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Final thoughts on Sicily
May. 10th, 2014 03:00 pmOn the whole, we had a great trip. The people were friendly, they were appreciative of (and tolerant of) my feeble attempts at Italian, and they were neither more nor less crazy than the folks back home.
As in previous vacations, late April to early May in the northern hemisphere is a good time to travel: apart from the Easter period, it’s low or shoulder season, so you’re not up to your armpits in tourists and prices are low to moderate compared to what they’ll be at the high season. Temperatures are moderate: warm enough to be generally pleasant, but not so warm that I’d find them intolerable. It’s often a great time of year for wildflowers; Sicilian fields were ablaze with dozens of species of flower, and the scent was heavy on the air. On the other hand, you’re probably traveling before the peak of the vegetable season, so you won’t get as good veggies as you would later in the year.
Basic sanity and common sense is a good thing given the often horrific roads. Sicilians like to drive fast, but on the whole, they were prudent and careful and not too scary. Sicilian drivers are like North Americans, only more so: you have to be a bit aggressive about insisting on your rights (you take your opportunity forcefully or you wait a long time for a gap). Italian roads are very different from North American roads in many ways. I’ve already mentioned the often-narrow roads and the scary switchbacks, but there are other differences. These range from changes in the signage (e.g., the no-parking signs are a red circle with a / through it, overlaid on a blue circle) to drivers who have a cavalier disregard for stop signs and posted speed limits, which are (in defense of the drivers) often nonsensical. Many roads have posted limits far higher than I was comfortable with, leading many drivers to pass us, and others had ridiculously low limits, such as 50 km/hour despite the absence of roadwork on a superhighway that our GPS claimed had a limit of 130 km/hour. In the end, we mostly struck a balance between following the example set by others and driving as fast as we felt comfortable, and pulling over every so often to let the backlog of drivers who had collected behind us pass.
Traveling with both GPS and a copilot to help you interpret its often cryptic warnings is efficient and preserves one's sanity; in fact, this support seems to be essential. (Doubly true since our software, GPS CoPilot, had a distressing tendency to crash unpredictably. It rebooted quickly enough, but sometimes it was a close call about whether it would revive in time to warn of the next turn.) I have no idea how you'd manage the driving without the combination... You'd be endlessly stopping to ask for directions, or wandering the streets looking for signs that would tell you where you are. Printed maps wouldn’t be much help, because you’d be constantly stopping to figure out where you were and choose the next steps in your itinerary.
Finding tourist sites can be particularly challenging, since all but the most important have few to no signs. This makes finding them a combination of luck and careful preplanning. For example, Google streetview and satellite maps came in very handy a few times, and a few times we just gave up and moved on to plan B.
The food was generally excellent, but that was probably because we relied on a combination of advice from our hosts and recommendations from Lonely Planet, supplemented by an occasional visit to TripAdvisor. The smaller family restaurants seemed pretty good in general (we mostly ate at such places). I'm sure there are crappy restaurants in Sicily too, but we didn’t eat at any of them. On the plus side, taxes and tip are included in the price; on the downside, most restaurants charge a "coperta" (basically, a cover charge) of 2 to 4 euros per person. This covers the cost of the bread that most restaurants supply with meals plus miscellany (e.g., I assume it covers the cost of accepting credit cards). A couple times we had to ask for the bread, and we almost always had to ask for oil and balsamic (dell'olio è aceto) to sop up with our bread. Possibly the oil and vinegar is an Italian, not Sicilian, custom?
The coffee was also excellent, but as I've bemoaned a few times, it's tiny. Espresso is great when all you want is a sip or two, mostly for the flavor, but it doesn’t satisfy my craving for multiple mouthfuls of aqua vita. Capuccino or macchiato or americano, even when you ask for the "lungo" (tall) version, are better, but still only offer a few sips. A couple times we got a smallish but acceptable volume of coffee by asking for a "nero" (black) con lattè (with milk), but that often results from diluting the coffee enough that it loses the virtues (strength and careful roasting) of real Italian coffee. I suppose the best solution would be to order three machiates per person and a large mug so you could combine them into one satisfactory dose. I'll have to try that next time.
Alcohol was good. We didn't get to try any microbrewed beer, but the Moretti is reliably pretty good, particularly the Baffo d'Oro. I also liked the wines more than I expected. I'm not usually a wine fan, but Sicilian wines have much lower tannin levels than the French wines I'm more familiar with, and thus I enjoy them more. I don't think I tasted any wines that I disliked -- we mostly ordered the restaurant's house wine -- and several (e.g., the Centopassi white wine) were excellent. Sicilians enjoy their wine enough that we didn't find anyone serving plonk.
