Under the Volcano

This is what our agriturismo, Tenuta Santa Tecla, looked like.

 

yes, that is Phil's foot

And this.

It had goats and chickens living together. Olive and lemon trees. A view of the sea. It was perfect.

We arrived well after dark, and the manager, a lovely woman who spoke enough French that we could understand each other, led us to a seafood restaurant in her car, down dark winding three-quarters-width streets to a place in the middle of what certainly seemed like nowhere. But the restaurant was beautiful, and the food…! We ordered one antipasto and a main course each, and the food – seafood all – started arriving with an enormous amuse bouche and kept coming for at least a couple of hours. Photos are below, for those of you who want to drool. Every bit of it was delicious,

as were the musicians who came in to serenade a birthday gathering and stayed on to serenade us. They made up a song that went something like this: “Diane, Diane, Diane – no no no no no!” Phil now sings it often. The place was filling up as we left, sometime around eleven. We found our way back by mere chance and collapsed, utterly stuffed and happy.

In the morning we staggered up to the enormous breakfast spread, to which we did justice despite the excesses of the night before. Then we swam, trying fruitlessly to work off the calories. Before long we were on the road in our semi-automatic, heading to Taormina, a hilltop town perched on towering cliffs overlooking the sea. It was a haven for many twentieth-century writers, including D.H. Lawrence, who lived and wrote there in the early 1920s. Some critics believe that he formed the idea for Lady Chatterley's Lover when his wife Freida offered herself to (and was accepted by) a local shepherd.

We arrived more or less without incident; it’s a major tourist destination and was well marked, thank god. You park below and take a bus up to the town, and we joined throngs of tourists walking down the main street to the Roman amphitheatre. Unlike the one in Catania, it was almost fully intact and not surrounded by more modern buildings.

We walked down to the  Villa Communale garden, which was created by an eccentric British aristocrat who built a series of Arabian styled towers from which to view the birds she loved. The only birds we saw were pigeons – Sicily’s answer to the mainland’s omnipresent swallows – and a parrot in a cage.

From there we walked around the base of the city and, slightly lost, found our way into a luxury hotel that had in the sixteenth century been a monastery. Many writers, including Thomas Mann and Pirandello, had stayed there. The place was vast, with a beautiful cloister and medieval antiques, and boasted a two-star Michelin restaurant. For the hell of it we looked at the menu and its prices. Then we fled in terror.

Later we admired the thirteenth century Church of St. Nicholas, unusual in its plainness and crenelated top, and the rose windows that can only be seen from the outside. We walked up the main street, stopping for a beer, and then found our way back to the car. We drove on steep roads down to sea level and stopped to dine opposite Bella Isola, a craggy rock in the wine-dark sea that captured the light from the sunset as we sipped our drinks and ate possibly the best pizzas we’d ever tasted (mine was smoked salmon and shrimp, and more delicious than you could imagine).

Our next day, and all the days but one that followed at Tenuta Santa Tecla, began with that huge breakfast and restorative swim. Our destination was a series of small towns ringing Mt. Etna. The 11000-foot volcano looms over Sicily, visible from nearly half the country. It’s often ringed with dark clouds, but when the sky is clear one can see a scary plume of smoke rising from its crater. It hasn’t erupted for over a decade, but that isn’t really long enough for me. (Some of you may be aware that I have a small volcano phobia. It might have contributed a little to some of the ungentle things I said to Phil as we got lost again and again, misdirected by The B*tch the wrong way down one-way streets and once, I swear, up and down every single street and alley in a particular small town only to end up where we’d started. Her combination of patrician haughtiness and just plain wrongness was infuriating. When she told us,  with a smirk in her voice, "Turn left on Strada Provinciale Etna Settentionale o Quota Mille," which took so long to say that we were in another town by the time she finished, we unplugged her for good.)

Our first stop was Castiglione di Sicilia. Wandering around town, we found the Church of Sts. Peter

and Paul, which for financial reasons was decorated exclusively with beautifully realized scenes of the life of the desert father and hermit, St.  Anthony. The whole time we were in the church/museum, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” played softly, which was both very pleasant and completely inappropriate.



actual national dog

We walked around the ramparts of a medieval castle at the very top of the town and stopped for a cappuccino before driving to the Alcantara River, getting pretty lost on the way (we could no longer blame our ineptitude on The B*tch. Now it was the fault of the inadequate Sicilian signage). As soon as we started hiking along the aquamarine waters, we were joined by a small dog, very excited that we smiled at her and very eager to accompany us on a walk. As Sicily has a national dog, I promptly 

our National Dog

named her National Dog (though the actual national dog doesn’t look like her at all).

National Dog chased lizards, rolled happily in puddles, and herded  us along past waterfalls and calm pools. Then she became so overwhelmed with joy that she leapt into the river. Though exceedingly cute, she was not very smart, and she couldn’t figure out how to climb back up onto the banks. She panicked. Phil, ever intrepid and courageous, clambered over the rocks, reached down, grabbed the fraying rope around her neck, and pulled her up onto dry land. She thanked him by shaking water all over him, then immediately forgot what had happened and pranced on down the path, looking back to make sure we were following.

We left National Dog regretfully and headed to Rondozzo, a town whose narrow medieval streets and buildings are made of black lava. The cathedral is astonishing, a Sicilian Baroque marvel in black and white. Though Rondozzo is the town closest to the volcano, it hasn’t been inundated by an eruption in recorded history. However, it took a pistachio gelato from the town square’s award-winning gelato manufacturer to calm my nerves completely.

That night we dined in the coastal city of Giarre. We searched for a restaurant for at least half an hour. Phil, who unlike other men is not afraid that asking for directions will undermine his masculinity, asked at least four different people, and we ended up two minutes from the car at a lovely rooftop place where, for once, we ate some dishes that were not seafood.

After a wonderful day, The B*tch got her revenge: we dented the car pulling into our agriturismo driveway. Again, and always, hurrah for full insurance!

A few of the courses from our first dinner in Acireale: