Thursday, March 30, 2017

Mediterranean Haze



Feb. 23-24, 2017

First order of business on Thursday was to go to the Piazza Duomo to see the Jewelry Man. He makes fantastic pieces—necklaces, bracelets, earrings—from wire that he weaves into intricate shapes.

Joanna had found a heart-shaped piece of weathered glass in the gravel at Castello Maniace. She had asked the Jewelry Man if he could do something to make the piece attach to a gold chain.

That was Wednesday and he was working with white wire at the time. He said come back Thursday when he would have yellow. So we did.



He wound wire around the stone and then fashioned a small ring where a chain could pass. He offered it to Joanna for free. When we paid him 5 euro, he made her a wire flower as a gift.

We went back to the bay, which is down a side street from the Piazza Duomo.

That took us back to Fonte Aretusa. This time, we went into the  aquarium, which had several small tanks with colorful and exotic fish, including piranhas and lionfish.

Another tank had several strange crustaceans common to the Mediterranean.

A rear door of the aquarium led to the Fonte. We walked part way around it, scaring ducks.



Then we walked up the promenade, Foro Italico, that forms the edge of the harbor

We stopped for lunch at Bar della Marina, near Porta Marina, an old city gate.



We ordered a caprese salad. It came with no basil. That’s a full third of a salad made of fresh tomato, mozzarella, and basil.

I asked for basil and was told they had run out.

I tried to make a joke: “How does an Italian restaurant run out of basil? That’s bizarre.”

I regretted it immediately. Nobody got the joke. I was the ugly American.

They wound up giving us a free dessert.

We walked up Via Collegio, named for the College of Jesuits Church at the top of the hill, and then made for the Piazza Duomo again. 

It’s a very bright, very lovely place. Once you have found the lizard, you can’t miss it. As often happens when it gets comfortable being somewhere else, I felt that I belonged here.

I could manage. Hell, I ordered dinner last night almost entirely in Italian.

This was our last night in Syracuse, and I’m already missing it.

We went back to O’scina for dinner because the menu is very good and the lady who runs it is a spectacular host.

This time we had linguine with prawns and mussels. The mussels came in the shell, as I expected, but so did the prawns, which I wasn’t ready for.

A lot of messy work to get at the meat. Especially tricky to keep the juice off my vest. I may have been successful, though.

Second course was sausage with potatoes and rosemary.  A little hot for Joanna, so we ordered extra bread.

I had wine by the glass, a couple of different Syrahs and a Nero d’Avola. The Nero was good, as always, but the Syrahs were more interesting. One, a Salier de la Tour, had a slight edge and a definite fruitiness. The Nero was from the same company.

I lost track of the other Syrah’s name. Sorry about that. It was very interesting, a very strong flavor of minerals and earth.

The lady topped off my glass with something, not sure what, but it was delicious.

I managed to find my way home. Well, to be more accurate, I managed to follow Joanna home.

Friday was check-out day for us at Alla Giudecca. I had originally booked us for five nights, expecting that we’d be ready to move out of the small town by Tuesday. Then we extended the stay to Friday. 



We still weren’t ready to leave, but we are running out of time. We will stay in Reggio for a couple of days to break up the long trip back to Naples.

You can go from Syracuse to Naples on one ticket, but it takes 12 or 13 hours. That’s a long ride.

After reading the warnings in Rick Steves’s travel books, we didn’t want to spend too many days in Naples. Just enough to see the Archeological Museum.

I was about to wash my face before breakfast when I turned the spigot and all that came out was a gurgle from somewhere deep in the pipe. It was deja vu all over again, except that the lights were still on.

I set out on a search for information

It didn’t take long to identify the cause. A room had flooded on the floor below us. Along with the lobby on that floor, the stairs below and the open courtyard on the ground floor.

Somebody had already gotten much of the water with a mop. Others were working on the plumbing.

None of the people working on the problem spoke much English. I couldn’t speak enough Italian to ask how long before the water would be back.

If it was going take several hours, then maybe we should leave for Reggio right away and take a shower at the hotel there.

By the time I got back to the room, though, the water was running.

My first impulse was to take a shower before the water went off again. Joanna calmed me down. We went down to breakfast instead.

We checked out with time to spare. We had our tickets at the station before 11.

