Sicily 6/22/24
The mountain has been conquered a second time. My triumph!
The way down in the morning was all smiles, leaving a little later than I intended at 7:10 and making it almost out of the lower village, a good hour and a half of walking, before Giro (of course) happened to be passing by with his wife, daughter and granddaughter on the way to the beach, and of course pulled over and insisted on giving me a lift the rest of the way down. His wife rolled the window down and I burst out laughing, that I just can’t seem to make it into town without them passing me.
In those early sunlight hours, it’s all young men in trucks and old men in olive groves. I passed two women, both of whom were studiously exercising, and then there’s me, the American in gingham pedal-pushers and a crop top on my way to the beach. One of the women said something along the lines of “Look at us, walking!” because exercise for the sake of exercise doesn’t seem to be all that popular in Sicily.
Once on the beach, the weather was borderline dreadful, first windy and then hazy and then overcast, but I stayed at the beach for four hours. There were families with children, there was an older couple arguing over how to place the umbrellas (eventually building an umbrella fort to block the wind) and a trio of nonna’s dressed to the nines in sparkly, silky, colorful beachwear walking up and down the strip of sand. And then there was me, the American in the itsy bitsy bikini trying to get a tan, occasionally strutting down to the water to take a dip in the cerulean waves.
By the time I left the ocean in the early afternoon, the wind had whipped up the water to a good froth.
I walked to the “mega” supermarket, which is the size of a small American grocery store, to kill time and get more lozione schiarente to bring home with me. Then I went to the butcher shop, where the lady has warmed up to me greatly, and her colleague found me charming (despite being sunburned and barely able to speak Italian) enough to think that I was French. A half kilo, by the way, is a mezzo chilo, so I got a half kilo of ground beef today, and two steaks.
Then, I switched out my nonna sandals for my Keds (my poor Keds…will they make it another two months?) and got on Via Trento, where the hills begin. Two hours of uphill walking, and let me tell you, by the time I come around the corner of the strada provinciale to my village, I’m on some sort of masochistic endorphin high.
To give you an idea of the geography, my village sits at 2000 feet above sea level in a hazelnut forest. The roads zigzag up and down the hills. The next village is about forty minutes below mine, and the bottom village is about 40 minutes below that one. Below the bottom village is the town, the città, and once in the città it’s about a twenty minute walk to my favorite beach. The rural roads don’t intersect with other roads because they are cut into the sides of mountains, they only go up and down. All along the way I am walking diagonally back and forth to keep on the outside of the curves, sometimes fighting with brambles. The only other roads are private roads into the olive groves all over the mountainside.
This morning I was just entering the bottom village when a dog…now you have to understand I am a small woman and have a fear of dogs…from behind a fence started barking at me. It was that same Sicilian mutt, 40 to 50 lbs, not frightening looking but not small either. I scurried past the fence only to meet two more dogs who came out of a garage into the road, the same kind of mutts, not behind anything. I was in a village, so logically, the dogs must be tame enough to be free like that, one of them was old and only went a few feet from the property. But my salvo was that I stood at the intersection of the main road and an alley that took me through the back of the village, away from them. There, I encountered a little cat with two kittens at her teats. And naturally, on the way home I took the alleyway, only to encounter some older Sicilians who didn’t seem too thrilled about the sweaty, red-faced backpacker interrupting their evening.
I look down a the ocean from here and I can’t quite explain how I walked (almost) all the way there and back in one day. Today, at least, I left the city at 5 p.m., ate a packet of oat biscuits beforehand and brought water with me. By the time I got to the goat enclosure about thirty minutes from home, there was a delicious, cool breeze at my back. It’s just one foot in front of the other, for two hours. I’m an inveterate walker, the only difference is that here, it’s either uphill or downhill the entire time.
I think I have enough meat to stay up in the hills for the next two days. And I could always go to the butcher in the next village, a mere thirty minutes from here on foot. Yesterday, I washed my sheets but used up all of my firewood. That is, I’ll sleep well tonight, and have enough to keep me busy tomorrow.