Fram's Voyages

October 2023 Licata, Sicily Weather predominantly summer-like; 25-28C, light winds most of the time We spent the first 2 weeks getting situated here at Licata Marina on the south coast of Sicily. The marina is quite big, with 2 parts; the Levante side (east) is where the Port di Cala del Sole is situated and where we are. The outer break wall is huge. Many people take their morning walk out and back and that is 3 km, just on the Levante side. It’s about a km wide. There is an extra inner break wall protecting us from the storm seas from the south. On the West side, there is a boat yard and fishing port which is not as protected as our side. But that doesn’t seem to bother anyone over there. Licata a big town, rather spread out on either side of the Salso river. There’s a tall promontory, with a fortress on top and a church, under which lies Licata Old Town. On the back side of the promontory there is a cemetery that runs from the bottom of the promontory up to the top. The graves are not buried in the ground, rather they are in stone sarcophagi. Many of the graves are vaults with 5 graves high and maybe 8 graves wide. Every grave has the name date and a photo portrait of the deceased. Plastic flowers decorate nearly every single grave. There are also great big mausoleums holding entire families over generations. There are big glass doors and you can see a nice foyer with chairs and small tables so family members can sit and visit their dead. We have walked up the hill a few times. Once to the church up there, once through the cemetery and a third time up to the fortress. There is a winding trail once you leave all the steps of the old town, and you can choose several paths to take you up and/or around. Each time the distance from FRAM was abut 6 km, so it’s a good walk. The old town is very typical old Italian. Narrow cobblestone streets with very old stone apartment buildings of 3-4 stories, no higher. Off the main streets there are even narrower streets where the sun rarely reaches. This is most likely a good thing as it gets so hot here in summer, these apartments are shaded from the sun. There are cute little shops on the ground floors; bakeries, mini-markets, and restaurants all along these streets. In order to get up to the promontory you have to walk through several of these tiny streets and up stone stairs that look like they are taking you to a private property, but no, at the top you realise you are on yet another little street. Cats sleep on the garden walls, dogs slouch around, sleeping in the shade. One can hear people shouting at each other through the wrought-iron balconies of their homes and the delicious scents of tomato sauce and roasting meat wafts through the air. Outside the town to the north is a long valley with a ridge of mountains on the north side. It’s extremely dry with light brown sandy soil. There are tilled fields in the valley but they have to be covered by plastic dome structures to protect the plants from the unmerciful sun. So it doesn’t make for lovely scenery. Licata has an open market every Thursday morning. Although most of it is populated by stands selling housewares, there are stands selling all kinds of fresh and sun-dried tomatoes, olives, local olive oil and vinegar, and nuts; Pistachios and almonds are grown in Sicily and are fantastic. There are also cashews, hazelnuts, lentils, dried legumes. It’s 3 km from FRAM so I don’t go there every week and when I do I focus on the nuts. We have been trying the cheeses here. We know we like mozzerella, parmesan and gorgonzola, so we started out choosing other cheeses that we haven’t had before. The first one looks like a sack tied off at the top and is called Scamorza. Semi-hard and rather tangy. Not a keeper. Pecorino is nice, kind of like manchega. We tried a ricotta yesterday at our favourite gourmet deli on the main street in Licata. The man behind the counter likes us and when I pointed at it and started asking “Cosa questa”, he explained in very fast Italian but saw my totally blank face and instead decided we should just try it. So he took a piece of one of the ricottas, put it in the oven to warm it and then gave it to us with 2 forks and 2 slices of Italian bread. I thought it was really good and bought the rest of the piece he cut ours from. The cost was 1.50 euro. You can use it with bruschetta or put it in a tomato sauce and serve with pasta. It looks like a mound of white soft cheese which has been put in the oven to toast the surface. There are masses of different mozzarellas, burratas and parmesan cheeses so it’s always difficult to decide which one to get this time. If you buy your parmesan in a deli, they will grind it for you at whatever size grain you want. Provolone was another one we tried, rather mild, but definitely good for cooking with. We are still a work-in-progress on the cheese front. (end of FB post 6/11) November Licata The first week of this month, we took an early morning bus to Catania (2.5 hours) and rented a car at the airport. Once settled in our little