Verona, Italy

Verona feels Italian!

We got to Bergamo, tried to figure out how to get to the train station, missing the train due to lack of understanding by seconds. And yes, you can buy tickets on the train it seems. Because we missed the train, we didnt get to Verona until dark. The whole direction, navigation thing is quite hard, especially when you rely on Google maps, and you got no visual references. We took a taxi 300 meters…

Verona Castle

Verona City

Next day we started fresh, got ourselves a Verona card, and got stuck into the Tocati Festival. We didnt understand what was going on, but it was fun and lively. Heaps of people in town, lots of activities and shenanigans going on. But get the Verona card, much better value!

Street gambling

One of the main highlights, besides the very nice factual cultural things, is the Romeo & Juliet museum. We went, we smooched, and we left. No lovers lost…

We did see some nice factual cultural things though, one of them beeing the monastery, it had catacombs, and stuff like that (Im not that into it), and a religious feeling I dont experience too often.

Indecent Exposure

Rest of the time in Verona, we spent eating icecream, they have a very good Gelato range and selection, drinking beer, and Louis Vuiton spotting. So many fakes!

Beer

San Vito Lo Capo, Sicily, Italy

This was our first trip to southern Europe, and it was all that I expected it to be! Bit like Port Kembla… 🙂

Pete and Kobe, or was it just Kobe, organised the trip, found the hotel and provided a rough itinerary. This was also the first time we tried TripIt, and it was great! No more endless forwards trying to sort things out, but rather Skype and a central repository.

Anyways, we flew in to Trapani, and picked up our Fiat 500c, and headed for San Vito Lo Capo. I had a discussion with Pete earlier regarding directions, and I had said I thought I should get a GPS, but listened to his advice and didn’t get one. Then at Trapani, Hertz had decided to not include any maps anymore, but they where kind enough to give us a 1:4 000 000 map, and instructions to “keep to the left”. After some run arounds, we got on the right track and found the hotel.

Fiat 500c

Somehow Pete, Kobe, Mark and Debbie, in their 2 bedroom apartment, had exactly the same apartment as us right across the hall! Lucky for us, it turned out that our visit coincided with the 1st International Kite festival, hosted by the council. It was so nice, to sit in the sun, lounge by the pool, gaze at the kites and sip beer.

We headed out to town, for a restaurant that was meant to be very good. Ristorante profumi di couscus. It was very good, and €300 later we were very full! Pete had the squid and all his dessert.

Dessert

Next morning we headed towards Corleone, Godfather country. The drive was very nice, lots of winding roads, and the first thing that greeted us where some hideous swiss style highrises. Not much like the movie though, but we got the compulsory tourist shot:

Corleone mafia

Next up was a restaurant that I read about in the SAS inflight magazine on some other trip. There was some disagreement between Tomtom, Google maps and the signage/directions. After doubling over a couple of times, we found the place. In the end, TomTom and the directions where more accurate than Google Maps.

Antica Stazione di Ficuzza had a wedding on, but they gave us some champagne and coffee, and after a short wait, we got the second floor to ourselves. We had no idea what we where doing, but got the set menu. It seemed like we where the only non-italians there, and it was such a nice and relaxed mood. Our waiter kept the food coming and it turned out we had quite a meal ahead of us. We didnt quite know what would happen, but we ate too much of the entree. Lots of food, warm weather, we should have had a nap!

Full

After that meal, we decided to head back to the hotel, and go for a dip with a few beers. We were there out of season, so it was nice and quiet. We ruined it tough by playing Marco Polo.

Pool

It took us a while, but we ventured out for a small supper. We ended up at a pizza place, and Mark ordered a Calzone with Pepperoni as extras. It turned out that wasn’t all that straight forward. Pepperoni in Italian means capsicum, and that’s what Mark got. Although when he complained, they just brought it back with more capsicum. We finally figured out that Peperoni in English is Salami Picante in Italian. In the end he got what he wanted:

Salami Picante

Next day we split up, as the others where staying longer and wanted to see Cefalu as well. We stayed behind, and headed to Erice first.

Erice Old man in Erice

It is a beautiful town/fortress/castle on top of a hill, overlooking everything. The drive up is long and winding, and we just beat the touristbusses.

Next on our little loop track was the Segasta temple ruins, it didnt take us long to wrap that one up before we headed to Castellammare del Golfo.

Segasta temple

Castellammare del Golfo from above

From the harbour

We then headed back for more Gellato, and a peek at the kites.

Kites

Kites again

While we had our gellato , we figured we would have a look at the show. This old fellow squeezed past, and walked down the beach. It turned out he was Ray Bethell, and he did this 3 kite show that was awesome! They where spinning around, chasing each other, whipping about and creating quite a impression!

As the sun set, the kiters packed up and people headed home. We went for a walk up the hill to get a view of the city, and also spotted some very familiar fencing work!

View

Fencing

Sicily was great, sunny and nice. We loved it there, and this is a place we would want to see more of!

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