Festa di Domenica

Before we arrived in Sicily we had hopes to meet some nice people and if we were lucky maybe even make some new friends. However, we weren’t expecting to already be considered a part of the (extended and strangely fair skinned) family, by our third week here. But apparently this is exactly how we are seen by our new friends at the pasticceria who invited along to the country house of a cousin for a Sunday get together. We didn’t manage to figure out the reason for the party, but we have a suspicion that Sicilians just like to spend an entire Sunday surrounded by family, eating, drinking and having fun.


The little house we were guided to was small and modest, but beautifully placed among an orchard of orange and banana trees with soft rolling hills as the backdrop. We arrived later than everybody else, and were told that the majority had been there since 11am for the unveiling of the home-made ricotta. Luckily, our friend, who had been there since the crack of dawn helping with the preparations had saved some for us, and was eager to find out what we thought.

But before we had any chance to taste the wonderful sweet home made cheese, we were heartily greeted by everybody. Our daughter was again showered with compliments and everyone wanted to hold and kiss her. We don’t know if it was the warming sun, the joyous atmosphere or just her growing up, but for the first time, our little one didn’t seem to mind being passed around everybody, being tickled, kissed and talked to. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it and we were happy to see our little blond bundle of joy appearing in the middle of the crowd, smiling, laughing and picking oranges.


So whilst she was well taken care of, we were also cared for, with food, drinks and constant encouragements to have more. After the delicious ricotta that left us thinking that we will never buy store ricotta during our stay here, there was home-made Italian-style bread, with a nice crust and a slight sweet flavour. We seemed to be the only ones eating but soon the smokey scents from the barbecue that was being prepared behind the house, made us understand why. Everybody was waiting for the salsiccia!


As the non-meat eaters we are, we were secretly hoping for a small break to digest the wonderful ricotta and bread, but the Italians had other plans for us. In the little kitchen behind the patio, the women had been baking more than 60 panini shaped breads in a proper bread and pizza oven. On the other side of the kitchen, in two big oven dishes, the house olive oil, made from the olives from the garden was mixed with salt, lots of garlic, oregano and anchovies. When everything was ready, the women proudly presented the bread, the flavoured olive oil and said it was time to eat…again! Suddenly everybody was being served with warm bread, generously soaked in the oil, with anchovies or salsiccia in between the slices. We had both eaten good bread and good olive oil before, but never anything tasting quite like this. The simple combination of just the right flavours; the garlic infused oil and the anchovies, was heavenly.


The short walk that followed was a welcome break from eating, and a siesta would have been perfect upon our return, but then there was no time for that. At the house, the tables had been cleared for the fruit and the…you guessed it… dolci! After a sweetened fruit salad a huge cake was brought to the table, decorated with the simple message “Good Sunday” and our thoughts were…can a Sunday be any better?


It could actually. After all the hedonistic food intake, a guitar appeared and a few of the men gathered to sing, everybody else gathered to listen, clapping and singing along to the Italian (or were they Sicilian?) songs. Even our little one was enjoying the music, clapping, dancing and trying to sing along, much to everybody’s amusement.

More temples in the sun

We’re lucky to have beautiful weather at the moment. It’s sunny, but not too hot, and because we’re close to the sea we get a constant, but gentle sea-breeze.

Since the coming months will likely make being outside at midday a hot and potentially unpleasant experience (and not the best place for mini) we decided to explore another archaeological site now, before it gets too scorching.


The guide book said that the temples at Salinunte are amongst the most striking archaeological finds in the Mediterranean, and they certainly are. The site is not only perfectly placed on the edge of a hill overlooking the sea, but the whole area had an untouched beauty. Wild flowers and high grass as far as the eye could see, with only a few trees braking up the line-of-sight towards the sea.


We were alone among the huge remains of the temples, giving us a sensation of being the first explorers on the site. Unlike in the valley of the temples, we had the possibility to wander inside some of the six temples and their ruins.




The enormity of the once 30m-tall columns was impressive and although the archaeologists are not completely sure for whom all temples were built, it is clear that immense amounts of hard work and dedication were put into creating those places of worship. Around the temples an ancient city was discovered, complete with an agora, official buildings and residential houses.