compact car, we headed north to Taormina, the pearl of Sicily. For hundreds of years it has been a resort town for the wealthy known for its restorative atmosphere. People have come from all over the European continent to spend the winter months enjoying Taormina’s mild climate. Many of them poets, writers, philosophers. Nowadays it is a summer tourist hit with thousands coming up its winding road every day to enjoy the views, the restaurants and the shopping. We drove north on the E45 motorway with Mt Etna to our west and the seaside to our east the whole way which should have taken an hour, but ended up taking a half hour extra because we missed a turn on the steep twisting road up to Taormina and had to continue all the way up the promontory to the top before we could turn around. Once you get off the motorway, you start winding your way on a very narrow road with masses of switchbacks to Taormina which sits right at the top of this high promontory . The scenery is breath-taking which is most likely why I missed the turn to the hotel as I was navigating while Dan drove. Also, thanks to the fantastic scenery, neither one of us minded when we realised we were way off our target. Our hotel was called Villa Schuler, an old mansion turned into a small hotel. It has a long family history of Germans who emigrated in the 1800’s. It was just a stone staircase away from the main street of Taormina and is surrounded by a beautiful garden with citrus trees, Bougainville, palm trees, cactus bushes and a huge pine tree, the largest private garden in the town. Our room was lovely, airy and spacious, especially for us coming off FRAM:) We spent the afternoon walking through the town which was surprisingly crowded for this time of year. We are in the off-season now but you wouldn’t now it from the crowds. We stopped for a late lunch at a restaurant called Circe which was both deli and restaurant. Sitting on the balcony in the back of the restaurant, we had a lovely lunch of foccacia with prosciutto, grilled aubergine and mushroom cream with a glass of white wine from Mount Etna’s slopes. Dan had a Sicilian beer called Messina that he thought was great. The service was impeccable and food delish. There are masses of shops selling Sicilian goods like ceramics and linen and lace. In the evening we went out on the streets again and stopped at a café for a glass of wine for me and a Messina beer for Dan, and people-watched. Later we went to another place closer to the hotel for dinner and were serenaded by 2 gentlemen playing accordion and guitar and singing classical songs like O Sole Mio. It was a lovely evening in wonderful surroundings. We could easily have stayed longer but we had a date to see Mount Etna up close the next day. After a great night’s sleep we got up at 07.00 to drive to a meeting point at the foot of Etna at 09.00. The hotel staff very kindly made coffee for us and put it in our thermo mugs for the drive. It didn’t take as long as we thought it would, only an hour so we got there in plenty of time but felt good not to have to stress. Once off the motorway we drove through small towns and wound our way slowly up the populated part of the volcano. We occasionally got glimpses of the volcano with steam rising out of the top. At the meeting point which was one of the strangest turn-offs I’ve ever seen, basically a hole in a stone wall and looked like a dead end 20 meters in. Had there not been a sign “Etna Excursions” we never would have driven in there. As it was, once in we could see there was a sharp right turn at what we thought was a dead-end. We continued uphill on basically a cowpath and after 2 sharp switchbacks found ourselves in a parking lot. Above the parking lot was a stone house, very modern and nice with restaurant and tasting stations for trying out the local products. At 09.00 we were directed to our drivers and cars. Dan and I were paired with a Slovenian couple and went with our guide Saro, short for Rosario, a Cataniese. He is a former Accountant who tired of working indoors and switched career to be a volcano guide 10 years ago. He drove a big 4-wheel-drive jeep and we all piled into it. 3 other jeeps were filled with the rest of the participants for the tour. It was a clear day with blue skies and excellent visability. We took off in a convoy and drove up the south side of the volcano slope to 1000 meters altitude, past the green and lush lower slopes, up past the tree line at 1500 meters, where there can be no building whatsoever due to the danger of eruptions. It is completely barren and then up to 2000 meters where everything is black lava. Here the vehicles have to stop, no driving allowed higher up. All through the drive Saro gave us a crash course in the Etna volcano system. Mt Etna isn’t just a one crater volcano, it’s a whole system of volcanos and where we stood at 2000 m, we could look over the landscape and see many of the other craters. They stretch from Etna’s main crater in a straight line all the way down the east coast of Sicily past Siracusa and continue