Sassy, Spicy Sicily

by Rick Steves

Jabbing his pole like a one-pronged pitchfork into the slow red river of molten rock, the ashtray salesman pulled out a wad of lava. I scrambled back as he swung it by me and plopped it into a mold. His partner snipped it off with big iron clippers and rammed it into shape. The now shapely mass was dropped into a bucket of water that did a wild jig. Cooling on a crispy black ledge were a dozen more lava ashtrays, each with the words "Mount Etna, Sicily" molded into it.

As the red lava poured out of its horribly hot trap door, I unzipped the ski parka I'd rented at the lift. At 11,000 feet, even on a sunny day, it's cold on top of Mount Etna...unless you're three feet from a lava flow.

At the edge of the volcano, I surveyed the island that I had just explored on my script-writing mission for a TV show on Sicily. Old lava flows rumbled like buffalo toward teeming Catania. The island's sprawling second city butted up against a crescent beach that stretched all the way to Taormina — the Santorini of Sicily, and popular with Italians who dress up to travel. And to my right was the hazy, high, and harsh interior. Two hours later I had dropped my rental car at the Catania airport and was flying back to Rome, a rough script unfolding on my laptop screen.

Sicily sights are hard to grasp. Its historic and artistic big shots just don't ring a bell. The folkloric traditions, such as marionette theaters promoted by tourist brochures, seem to play out only for tour groups. And the place must lead Europe in litter. But there's a work-a-day charm here. If you like Italy for its people, tempo, and joy of living — rather than for its Botticellis, Guccis, and touristic icons — you'll dig Sicily.

Sicily, standing midway between Africa and Europe, really is a world unto itself. While part of Italy, it's not quite that simple. Even though (with government encouragement) the siesta is fading out of Italian life, it thrives in Sicily. As Euro-safety regulations take hold in the north with laws requiring helmets on motorbikers, hair continues to fly in the Sicilian wind.

Palermo is the Rome of Sicily with lavish art, boisterous markets, and holy cannoli. In the market, animals hang like anatomy lessons, sliced perfectly in half. Fichi di India, the fist-sized cactus fruit that tastes like a cousin of the kiwi, are peeled and yours for less than a buck.

Palermo offers a great bone experience-skull and shoulders above anything else you'll find in Europe. Its Cappuccin crypt is a subterranean gallery filled with 8,000 "bodies without souls" howling silently at their mortality. For centuries, people would thoughtfully choose their niche before they died, and even linger there, getting to know their macabre neighborhood. Then, after death, dressed in their Sunday best, they'd be hung up to dry. The entrepreneurial monk at the door said that for $125 we could take our TV camera inside for an hour. For $2, a tourist can spend all day.

Sicily's slick autostrada seems out of place (and way too wide), cutting a nearly deserted swath through the heart of the island. For the tourist, it zips you to some of the best Roman mosaics ever excavated. An emperor's hunting villa at Casale (near the town of Piazza Armerina) shows off 50 lavishly decorated mosaic floors. With the help of a guidebook (Giuseppe di Giovanni's is by far the best), the duck-driven chariots, bikini-clad triathletes, and amorous love scenes make more sense.

Travel smart in Sicily: Be sure to pay your respects to the local Big Cheese.

Cefalù was my favorite stop. Steeped in history and bustling with color, it's dramatically set with a fine beach along a craggy coast under a pagan mountain. As the sun grew red and heavy, the old women — still in bathrobes, it seemed — leaned from their flower-potted balconies as boys, girls and Vespa ("wasp") scooters clogged the main drag below. Tsk-tsking at the age-old flirting scene, the grannies loudly gossiped from balcony to balcony about the tarted-up girls below.

I walked up to a local man who seemed to ignore the girls, but mentally undressed every scooter that went past. He told me of the motorbike he lusted after, "a classic Vespa from the '70s, with a body that's round like a woman's." Just then, another guy buzzed up on his very round, very blue, classic Vespa. He declared, "It's the only Vespa I've ever owned. I got it when I was 14. That was in 1969, the year man first walked on the moon. That was the year I first rode this Vespa." Guys gathered around almost worshipfully. The old women in the balconies and the mini-skirted flirts no longer existed for these men. Cefalù and its teeming main drag were just Mediterranean wallpaper as that round, blue wasp, positively dripped with la dolce vita.

Later, at a café overlooking the beach, I sipped my latte di mandorla (almond milk) with the locals who seemed to be posted there on duty, making sure that big red sun goes down. Little wooden boats, painted brightly, sat plump on the beach. Above them, the fisherman's clubhouse filled what was a medieval entry through the town wall. I wandered in.

I was greeted warmly by the senior member, "Il Presidente." The men go by nicknames and often don't even know their friends' real names. Since 1944, Il Presidente has spent his nights fishing, gathering anchovies under the beam of his gas-powered lampará. When he took the pre-Coleman vintage lamp off its rusty wall hook, I saw tales of a lifetime at sea in his face. As he showed me the ropes he wove from local straw and complained that the new ropes just aren't the same, I lashed him to my budding script.

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