We killed some time and then started down the stairs to the underpass. 

Three tracks at Syracuse station are accessible without stairs. So our train was scheduled for the fourth track.

Actually, it’s because tracks 4 and 5 are the only through tracks, and our train was coming from the south. 

I took my bags as far as the first landing and came back to help Joanna. As I was coming up the stairs, a lady showed up and took Joanna’s bag for her.

After she got Joanna up the next staircase, she came back to help me. But she had done more than enough already, and although I was taking it one step at a time, I was going to make it.

She had a strange accent, which turned out to be from Canada. She was traveling with a group of friends who had rented an apartment in a town whose name I didn’t catch, but is not far from Reggio. 

They had come down to Syracuse for a couple of days and were on their way to Taormina. Same train as ours.

There were no last-minute track changes. The train pulled in almost a half-hour early.

That was lucky because I had forgotten to have the tickets stamped with the day’s date. They’re not valid until you do that. There was plenty of time to go back to Platform 1 and validate them.

It’s a bright, but hazy day. We pass through olive and citrus groves, fields with cows, an occasional tunnel. 

The Mediterranean is on our right hand and Mt. Etna on the left. 

I can’t see where the sea ends and the sky starts. I can’t see the top of the volcano. Grapes are growing up there to make great wine.

It’s easier to find a marine terminal than a rail station.

We were able to walk from Messina Central Station to the ferry terminal, because we could see the boats when we came out. It was a walk of a few minutes, because we were encumbered with baggage.

Last time we did this in the opposite direction and had to hire a cab for 10 euros.



The ferry brought us to Reggio around 5. The Hotel Continental is maybe 100 yards from the gate of the ferry terminal.

We went out for dinner later to a neighborhood place that was recommended to us on our first stay here three weeks ago. It’s called Villegiante. 

We had spaghetti blackened with ink and bits of meat somewhat like squid, but more tender. The menu said “cozze,” which Wikipedia tells me is a Mediterranean mussel, but I think it may have been cuttlefish.

For our second course, we had involtini de pesce spada. In the States, I have learned, that would be braciole of swordfish.

Thin strips of fish were wrapped around a filling, which may have contained one or more cheeses, bread crumbs, and maybe more swordfish.

We hadn’t tried anything like either dish before. Even now, I’m not sure what they are. And both dishes were damned good.

I took a flyer on the house wine and was reminded you can’t win all the time. It was billed as a red, but was a thin pink. It didn’t have much character or flavor, but it was wine. And well worth the 3 euros I paid for a half liter.

What’s going on? I never met a bottle of wine that I didn’t like, and here I am bitching about a bargain. The wine of this country must be spoiling me. 

Right now, I’m making up for the cheap stuff with a bottle that I picked up at the hotel bar downstairs. It’s made from Aglianico grapes grown north of here in Campania, the province where Naples is.

It’s a 2011 vintage from Avellino labeled Gioviano Irpinia and has an almost astringent edge. I wonder: Would it interfere with the flavor of food? Probably not. But who knows?

It was 14 euros for the bottle and at 15 1/2 percent is one of the strongest wines I’ve ever had. It’s very good.

OK, it’s getting hazy again. 

Love to everybody. And please don’t take water for granted.

Harry





Monday, March 27, 2017

A Lizard, Donkey, Orlando Too.




February 21-22

A small strip of water separates the island of Ortigia from the island of Sicily. Two bridges cross it, one in and one out.

Just for the hell of it, we walked across both bridges on Tuesday. The approaches to the bridges on Ortigia enclose a park, and in the park is a life-size bronze statue of the town’s most famous resident.

Archimedes holds a parabolic mirror in one hand, maybe to burn a small ship. It’s a little bigger than the solar cigarette lighter that used to be sold by Radio Shack.

The other hand has a compass. He is standing on a stomachion, a geometrical puzzle ascribed to him. I actually had one made of plastic when I was a kid.

It’s a square dissected into various shapes and you find different ways to compose the square. My version of the game had a booklet with a number of strange shapes, and it challenged you to make them from the pieces.

There was a school group at the statue, and we think they were presenting papers about Archimedes. A student would mount the stomachion and give a short speech. The others would applaud and then the next student would take his place.