Things are fairly expensive, particularly if you take the lazy route (as we did) and eat almost exclusively in restaurants instead of shopping for your lunch at supermarkets. As a ballpark figure, we found that main courses ranged from 8 to 12 euros each, usually (but not always) for a good enough quantity that you didn’t need a second course. We generally found a single course plus (shared) appetizer was more than enough, but occasionally opted to split a second course. The B&Bs we chose averaged around 60 euros per night, and were only of "good" quality, rather than excellent or exceptional quality. That is, comfortable and often pretty, but nothing to rave over. (Note: Here, I'm referring to the quality of the accommodations, not to the quality of the people. All of our hosts were friendly and helpful.) The quality of the bathrooms was often low; they were all functional, with plenty of hot water, but the showers were often tiny (in several cases, I could barely turn around without striking the walls with shoulders or knees), and there was rarely a shelf where you could put your soap and shampoo or somewhere to place your clean clothes outside the shower stall. Many of the toilets flushed strongly, with lots of water, but didn't actually remove (ahem) the evidence. I suspect this is because many of the ensuite bathrooms were afterthoughts, added on post hoc rather than designed into the house from the beginning. When the kids have moved out, and we have a little more disposable income, I foresee us looking for higher-end accommodations.
Gas stations are an interesting experience. Surprisingly many don't accept credit cards, and may not accept debit cards (or only accept bancomat cards that are not part of the Plus network used in North America and other parts of Europe). Thus, plan accordingly: if you’ll be staying for a while in a certain area, locate credit card–friendly stations well in advance, or ensure that you have at least 50 euros of cash on hand (the cost of a fill-up for our car as of April 2014). Also, don't expect most of the facilities you'd find at a North American station: no attached convenience store, usually no garage for repairs, no bathrooms, and occasionally nothing more than a couple of unattended pumps with a money slot.
The whole idea of "non c'è la mentalitè" fascinates me. Some things are clearly wrong, like overlaying modern highways on scary switchbacks that probably date back to pre-Greek times. Both for safety and to alleviate traffic congestion, some of these roads really need to be replaced with modern designs, even if "that's not how we think". Other times, there may not be an option; for example, short of tearing down whole rows of buildings, there's simply no room to put in wider roads in the older cities. For some things, it's clearly a case of preference rather than absolute right or wrong. For example, an American would undoubtedly want to maximize income from a gas station by trying to sell as many products as possible from the same location, but if a Sicilian is content to sell only gas, that's nobody's concern but their own.
On the whole, a lovely (if fatiguing) vacation. I can thoroughly recommend Sicily to anyone looking for a nice Mediterranean vacation. We'll undoubtedly return some day, although the mainland of Italy is calling to us, and might be our next port of call.
As in previous vacations, late April to early May in the northern hemisphere is a good time to travel: apart from the Easter period, it’s low or shoulder season, so you’re not up to your armpits in tourists and prices are low to moderate compared to what they’ll be at the high season. Temperatures are moderate: warm enough to be generally pleasant, but not so warm that I’d find them intolerable. It’s often a great time of year for wildflowers; Sicilian fields were ablaze with dozens of species of flower, and the scent was heavy on the air. On the other hand, you’re probably traveling before the peak of the vegetable season, so you won’t get as good veggies as you would later in the year.
Basic sanity and common sense is a good thing given the often horrific roads. Sicilians like to drive fast, but on the whole, they were prudent and careful and not too scary. Sicilian drivers are like North Americans, only more so: you have to be a bit aggressive about insisting on your rights (you take your opportunity forcefully or you wait a long time for a gap). Italian roads are very different from North American roads in many ways. I’ve already mentioned the often-narrow roads and the scary switchbacks, but there are other differences. These range from changes in the signage (e.g., the no-parking signs are a red circle with a / through it, overlaid on a blue circle) to drivers who have a cavalier disregard for stop signs and posted speed limits, which are (in defense of the drivers) often nonsensical. Many roads have posted limits far higher than I was comfortable with, leading many drivers to pass us, and others had ridiculously low limits, such as 50 km/hour despite the absence of roadwork on a superhighway that our GPS claimed had a limit of 130 km/hour. In the end, we mostly struck a balance between following the example set by others and driving as fast as we felt comfortable, and pulling over every so often to let the backlog of drivers who had collected behind us pass.
Traveling with both GPS and a copilot to help you interpret its often cryptic warnings is efficient and preserves one's sanity; in fact, this support seems to be essential. (Doubly true since our software, GPS CoPilot, had a distressing tendency to crash unpredictably. It rebooted quickly enough, but sometimes it was a close call about whether it would revive in time to warn of the next turn.) I have no idea how you'd manage the driving without the combination... You'd be endlessly stopping to ask for directions, or wandering the streets looking for signs that would tell you where you are. Printed maps wouldn’t be much help, because you’d be constantly stopping to figure out where you were and choose the next steps in your itinerary.
