Some Days in Sicily and Malta
Months ago, we decided to do a bus tour of Sicily and Malta, thinking this would be a good way to see them against possible longer trips later. In mid-November, we flew to Palermo via Istanbul, a route we failed to note when we booked the trip. It added hours to our flights plus a four-hour layover on the way over and an eight-hour one going back. Distracted by an earlier family trip, we relied on the tour operator’s good sense — a mistake.
We arrived on Sunday night, fetched by our bus driver Dario at the Palermo airport, and then spent Monday in Sicily’s capital city. Our first stop was the Norman cathedral in Monreale. Its walls illustrate the Bible.
We saw Palermo’s cathedral (below), where there was a public funeral mass in progress that understandably precluded seeing much of the interior.
We walked through the fish and halal markets. Along the way, we stopped at a quite beautiful smaller church (below).
Walking back to our hotel, we stopped off at a traditional restaurant filled mostly with men eating their midday meal. Late that afternoon, we visited the apartment of a noble family in its palace, narrated by a duchess — a very nice woman who reminded me of the older Ingrid Bergman.
We had dinner at Nova, a restaurant and wine bar on the Piazza San Giacomo La Marina, where we met a couple—Katy, American and Clemens, German — who work remotely in the city, their second stint there. We struck up a conversation after Katy recommended a dessert to Kathy.
On Tuesday morning, we went to Agrigento, a town overlooking the Valley of Temples, of which the one above was the most nearly intact. Our guide Claudio was a windbag who at one point expounded on a century plant someone asked about. We had been issued radios to hear the guides, but he had a booming voice from which we kept our distance.
Agrigento is arrayed along a ridge overlooking the valley. Our hotel was at the edge, a location that proved characteristic of the tour’s hotel choices.
A softspoken, knowledgeable woman took us through a Roman villa that was buried by a landslide and then unearthed. Built by the Prefect of the Siracusa region, they think, it has mosaics like those above and below. It consists of gathering spaces for the Prefect’s many guests and private quarters for him and his family, set within land organized for hunting. The mosaic below shows various sports that the women guests played.
The villa is a mix of restoration and preservation. The original columns are of variegated marble, for example, while the solid ones are new.
We visited Ortigia, the oldest part of Siracusa, briefly seeing its cathedral, which incorporates a Greek temple along one exterior wall and the nave.
The next day, instead of returning to Ortigia for a longer look, we went to what was once a limestone quarry at the city’s edge where the losers in a war between Athens and Siracusa carved an amphitheater. A Roman stadium is nearby, an early example of that pairing. (Both are now cultural venues.) Our guide, Pietro, noted that many of the city’s antiquities were later looted for their stones by the Spanish to build fortifications against the Turks. (He too was knowledgeable and on point. I asked him why Siracusa proper is so ugly. Much of it was destroyed in WW2, he said, and they rebuilt quickly to accommodate a growing population.)
Catania, our next stop, is one of Sicily’s larger cities. The oldest part of it is organized around a long central street with several large plazas, one of which is the focal point of the city’s university.
Catania’s baroque cathedral is more interesting outside than in. Like others in Sicily and Malta, it closed at noon, reopening later in the day to close again at six p.m. These hours are rigidly enforced.
A surprise was a dinner at a winery on the east slope of Mt. Etna near Taormina — the source of Murgo’s Etna Bianco, our table wine in Berkeley.
We went about halfway up the east slope of Mt. Etna, where we saw the caldera of a “dead” side vent. The volcano, also visible from the west as we drove to Siracusa, was erupting at the time, with plumes of smoke visible (from the west) but apparently no danger.
Taormina sits on a plinth overlooking the Ionian Sea. It’s Sicily’s inferior version of the Amalfi coast — smaller and more touristy, but picturesque. You can see the Calabrian coast of Italy off in the distance.
After our Taormina visit, our tour leader revealed to us that we’d have to leave for the Catania airport at 4 a.m. to catch a 7:30 a.m. flight to Malta. To cap this misadventure in scheduling, the bus driver — not Dario, who was supremely competent, but another hired for the occasion — dropped us at the wrong terminal. Making our way over to the right one, we cooled our heels for the next two hours. Farewell, we thought, to the Sicilian leg.
We made it. Our hotel, also a Mercure like the one in Palermo, was well located in St. Julian, a small bay with good local bus service and many restaurants. But first, we went to Valletta, where we were subjected to an “orientation” by the passive-aggressive guide. We explored a bit on our own and then had lunch at a small place with an unusually good octopus salad.
The next day, we took the 13 bus to Valletta and went to mass at the cathedral built by the Knights of St. John. No expense was spared. The colored marble floors — squares devoted to different knights and local worthies — were also impressive. This motif was repeated at the M’Dina cathedral, also endowed by the Knights. (Malta’s buses are cheap, frequent, and extensive, so there’s no need for hire cars or taxis unless you’re in a rush, which we were not. It reminded me of Singapore. Social housing and other public services are subsidized, like that other island city-state.)
We took the 202 bus to Rabat, where we got lost but eventually made our way to M’Dina, which the Knights of St. John extensively redeveloped, adding a baroque cathedral and bishop’s palace, among other buildings. The palace now houses a very good arts-and-artifacts museum.
We skipped the 202 return in favor of heading back to Valletta on the 13, a much shorter journey. Trying and failing to reach the ferries, we walked instead to a park overlooking the entry of the Grand Harbor.
Ironically, our two best meals, both in Malta, were at Sicilian restaurants — one in Valletta, where we ate after walking the streets, and another around the corner from our hotel in St. Julian. The photo below is from another restaurant on the St. Julian waterfront with good grilled fish.
We spent our last day in Malta waiting for a 7:30 p.m. flight back to Istanbul. We walked along a promenade adjoining St. Julian and Silema bays, which include places to swim. (It was warm; people were swimming.) I should mention that the guide — not the talkative one we met in Valletta, but a woman who grasped how annoyed people were with the Sicily leg — was very helpful in organizing our transfer to the airport.
There’s a two-hour time difference between Malta and Istanbul, so we arrived at the latter’s enormous airport at midnight, reaching our Yotel sleeping quarters around 1 a.m. and getting up at 5:30 a.m. to get some coffee and get to the boarding area for our 13-hour flight back home. The Yotel was the one saving grace of the airport, with the best bed of the trip and a shower. The flight was fine, but Kathy caught a cold in Sicily, likely, and it came on in full force on the plane. (We considered a layover in Istanbul, but any change to our tickets bumped the price up a lot.)
The Sicily leg was a bit of a deathmarch. We saw interesting things, but at a relentless pace, and some of it — like the cathedral in Ortygia — was too brief. The tour guide’s endless (and amplified) patter on the bus did not enhance the hours we spent on it. Malta, where we skipped the tour events, was leisurely and enjoyable in contrast. (Like Palermo, it’s walkable.) We’re glad we went, but we resolved that we’ll never do a tour again.
