Sì, Silly Sicily: Catania

When the music’s over, turn out the lights. And when the adventure’s over, get on your flight. Both are the end of an era, perhaps a tiny little personal one, but still an era. The doors close. With this post, too, my Silly Sicily series comes to an end… just to set me free to embark on another adventure, some other space, some other time, the very same continuum. But hey, my next plane takes off in a day or so!

Catania. Clamoring in the shade of the dreadful chain-smoker, Mount Etna. At the mercy of that volcano, which, on the other hand, benignly provided its citizens with black stone to rebuild the polis when its eruptions shattered it to pieces. Perhaps the name even refers to that. The name that changed over time, as conquerors kept seizing it through the millennia. Yet only Mount Etna has withstood the test of time. Together with Palermo, Catania is one of the gateways to Sicily, at least until the bridge to the mainland is finally built.

Catania offers several city beaches, not particularly outstanding, though, so we saved a bit of time for roaming the city before leaving the island (and summer) behind in the afternoon, after taking a sunrise dip and playing the busy bus roulette again. The bus eventually came, albeit late, and managed to arrive roughly on schedule.

After having the obligatory gelato, we rushed through the old town by Palazzo San Giuliano, the university complex with its patio, to the Sant'Agata Cathedral and the elephant fountain, which has nothing to do with Hannibal, as many people wrongly claim. It’s merely a city symbol, a sort of patron saint in a way that may feel peculiar in Italy, but still. It was sculpted out of magmatic rock from Etna.

And then, since there’s already a dozen posts covering Catania city center on Wordlmappin, let me skip the mandatory must-see stuff and roam the city melancholically, and alone this time, as @honeydue got on another plane in the afternoon and I still had some time to find a craft microbrewery for #beersaturday… In which I failed, I have to admit. Even though I did my homework this time and researched places around the east coast, microbreweries haven’t survived Covid. At least half a dozen of them have shut down in the past few years. I had high hopes for this place, as someone rated it on Google just a few months ago, but no luck.

An archetypal ristoratore from the adjacent establishment spotted me idling in front of it for about ten minutes after the official opening hour, hoping for someone to rush in and open the bar, and tried to coax me into his place. “Sì, Sì, craft birra! Sì, we have!” Sadly, it was a lie. I got a pint across the street, not particularly great, not worth a #beersaturday post, but good enough to boost my morale for a bit of exploration.

It never ceases to amaze me how, once you leave the gutter filled with blindfolded tourists, you suddenly find yourself all alone on streets that look just the same. And you can start admiring the little details and quirks. Be it a monastery football pitch overseen by the patron saint (can you even score at the far post?), a Jesus-protected garage, or that inconspicuous mosque, which likely used to be a flat up until recently, just across the street, perhaps to keep things in balance.

You can walk down a street with 24/7 American coffee (in Italy!), a cute little sweets and cocktails bar, a selfie room, whatever that is…

And as the sun climbs higher and higher, you find yourself attracted back to the touristy streets, those with parasols and umbrellas hanging—they are in every city and most towns lately, but still, there’s something that lures people in, much like a flame draws a moth. Stalls of local snacks and treats, you can’t go wrong sampling any of them—it’s Italy, after all.

And then? Just a peek into several typical tiny alleys, the ones suitable for scooters only, a square overflowing with trash where a market just ended. And then catching a bus to the airport.

So much for Sicily. Farewell!

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