We stopped at Cafe Apollo for an Americano (me) and cioccolatta calda (Joanna) before we walked over to the street market near the Bourbon jail to buy a few pieces of fruit.

It was pushing 1 o’clock and several stands were already packing up, but most of the market was still intact and in business.



Joanna had read a curious story about the municipal building, which is at the Piazza Duomo, across the Via Minerva from the cathedral.

The architect, Giovanni Vermexio, for some reason was nicknamed the Lizard, and he signed his work by putting a lizard on a cornice of the building. So we went looking for it.

I was standing back to look at all the decorations on the front. Joanna stood closer to the building and found it.

It’s made of stone or concrete and looks like it’s crawling from one edge of the roof to another. It’s certainly the photo of the day.



Punto G was quiet when we stopped there. Where’s the music? Gabriele put some on for us.

So I sat with a glass of wine and listened to some bouncy, almost ’20s-sounding music, although I knew it was much newer than that.

We tried a new place for dinner, Sciccheria, which Gabriele had recommended. 

We had pasta with clams and salmon. The clams were in the shell sitting on top, and pink salmon morsels were mixed throughout the linguine. Very savory.

We also ordered swordfish with breadcrumbs. I expected toasted bread crumbs sprinkled on top of the dish. Instead, it was a thin swordfish steak breaded and fried.

I prefer swordfish grilled, but this was tasty.

Wine was a new one to me, Cerasuolo di Vittoria, under the label Judeka. It’s a mild southern wine with just a touch of tannin to bite the tongue. 



How long can you live in a neighborhood that has its own Museo di Pupi and not go see it? The answer is seven days. 

Wednesday was our seventh day in Ortigia, so we went to the Museum of Puppets. Unlucky for us, it was closed, because this is the off season. 

But we did get to chat with the lady in the laboratorio, where they make puppets. We saw Orlandos and other characters in the process of taking shape, the guy puppets in shining armor, Orlando’s innamorata in a long flowing dress.

Everywhere we have gone in Sicily, There are marionettes in armor. There are four of them on the stair rail in the breakfast room.



They are sold in souvenir shops and in the store of the puppet theater.

They are on post cards and restaurant signs. They are also featured briefly in a scene of “The Godfather Part II.”

I’m sure there are many traditional puppet shows, but the one that I was aware of is based on Roland, who becomes Orlando in Italian. When they drove the Moors out of Sicily, the Normans may have brought tales of Roland with them from France.

We walked down to the water and came to the Fonte Aretusa. The shallow water of the natural fountain contains a large cluster of papyrus. Like tufts of curly hair. 

We didn’t make it back to Duomo Square for lunch. Instead we stopped at an eatery called Mokrito overlooking the harbor.

We shared a plate of curried donkey meat and French fries. I had the best beer so far on this trip, Norbertus red, which is from Belgium.

The curry was very mild, but it wasn’t a free ride for Joanna. She told me she could feel the heat building in her stomach.

So when we go to the Piazza Duomo, we shared a crepe to settle her digestion.

We were sitting at the crepe when Gabriele from Punto G walked in. He took one look at us and asked, “Why here?”

We told him we’d see him in a little while.

When we stepped into Punto G, Gabriele remembered that we like his choice of music. He put on a new artist, whose name I didn’t catch.

After a rest stop at the hotel, we finally got to Osteria da Seby when it was open.

We started with spaghetti with clams (no salmon this time). Clam sauce is always good, but in New Jersey, the clams are not in the shell. These came from the back yard, so they are not likely to get much fresher than that.

We followed that with pan-fried sardines. We ate them tails and all for the calcium. And also because they were very good.

I bought a bottle of Sicilian Syrah to go with dinner. It has a lot of tannin, and I’d tell you what the name is, but we were almost back to the hotel when I realized that we had left the remains of the bottle on the table.

Joanna offered to go back. They say there are guys who’d walk a mile for a Camel, but I wasn’t about to do that for a couple of bucks’ worth of wine. 

Be well, everybody. Don’t forget to eat your clams and your calcium, and don’t forget your wine.

Harry



Sunday, March 26, 2017

Fourth Down and Punto



February 19-20

We were running late Sunday morning, but we made it to the church on time. Early, in fact, because we got there a little after 11 and found that the service didn’t start till half past.