We spent an hour-and-a-half walking up and down the sandy roads around the temples, talking lots of photographs and gazing with amazement at these impressive structures built more than two-and-a-half millennia ago. We talked about coming back, perhaps when we have guests staying with us, though next time we should definitely be equipped with water, sun protection and maybe even a picnic bag.

In search of Cinema Paradiso

Cinema Paradiso was Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore's love letter to cinema, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1989. It tells the story of the arrival of cinema in a small Sicilian village, and the impact this has on one young boy.


Parts of the movie were shot in Palazzo Adriano, a tiny hamlet that sits on a ridge at 700m above sea-level. Being fans of the movie, we couldn't come to this part of Sicily and not take the winding trip up the mountainside to see the village for ourselves. After a seemingly endless series of serpentine roads, beautiful views and yet another wonderful pasta lunch in a friendly trattoria hidden in the mountains, we finally arrived.


The square looked familiar, but we'd be lying if we said that it looked exactly as we remembered from the movie.






We're not sure if this is because it's been a few years since we've seen Cinema Paradiso, or because the director worked some movie magic with fake facades and clever camera angles. Perhaps it's a bit of both. In any case, we've promised ourselves that we're going to refresh our memories by watching the movie again as soon as we get back to Sweden.






Walking around the picturesque little village we got the distinct impression that the locals were eyeing us with suspicion. Perhaps the flood of tourists the village experienced during the Nineties has slowed to a trickle, and now tourists are an unusual sight in the village again? Or was it just that we were an unusual sight in our short sleeves on that cloudy afternoon, when the italians were still dressed in their winter coats?

Bimbi

Babies are called bimbi in Italian and since we have a nine and a half months old with us, it is almost impossible not to write about the new customs and habits we have come across regarding the little ones.

First and foremost, statistics may show that Italy is suffering from the lowest nativity rates in Europe, but in this corner of the country we seem to be noticing the opposite. Almost everywhere you look, in small or large towns, there is an abundance of stores dedicates to the youngest. There are clothes stores selling the cutest outfits imaginable, many almost doll-like for the girls and very tailored for the boys. Practicality doesn’t seem to be in fashion here, but hey, this is the country of Dolce and Gabbana and not of Polarn and Pyret. Funny enough the well-known colour schemes for boys and girls don’t seem to apply here either. The little girls seem to be dressed in blues, whites and purples and not only in different shades of pink. The boy’s outfits tend to stick to black and red tones. From what we understood, as much as the clothes look nice, the price and quality ratio isn’t always the best, so we’ll stick to what we have for now and will probably just opt for an absolute “must have” if we see it.

If the clothes shops (not many chains here) weren’t enough, there are toys stores, party stores and even underwear stores for the little ones, all competing with each other to win customers.

The strangest thing we have found so far are the pharmacies though. Unlike in the rest of Europe, pharmacies seem to be the place where parents buy baby food, nappies, wet wipes, crèmes, lotions, toys, dummies, bottles – well, basically everything apart from clothes. We asked how it came to be that all of these items (that we normally buy in a supermarket) were sold in a pharmacy, we got a very surprised look and the response “But where else?”.




So now we do like most Italians do and buy our Pampers (not as good as the Libero’s) and our wet-wipes (that are all perfumed!) in the pharmacies but we stay clear of the cans of food. Not because we don’t trust the Italian baby food products, but because the fresh ingredients here are just so full of flavour that we would feel bad depriving “mini” from them. Although, as we were looking for iron enriched porridge we found out that in Italy babies don’t get enriched anything, the food here is considered good enough.


They definitely feed children well in Italy, but without the long list of rules that seems so important to parents in Sweden. Our little one has in just the last few days been given everything from grandma’s spaghetti, to parmesan, to strawberries and choux á la crème from the eager hands of our Italian friends, but she munched them all down with great happiness.

The conclusion we have reached so far is that the bimbi are adored, constantly shown off, the immediate center of attention and all adults can’t resist giving them toys, oranges and food. No wonder the children look so happy here!

Grandma’s pasta

Sundays are supposed to be a family day here in Italy, though it’s easy to believe that every day of the week could be described that way. We guess that our Italian friends at the pasticceria felt sorry for us not having our relatives close by, so they invited us over to their grandma’s house for Sunday lunch.

Our expectations were high; our first Italian family lunch, and cooked by grandma no less – in Italy, the gastronomic pillar of the family.