Finding tourist sites can be particularly challenging, since all but the most important have few to no signs. This makes finding them a combination of luck and careful preplanning. For example, Google streetview and satellite maps came in very handy a few times, and a few times we just gave up and moved on to plan B.
The food was generally excellent, but that was probably because we relied on a combination of advice from our hosts and recommendations from Lonely Planet, supplemented by an occasional visit to TripAdvisor. The smaller family restaurants seemed pretty good in general (we mostly ate at such places). I'm sure there are crappy restaurants in Sicily too, but we didn’t eat at any of them. On the plus side, taxes and tip are included in the price; on the downside, most restaurants charge a "coperta" (basically, a cover charge) of 2 to 4 euros per person. This covers the cost of the bread that most restaurants supply with meals plus miscellany (e.g., I assume it covers the cost of accepting credit cards). A couple times we had to ask for the bread, and we almost always had to ask for oil and balsamic (dell'olio è aceto) to sop up with our bread. Possibly the oil and vinegar is an Italian, not Sicilian, custom?
The coffee was also excellent, but as I've bemoaned a few times, it's tiny. Espresso is great when all you want is a sip or two, mostly for the flavor, but it doesn’t satisfy my craving for multiple mouthfuls of aqua vita. Capuccino or macchiato or americano, even when you ask for the "lungo" (tall) version, are better, but still only offer a few sips. A couple times we got a smallish but acceptable volume of coffee by asking for a "nero" (black) con lattè (with milk), but that often results from diluting the coffee enough that it loses the virtues (strength and careful roasting) of real Italian coffee. I suppose the best solution would be to order three machiates per person and a large mug so you could combine them into one satisfactory dose. I'll have to try that next time.
Alcohol was good. We didn't get to try any microbrewed beer, but the Moretti is reliably pretty good, particularly the Baffo d'Oro. I also liked the wines more than I expected. I'm not usually a wine fan, but Sicilian wines have much lower tannin levels than the French wines I'm more familiar with, and thus I enjoy them more. I don't think I tasted any wines that I disliked -- we mostly ordered the restaurant's house wine -- and several (e.g., the Centopassi white wine) were excellent. Sicilians enjoy their wine enough that we didn't find anyone serving plonk.
Things are fairly expensive, particularly if you take the lazy route (as we did) and eat almost exclusively in restaurants instead of shopping for your lunch at supermarkets. As a ballpark figure, we found that main courses ranged from 8 to 12 euros each, usually (but not always) for a good enough quantity that you didn’t need a second course. We generally found a single course plus (shared) appetizer was more than enough, but occasionally opted to split a second course. The B&Bs we chose averaged around 60 euros per night, and were only of "good" quality, rather than excellent or exceptional quality. That is, comfortable and often pretty, but nothing to rave over. (Note: Here, I'm referring to the quality of the accommodations, not to the quality of the people. All of our hosts were friendly and helpful.) The quality of the bathrooms was often low; they were all functional, with plenty of hot water, but the showers were often tiny (in several cases, I could barely turn around without striking the walls with shoulders or knees), and there was rarely a shelf where you could put your soap and shampoo or somewhere to place your clean clothes outside the shower stall. Many of the toilets flushed strongly, with lots of water, but didn't actually remove (ahem) the evidence. I suspect this is because many of the ensuite bathrooms were afterthoughts, added on post hoc rather than designed into the house from the beginning. When the kids have moved out, and we have a little more disposable income, I foresee us looking for higher-end accommodations.
Gas stations are an interesting experience. Surprisingly many don't accept credit cards, and may not accept debit cards (or only accept bancomat cards that are not part of the Plus network used in North America and other parts of Europe). Thus, plan accordingly: if you’ll be staying for a while in a certain area, locate credit card–friendly stations well in advance, or ensure that you have at least 50 euros of cash on hand (the cost of a fill-up for our car as of April 2014). Also, don't expect most of the facilities you'd find at a North American station: no attached convenience store, usually no garage for repairs, no bathrooms, and occasionally nothing more than a couple of unattended pumps with a money slot.
The whole idea of "non c'è la mentalitè" fascinates me. Some things are clearly wrong, like overlaying modern highways on scary switchbacks that probably date back to pre-Greek times. Both for safety and to alleviate traffic congestion, some of these roads really need to be replaced with modern designs, even if "that's not how we think". Other times, there may not be an option; for example, short of tearing down whole rows of buildings, there's simply no room to put in wider roads in the older cities. For some things, it's clearly a case of preference rather than absolute right or wrong. For example, an American would undoubtedly want to maximize income from a gas station by trying to sell as many products as possible from the same location, but if a Sicilian is content to sell only gas, that's nobody's concern but their own.
On the whole, a lovely (if fatiguing) vacation. I can thoroughly recommend Sicily to anyone looking for a nice Mediterranean vacation. We'll undoubtedly return some day, although the mainland of Italy is calling to us, and might be our next port of call.