You will do foolish things in life, but make sure you do them with enthusiasm
No more spectacular sights of the sun setting into the sea, but on Friday evening a full moon rose out of the ocean and created a lovely shimmering silver path across the sea to Eileen’s back window. A glimmer of paradise.
The wind died down at some point in the night and the sea stopped sounding quite so angry. When we woke up in the morning the sea sounded more like Neptune breathing; a deep low inhale and then a louder longer exhale. It’s a wonderfully calming sound, especially when you can stand at Eileen’s kitchen window and watch the rhythm in motion.
At 10am we set off to the bus stop and sheltered from the drizzly rain under the concrete of the autostrada. Now we know you should never accept lifts from strangers, especially on the island that heavily promotes the Mafia on tea towels, mugs, postcards and aprons, but…..! A vehicle stopped, and the friendly driver asked us if we were going into Taormina and would we like a lift. His girlfriend / wife smiled nicely at us……….so we climbed into the back seat. He turned out to be a very friendly local who spent most of the ten-minute drive quizzing us about average salaries and rental prices in Australia, translating our very vague answers to his passenger lady and then looking back at us in the back seat!!! We watched the road ahead for him. As we entered Taormina, he pointed out numerous car-hire companies; he obviously thought we needed some wheels.
Safely and very gratefully deposited in the centre of Taormina, grazie, molto grazie, grazie, thank you so very much, we ambled along the main Corso Umberto and embarked on a little window shopping. A café drink, beside a steep staircase of a side lane, set us up for a very steep climb up a footpath to the Castello Saraceno which sits at the very top of the town. We managed to get all the way up there, in a shorter time than I anticipated when we had initially looked up at it. We passed quite a few tourists coming back down, and apart from a few hellos and buongiornos, no-one said anything else. So quite frankly, I was a little bit peeved when we got to the gates of the castle to find them padlocked and long since derelict; the Saracens had left town. Dang and double dang, wish one of those tourists had warned us. We never thought to ask the tourist office if we might find it closed if we walked up there. At least there was a charming little grotto-like chapel, the Santuario Maria della Rocca, built into a cave near the top. That made the effort worthwhile, almost. Needless to say, on our way back down, we did warn the hikers who were dragging themselves up.
With an appetite now building, we ate a late lunch, of three lamb chops each, sitting on the terrace of La Cisterna del Moro restaurant and enjoyed the view out to sea. Then we meandered our way back through town to the Greek / Roman amphitheatre. As ruins go, there is not a lot left standing apart from the main arc of the seating area and a modern stage being set up for future performances, but sitting in one of the rows gave you the most lovely views of the sea and, somewhere in the cloud, the top of Mount Etna. In fact, we sat there for quite a while, enjoying the warmth of the sun and soaking up the scenery, then we carried on further downhill to the lovely Parco Duca di Cesaro. The garden was created by Lady Florence Trevelyan who lived in Taormina in the late 19th century. She moved there after being ‘invited’ to leave Britain after allegedly having an affair with Edward VII, the then future British king. She settled in Taormina, marrying a local Italian, and she has certainly left behind a lovely garden paradise.
We still had an hour to wait for the 7:10pm bus, so we sat ourselves outside a bar in the Piazza Pancrazio and watched the world, a parading wedding couple, evening shoppers and the gusty wind pass by. At the bus stop no-one offered us a lift to the campsite, so we caught the bus and enjoyed the crazy drive back down the hairpin bends to the main road. At one point another bus was coming up and our driver had already swung to the wrong side of the road to get around, resulting in a ‘Mexican standoff’. Finally, our driver backed up a bit, but stayed on the wrong side of the road and the bus coming up passed through the gap, followed by a number of cars, all on the wrong side of the road!!! Ah, these Italian drivers really are giving us a lot of laughs and we really must have a go at doing some diagonal parking when it should be parallel. You just poke the bonnet of the car in at a jaunty angle and it saves time doing a couple of ‘back and forwards’ to fit in the space and park properly. No one seems to care, but there are an awful lot of cars which are lacking in one, or more, rear corners.
Taormina ….….tick……..
