Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
Viewing entries in
Italy
Just south of Messina, this gorgeous Sicilian town sits on the edge of a mountain, looking out over the Ionian Sea towards Calabria. It's population is just over 11,000, but it gets vastly more tourists every month. Indeed, Taormina has been a fashionable travel destination for a few hundred years now. Yes, you read that right—we're talking centuries of tourism here.
Just 2 hours south from Catania, down the eastern coast of Sicily, sits a the city of Siracusa (a.k.a. Syracuse). You may recognize this name from history books about the very distant past. Syracuse makes appearances in tales and legends that stemmed from a great many famous Empires over the course of Mediterranean history, most notably the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines. Oh, and it makes a cameo appearance in the Bible. It was described by early Roman officials as "the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all."
Suffice to say, this place has some serious history behind it. Are you ready to see what’s going on in 2018?
If you want to come here, it's very important that you know that this happens exactly at sunrise. If you really want to catch this place in action, it's best to get there before 7:00am. The first time I attempted to come here, I slept in and showed up at 7:45-ish, and it was mostly over. I got some decent pictures, but it was clear that things were winding down. It was frustrating. The next day I set my alarm for the TRUE butt-crack of dawn, and got here before the sun rose.
Catania is the second largest city in Sicily. The population of Catania proper is about 320,000, but there are a combined 1.1 million people who live in the metro area. In Italy overall, Catania is the 10th biggest city, and the 7th largest metro area. This is a major population center for Sicily, second only to Palermo, which will be our last stop on this trip. Catania is not the most well-known place, but it's definitely not small either. It's actually really big, especially by Sicilian standards. But Catania's burgeoning population should be surprising. This isn't exactly prime real estate.
Why? Because of Mount Etna.
We arrived at the foot of Via della Conciliazione in later afternoon. The sky was gray, and the air held a cold moisture. We followed the masses of people up the road towards the giant stone gates. On either side of these gates, giant Roman columns stretched off endlessly. These marked the border between Italy and Vatican City. Perched on either side of the entrance were Italian military outposts manned by heavily armed but very bored-looking soldiers.
Crossing into Piazza San Pietro, though an international boundary, was decidedly anti-climactic. However, what we found on the other side of this plaza blew us away.
It was a long and unfortunate series of circumstances that delayed our flight from New York to Algiers for 2 full days, but they say that when God closes a door, he opens a window. And for us, this window came in the form of a extremely long layover in Rome. This would give us just enough time to sneak out of the airport to go into the city, so that's exactly what we did.
Even if you know Rome only by reputation, you can probably guess that it's far too big a city to see in a single day, so we decided to break off a single bite-sized piece: a neighborhood called Trastevere.
Travel plans! This time we'll be exploring Sicily, as well as the North African nations of Algeria and Tunisa. We will also be stopping through one other mystery Mediterranean location, which will be revealed shortly. In the coming articles, you can expect to hear about cities like Algiers, Tunis, Catania, Syracuse, and Palermo, among others.
LET'S DO THIS!
This is Part 2 of my time sneaking around Venice, seeing everything this amazing city has to offer, and spending as little money as possible in the process. Here we'll go through extensive photo galleries, which stretch well into night time on the canals, as well as meet the infamous Plague Doctor.
With it's legendary boats and canals, few other destinations possess the same fabled mystique as this fairy-tale city. Once a powerful autonomous kingdom in its own rite, Venice is composed of 118 small islands off the coast of Northeastern Italy. Before Venice was ~*Venice*~, these islands were nothing but swampy lagoons. These lagoons are thought to have been settled by Roman refugees who were fleeing invasions of the Germanic and Hun empires. There is no surviving historical record to give us any insight into Venice's formal founding, but some ancient Roman documents place these refugee fishermen here as early as the 1st century A.D. According to tradition though, the first church of Venice was officially established in 421 A.D., so that is the historically accepted year of Venice's founding.
I arrived in Italy pretty directionless, so their vivid descriptions of discovering beautiful seaside towns along the Italian Riviera that were completely void of tourists were enough to sell me. Of course, that was the 1980s, and today it isn't quite the same, but Cinque Terre is still incredible.
Buckle in.