During the short walk from the pasticceria to grandma’s house “mini” was shown off to all the neighbours and passing acquaintances as if she was part of the family. We were heartily welcomed by the grandmother on her door-step. The street entrance to her house led immediately into the kitchen, where she already had set the table for seven. The smell of the upcoming feast, cooking in the corner on her large stove, was like a nice prelude for the flavour symphony yet to come.

Since it was past our little one’s lunch time we began by feeding her outside in the sun-soaked street, with the whole family spinning around her, admiring her appetite. Shortly after, the grandmother spoke the magic words “A tavola, mangiamo!”


Thus the feast began. The first course (of many) was one of spaghetti al sugo, or spaghetti with a homemade tomato sauce, where everything from the tomatoes to the olive oil came from the family’s plot of land. It might seem silly to praise a dish as simple as spaghetti with a tomato sauce, but this one truly deserved it, since it was the ultimate genuine food experience – no fuss, no tricks - just delicious ingredients, perfectly cooked.


Since they were sure that we couldn’t possibly have had enough to eat after the first huge bowl of pasta, they refilled them again (and again) whilst they continued onto the “secondi” of rabbit and chicken. By that point we could have easily rolled our way out of the kitchen but there was still more to come.

To everybody’s amusement “mini” was keeping pace with us, and was already on her second small serving on spaghetti al sugo. The remaining pasta and meat was whisked off the table and on came the salads, hand picked olives and a giant Italian baguette. The salads were followed by a huge fruit bowl and to nobody’s surprise an even bigger plate of dolci.


The amount of food was almost comical, and left us wishing that we were wearing elastic waistbands. We learnt that Italian etiquette doesn’t appear to allow self-service when it comes to food, we both had six dolci specially selected for us. Now neither of us is known to be a particularly small eater, but by our third and fifth dolci we had to admit defeat. Our hosts didn’t seem too impressed by our lack of conviction and explained that this was just a typical Italian lunch (not Sunday lunch!) and that we could always get back to our old habits in Sweden. For now, this was Italy: family, sunshine and grandma’s wonderful pasta.

The valley of the temples

Last week when we were in the town of Agrigento, we didn’t have the time to stop and explore the “valley of the temples”, which is situated below the city on a plane that stretches towards the sea.

Today we made visiting the valley the main point on our agenda. After a wonderful pasta lunch in a small trattoria overlooking the plains of Agrigento, we headed back down into the valley.


We were a little worried about pushchair accessibility around the temples, but we were pleasantly surprised to find a smooth path running the entire length of the temple site.


The temples themselves looked majestic in the soft afternoon sunlight. A gentle breeze brought the faint scent of the sea across the plain. It wasn’t hard to see why the Greek settlers had chosen this site for their holy buildings, more than two and a half thousand years ago. We passed temples built to honour Zeus, Hera, Castor and Pollux, Concordia and Heracles. They say that pictures paint a thousand words, perhaps it’s best if we just let them do the talking

Palermo at a glance

For the first eleven days of our stay in Sicily our little “mini” has had four adults caring, playing and comforting her since her grandparents (i.e. farmor & farfar for the Swedish speakers) also joined us in Italy. Unfortunately yesterday they went back to England, so before waving them off at Palermo airport, we took the opportunity to take a quick visit into the city.

Haven gotten used to the tranquillity and size of the small villages around our home, Palermo reminded us what a big city looks and sounds like. Cars and mopeds were speeding along side one another competing for non-existent space, using their horns very liberally seemingly for no reason at all. From our quick drive through the city we spotted large avenues, interesting architecture and definitely more shops to spend your money in than near where we’re staying.

Since we only had about an hour to spend in the city and also needed to have lunch, we decided after a few minutes of walking to sit down at a place on a narrow restaurant street, underneath balconies with drying laundry!


The place that had won our trust was held by a true Italian “mama” who was inviting people to her home made spread of typical Sicilian specialities.








Unfortunately the food looked much better than it tasted and only two of us were content with their choices, so we ended up wandering off shortly, in the search for a place to have coffees in the sun.

The coffee place we discovered turned out to be a much better find and we enjoyed a lovely half an hour drinking delicious espressos and making conversation with the people around us. Unfortunately our time in the city passed all too quickly. After dropping the grandparents off at the airport and seeing Palermo disappearing in our rear-view mirror, we agreed that we must return soon, and see the city at more than just at a glance.