Sicily

After a single day at sea, I was ready to start going on some solo expeditions. I knew Brianna was in good hands, staying with her Gramma on the ship. The Zuiderdam docked in Catania on the island of Sicily. I had been to Messina before, and taken an excursion to see a Roman era ruins and a beautiful church on a hill at Tindari. Similarly, I took another half-day trip, this time to the south, toward Siracusa, to see Greco-Roman ruins at the Archeological Park of Syracuse. The tour guides in Sicily are very, very passionate about their history and culture. They are proud to be Sicilian. Our current tour guide argued that there would be no Italy, no Italian culture, without the Sicilian culture as a base for it. The prior tour guide mentioned the organized-crime aspect of Sicily is alive and well, but you really don't see it unless you want to go looking for it. I would not want to live there, but it is a beautiful island. It is quite big, with lots of traffic, and lots of farms and agriculture. The straits of Messina is the location of Homer's famous Scylla (sea monster) and Charybdis (whirlpool), and our tour guide gleefully read us the description from the Odyssey. The island is also the supposed home of the goats and sheep that were not to be killed, alas which, because the crew killed and ate them, they all died leaving Odysseus alone. So it was with great hopes and expectation that I went to the Archeological Park, but like Sicily itself, I kept looking for more than it has to give. The park was interesting, there was a huge Greek theater which was restored and still in use today (not bad for a 2000 year old place!). There was a Roman Amphitheater, mostly in ruins, but you could get a feel for the size of the thing. There was an enormous pit that used to be a limestone quarry, with a few still-standing columns of stone to show where the roof would have been, and how big the cavern was. There was the "Ear of Dionysus" (named by Carravagio, the painter), a large curving slave-carved cave where echoes amplify like that of an ear canal. That was pretty cool, to go into the back of that cave and hear what was being said at the entrance. Of course, enjoying the cave with a hundred other people in at least three different tour groups and speaking in five different languages did maybe dampen the effect a little. I guess my problem with Sicily is that I would like to explore it myself, not with thirty other fat, old people on an air-conditioned bus. I would like to linger and not be a slave to the return time. I want the sole attention of a guide, so that I can interact, ask questions, and share information, not get lectured to. This is not Sicily's fault. Still, Sicily epitomizes the worst of american tourism, that is: getting just a little information, a small scope sighting, and being left to have an invalid opinion of it all.