Eastern Sicily after the summer season – but not the obvious kind! There was no climbing Mount Etna or strolling through touristy Taormina. Instead, there were baroque towns and golden beaches. Siracuse, Scicli, Módica, and Ragusa. And Caltagirone as the local centre of ceramics.
Sicily is on a grand scale! Everything there is “the best”! Spaces, sizes, heights, colors, flavors.. Sicily definitely does not play with half-measures! Every aspect of it – is the highest intensity!!! It is full of blue skies and lemon groves! Full of colors, paintings and ceramic majolica tiles. Full of Italian shouts and songs in the market, the smell of fish and the taste of parmigiano. Full of breathtaking architecture, where huge basilicas and monstrous, baroque cathedrals tower so sublimely over stone houses with beautiful Sicilian roof tiles..
This intensity is also the captivating interior of the island – so full of hills and valleys, rural and empty… and only occasionally dotted with terraced towns that never cease to amaze. Vast open spaces and dense stone towns embedded in the rocks! Truly, the word Sicily should mean intensity!
Sicily is beautiful, yet harsh. Tough and full of contrasts. It’s either the best or the worst. It’s definitely not like Mallorca: painted with a soft brush by a creator-artist, like the most beautiful painting. You have to feel it. Overlook the trash or the seemingly endless winding roads…
Yet the market atmosphere… those vendors’ shouts… that impossible choice of seafood, fish, oysters… there’s nothing else like it.
Italia, Italia, Italia! Buonaserra Sicilia! Let the journey beginn!