Time for more coffee. We went to a colorful looking place called Punto G, in a corner of the Piazza Duomo. I had noticed it the other day when we were eating crepes across the street.

It sells chocolates, sandwiches, coffee, and drinks.

I had an Americano, which is espresso with extra hot water added. It’s a little smaller and has less kick than a cup of coffee at a New Jersey diner, but two or three in the morning are usually enough to hold off my caffeine withdrawal symptoms. 

The bartender was singing “Come Together” along with John Lennon when we got there. It was still early, I guess, because there may have been people at one other table.

When it came time to leave, he offered to put a plate of something together for us. It sounded good, so we told him we’d be back. 

In the plaza near the church steps we saw families with young children in costumes. The girls tended to be princesses, although there were a couple of tiny Teddy bears. Among the boys, we saw an astronaut, a cavalier, and a page.

One of the big activities was to throw confetti into the wind and watch it eddy. The kids got a kick out of that.

The cathedral service was fine but strange. The only other Sunday morning mass is at 8 o’clock, so I expected 11:30 to be the principal mass. 

Only about 50 or 60 people attended. There was no music, and that was the strangest thing of all to me, a Sunday morning service at a cathedral without so much as an organist, let alone a choir.



We saw a sign on the way in asking tourists not to visit the church during its religious ceremonies.

Somebody in the back started to take flash pictures during the sermon. It didn’t seem to bother anybody, so that may have been for the church bulletin.

But after the service, we took a quick peek into the side chapel where the martyrs’ bones are. When we came out, there was a group of people pointing cameras.

They were about the same number as the people who attended the service. Were there that many tourists at mass?

No, this was a new group, listening to a tour guide. They must have been waiting on the porch for the go-ahead.

When we got back to Punto G, the guy was glad that we hadn’t been pulling his leg. The place isn’t big and was beginning to fill up.

The bartender would run into the back now and then to come back a short time later with stuff. He was bouncing to the music. He was juggling oranges before he cut them and held them on the juicer.



Joanna had water, but he mixed a great Campari and soda for me. He came back from one of his trips with two plates of appetizers for us.

There were little squares of pizza and others cut from what appeared to be a croissant filled with ham. There were olives and a few cold cuts as well.

The guy’s music selection had shifted to some interesting Italian pieces, including one that sound hauntingly familiar. I could even hear the English lyrics: “We will come from the shadows. ...”

A mild cocktail, salty and savory snacks, a Leonard Cohen cover. I was in pig heaven.



I talked the bartender after the track finished. Something like this: “What was that song? There is an English-language song by Leonard Cohen called ‘The Partisan.’ This sounded like it.”

He said it was the song in Italian. But I’m not sure that he understood the question. He wrote down the names of several performers on his playlist, but not the Italian name of the song.

Doesn’t matter. I had just found another favorite bar.

The bartender had a good command of English when he spoke to us. So Joanna asked him for a few vocabulary words, specifically names of vegetables so we could order them in restaurants. 

He didn’t quite get the gist of the question. He recommended a restaurant down the street and said we could even mention his name. That’s how we learned that he is called Gabriele.

We wandered a while, but it was Sunday, and afternoon besides, so very little was open.

According to Gabriele, the afternoon shutdowns are seasonal. In the high season the restaurants stay open all day long.

We were back in the hotel a little earlier than usual. It wasn’t bad to rest on the day of rest, so we stayed in until dinner time. 

I had an inspiration. At my age, I should know better, but anyway, I led Joanna on a walk in the chilly wind to the third of the restaurants that the man at Villa Politi had recommended to us.

I even know how to get there. It’s the Osteria da Seby on Via Mirabella, near the Leonardo museum. You walk down the east side of Piazza Archimede into Via Dione and right past the Street of Dyers.

Of course, the restaurant was closed and dark. The whole street was closed and dark.

We walked back looking for a place to eat and finally came to Dioniso again. It was open, key in the door and everything.

It’s hard to pass up pan-fried stuffed sardines, so we started with that. They may have been the best sardines we’ve had so far on this trip.

They were tasty but not overpoweringly fishy. They may have been stuffed with cheese. Whatever the stuffing was, it was very good.

We’re not crazy about gnocchi, a doughy pasta stuffed with mashed potato, but the pork cheek and broccoli made us go for it. We expected that it would be good, but it was indeed surprisingly good.