under the sea for another 50 miles. Mt Etna’s main crater has 3 additional smaller craters inside it, all active. The most recent eruption was in August of this year when magna started shooting and flowing over the crater down the slopes due to small earthquakes in the region. I didn’t now this, but an earthquake always precedes a volcanic eruption. When this happens the whole area is shut off until the danger is past and the lava slows its progress. At this time, the upper reaches of the south summit were still closed to the public. We hiked up to the edge of another crater that is not presently active. The landscape looks very unearthly, more like another planet. Everything is black lava except for some yellow grass-like patches that the Siciians jokingly call “mother-in-law’s pillow” due to the prickly thorny flowers that grow on them. In the spring flowers bloom on them in verdant colors. The visability was so sharp that we could see across the Messina straights to the Italian mainland area of Calambria to the north and Siracusa Bay to the south. To the west the landscape stretched out in a long valley. It was very windy up here and the temperature was about 15C where it had been 25C down at 1000 meters. Everyone wore thick trousers, long-sleeved shirts and sweaters. Dan and I wore hiking shorts and a windbreaker. We’re from Sweden after all…We told the Italians, 15C is summer to us. Back to the cars for a drive over to the east side of the volcano where there is a huge lava “glacier” where lava flowed down the volcano after a crater collapse several thousand years ago. It goes all the way to the sea and beyond. One of the other guides, Peter, told us how Etna came about and how it was originally below the surface of the sea, but with several eruptions it eventually grew out of the water and encroached until it was part of the east coast of Sicily where it is now situated. Quite remarkable. The crater changes all the time with small craters suddenly apprearing and then disappearing. There is a constant puff of smoke-steam coming out of the top of the volcano. From there we drove off-track on a lava encrusted path that was so bumpy we had to hold on for dear life. We arrived 15 minutes later and very shaken to a rocky plain also on the east slope where we were given hardhats and then taken down into the lava tube. Lava tubes are formed when molten lava flows down the slopes forming a rut with rock sides. As the lava cools and moves on, a ceiling of lava hardens and once the lava has passed through, it leaves a hollow tube. There are about 300 such lava tubes along the coast of Sicily, this one was about 75 meters long. We had to climb down into a dark stone hole and then walk very gingerly due to the loose rock surface with our heads ducked as it was not very high inside. Using our headlamps, we could see the remnants of gas pockets in the ceiling that exploded or popped during the cooling of the lava and looked like the little crater that a drop of water forms when it splashes into a pond. There were also small stalactites in the ceiling about the size of a dog’s incisor tooth. These lava tubes are very fragile and can only be entered at certain times of the year, never in the winter as the colder temperatures can cause changes and falling lava rocks. In the middle ages, the lava tubes were used to store ice and snow that fell during the winter on Mount Etna. This snow was then transported as far as Saudi Arabia so the people there could have ice cream! We piled into the cars once more and drove back to the camp. Saro told us about the food culture of Catania; the almonds from Siracusa, pistachios, the big naval oranges that ripen in January after a cold snap, Caponato a dish kind of like ratatouille but with pine nuts, olives, capers, aubergine, bell peppers and onions in a tomato base. He also described Granitas, a sort of ice slush drink with lots of sugar that everyone eats in the summer. He defended the unhealthiness of it by telling us that when it is so hot in the summer, it’s the best way to start the day. Cannoli is one of the favourite desserts here and he advised us all to try it before we leave Sicily. When we got to the camp, they had put out all kinds of preserves, pestoes, oils and tepanades for us to try. We also got to try some Etna wines which were very nice. One of the specialties here in Sicily is pistachio pesto. It was very good, more mild than basil pesto. I bought a bunch of things like caper paste, green olive tapenade, sun-dried tomato tapenade and some olive oil Everything is grown on the slopes of Mt Etna. We thanked our guide Saro and the others for a great day and headed home to FRAM. We took a more northern route home which was very scenic though rugged. There were high plateaus where old villages were built centuries ago and are still populated. Cliffs with the strangest composition; some kind of sandstone, very layered. We arrived back in Licata just as it was getting dark. I started making a list of what I need to make Caponata. Can’t wait to try it!