We also ordered a side dish of turnip greens.

The broccoli in the pasta sauce and the turnip greerns were the same thing, broccoli rapa. I wasn’t disappointed by that. I prefer that to broccoli. “Rapa” is Italian for “turnip.”

We got a bottle of Sicilian Nero d’Avola called Ananke, maybe named for the princess in “The Mummy.” It’s a smooth mild wine.

We were doing fine until the end. 

Joanna wanted to pay for the meal. When the waiter brought her the bill, he did the unforgivable: “Do you want to pay in euros or dollars?”

I couldn’t believe it. The food is good at Dioniso, even though there is not much of a selection. It is also expensive enough to border on overpriced. 

When they ask euros or dollars, they don’t tell you that they plan to lay a 3 percent surcharge on your bill “for the convenience of paying in dollars.”

I ran into this scam in Amsterdam when I bought bus tickets to see the flower gardens in Lisse. It’s the petty nastiness of it that makes me so angry.

So here was this guy trying to weasel another 3 points out of Joanna on an already inflated bill.

So if you’re anywhere, watch out for this trick. Pay in the local currency. And if you’re in Syracuse, stay the fuck away from Dioniso, just on principle.

Monday dawned bright and cheerful and stayed that way till the power failure. Our street and the next one over went dark.

In Montclair, a power failure takes out lights, of course, along with TV and computer. But the gas and water still flow, so you can cook by candlelight and take a hot shower in the dark. That can be fun.

Here, though, the water relies on electricity. Suddenly, we were no longer on the set of “El Cid”; we were plunged into the age of El Cid.

We set out to pick up our laundry and to scout out places with bathrooms we could use when we needed them.

My suit still needed a touch-up so the lady at the laundry asked us to come back in 10 minutes. We went for a short stroll. I got some cash from a bancomat, and then we got our clothes.

We took them back to the hotel, rather than tote them everywhere, and found that our lucky angel had turned the lights back on while we were out.

It was sweet. We all know how great a shower is when you think you won’t get one. I even put on a clean shirt to celebrate our deliverance.

We went to a castle, Castello Maniace, at the southern tip of the island. It looks like a fort within a fort. The central structure was built by Charles V, who is billed on a plaque there as “emperor, king of Spain and Sicily.”

This may be where he took the stones that used to be in the Temple of Hieron at the Archeological Park.



It’s a fun place to visit. You get some terrific views of the sea and of Syracuse across the bay. You get to look through some cannon ports. 

You can climb ramps and stairs, see replicas of the bronze rams that used to be somewhere in the fortress, and walk on the Spanish Walk.



We saw photos of a spectacular space with vaults and columns, but that is being renovated and is closed.

For two euros each, it was a terrific place to go.



We made our way from there to Arethusa’s Fountain and then to Piazza Duomo. It was about 4 in the afternoon, and Punto G was closed, so we went across the street for a crepe and a Campari and soda.

We checked out Osteria da Seby by daylight. From September through February it is open only for lunch on Sunday and is closed on Monday.

OK, so now we know the ground rules.

Joanna seemed to be doing fine, but I was wearing down, so we retreated to the hotel for a couple of hours.

We went back to Kalliope for dinner. No Pinocchio this time. 

We tried that Sicilian specialty, pasta con sarde, again. Kalliope makes it with sardines, pine nuts, capers, fennel, and raisins. 

The dish was good the first time, at Terrazza Angelo in Taormina, but the sardines largely took it over.

The version at Kalliope balanced everything. The sardines were part of the flavor, and not the main event. It was plain terrific.

The second course was grilled swordfish with caponata. The swordfish, pesce spada, was breaded and roasted. 

We had a side dish of potatoes, and the sweet-sour of the caponata actually went better with them than with the fish.

Wine was a Sicilian Syrah called Talia, from a town called Salemi.

It has a little more edge than most of the Nero d’Avolas we have been drinking, and it was time for a change.

And now it’s time to wrap this one up.

So everyone, here’s wishing you good wine and good times.

And don’t let the sardines take over.

Harry




Feb. 21

Harry: Unfortunately I'm recovering from pneumonia and I'm on a restricted diet.

Have extra for me!


Best,
Art