Last Taste of Italy
Matera was an amazing city and great experience. So much history and unique scenery to take in. But now, we needed to head south for the last leg of our trip. We packed up our car in the morning and prepared ourselves for the long 8-hour drive from Matera to Sicily. Besides driving an absolutely gutless tin can (I’ll never own a Smart car…), the drive was pretty good. We loaded up my phone with some Spotify playlists and hit the road. Driving through the Italian countryside was beautiful. Green hills, gorgeous rock mountains, giant wind farms, vineyards, and even old turret bunkers left over from the wars and scattered around.
Sicily is a giant island so we needed to take a ferry to get across. This being Italy, the signage was a little light, of course, and so we never really knew if we got on the right ferry. Luckily for us though, we ended up where we needed and continued driving until we got into Agrigento. Even after a full day of driving, we didn’t arrive until dark. Our B&B host was great, though, and met us in a parking lot where we got free parking and he then took us to the apartment. This place was great and had a beautiful view overlooking the city towards the ocean. It was also very central in the city and close to anything that we needed.
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Agrigento
The next day we hit a lot of the tourist things we wanted to do. Sicily has a lot of Greek influence and history and there is a 2km stretch called the Valley of the Temples. This is where you can find Greek ruins and temples that were built to worship the gods. They were huge and it’s incredible to think about how they made these massive structures. There is also a large garden where they now grow many types of fruits and plants — including some types that you can’t really find anywhere else in the world.
We spent quite a few hours walking around in the hot heat looking at these amazing ruins and soaking in the history about what once was. After walking through the valley, we made our way to the nearby museum which we were told was supposed to be one of the biggest collections of Greek artifacts. Being such a highly recommended museum, it was surprising for us that it was actually quite quiet with not many people visiting. Very different experience from the other over-populated museums we’ve seen in the past. I think this might just be because not as many tourists make their way to Agrigento as compared to Rome or Florence, for example.
The highlight of the museum was seeing the size of these statues that used to decorate the Temple of Zeus. It’s hard to tell in the picture here, but I’ll try to paint the picture. These statues were built by connecting blocks together and would have been beautifully carved statues, not the block-like figure you see now. As you can see in the photo with me standing in front of one, these statues were huge! Now, the temple would have had around 38 or 40 of these giant statues. Cool, right? Well to give you a sense of just how big the Temple of Zeus was, these statues were only a quarter, maybe a third, as tall at the temple itself. You can see a photo of what the temple would have looked like with the statues in-between the pillars in the other photo describing the temple.
Not sure if these photos really give you the sense of scale for these ruins, but it was pretty unreal for as and to think they made these massive buildings and structures without much for technology and tools. Truly remarkable.
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After our day, we went out for dinner to this amazing restaurant. This place called La Posata Di Federico II is run but this cute old couple. They must be in their 80s and don’t speak a word of English. However, the old lady made sure we had the best experience possible. She was very friendly and it honestly was the best service we received the entire trip. Normally, you need to hunt down or call out for your server at restaurants, but she would keep checking in on us and did everything to make sure we enjoyed ourselves. You could really tell she loved people and running her restaurant. Her husband was also great and kept our wine and water topped and bread basket filled.
Once the food started coming out, we knew this place was living up to the hype. It not only had some of the most beautiful looking dishes but also very delicious. I thought we took some pictures, but I guess we were too caught up in the experience and food. If anyone reading this makes it out to Agrigento, source this place out. It’s number one for the city on Trip Advisor and I can understand why. Molto bene!
The next day we made our way to one of the beaches to enjoy some of the incredibly blue water. We stopped by a grocery store along the way and picked up meats, cheese, and bread so we could have a picnic lunch on the beach. The waves were still pretty big from the storm that came through the night before and it seems no one else was in a beach mood as we had the entire beach to ourselves.
However, while playing in the waves and waters, Nicole had a bit of an unfortunate accident when a wave caught her by surprise and swallowed her Tiffany sunglasses. We spent the next hour walking through the beach hoping they might wash up, unlikely, but we tried. After searching for a while, we gave up and accepted the loss. To be honest, it’s amazing they lasted this long as she almost lost them the last time we were at the beach in Cinque Terre as well. It’s alright though, at least it happened near the end of our trip instead of the beginning.
We made our way back home to clean up after our beach excursion and get ready for a fun night of cooking. We had a cooking class planned with a teacher that would teach us some traditional Sicilian meals!
Our teacher, Annalisa, was great. When we arrived, she had some snack foods prepped for us to enjoy including roasted green peppers, a bread and egg dish that reminded me of French toast, lots of local fruits, nuts, and vegetables from her farm, and of course, wine. Everything was so fresh and the flavours were incredibly vibrant.
After we enjoyed our snack and socializing, we got to cooking. We made three dishes from scratch that were delicious. The first was a dish called, Caponata di Melanzane. It is basically a bunch of cooked vegetables that are mixed together with a tomato sauce. It included eggplant, onions, olives, capers, peppers, mushrooms, and probably a dozen other ingredients I’m forgetting (we have the recipes, but I just can’t find it right now). It was very hearty and reminded me of a very chunky antipasto that would be great on bread. It’s a traditional meal served as a main course. In our case, it was served alongside our next meal, pasta!
Annalisa taught us how to make homemade pasta noodles from scratch with just flour, water, oil, and a fork. This pasta is called Cavatelli with tomato sauce. It was so cool to make our own pasta! It was even cooler when we saw how easy it was to make fancy looking shell type pasta noodles with nothing but a fork.
The sauce for the pasta we made from scratch as well. We used a bunch of cherry tomatoes and cooked them until they were soft. Then we put them in a special crusher that would crush the juice out while leaving most of the pulp. You can see Nicole using it in one of the photos below. From there, we added a little seasoning to the sauce, but not much. Annalisa wanted us to taste pure tomato sauce as a base and from there we could always add seasoning when we wanted to make it again.
Lastly, for dessert, we made what would be my favourite — Sfingi. For this, we made a dough batter similar to that of pancake batter. It was very watery. Then we deep-fried spoonfuls of the dough until they puffed up and became golden. Once cooked, you rolled them around in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. These were absolutely delicious. Very reminiscent of the mini donuts you might get at the fair, but much lighter. They weren’t dense like a donut at all.
After all our cooking, we set the table for our homemade Italian meal and socialized with our teacher. It was interesting to learn about the differences between Italy and Canada, as they had their own questions about what life was like for us back home. It was a great experience and one that I can’t wait to try to recreate in our own kitchen! Mmm… Sfingi.
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Syracuse
Road Trip! After a couple days in Agrigento, it was time to drive to our last city — Syracuse. It was only a couple hours from Agrigento and it would be our last chance to use the car to travel somewhere so we took the opportunity to make a slight detour on our way to Syracuse. While driving, we visited a national park (Riserva Naturale Cavagrande del Cassibile) that has been closed for a couple years now. Even though it’s been closed, people still visit and access through an alternate entrance (read: hole in the fence).
Once there, you follow a trail down into the giant canyon to a river flowing below. The river is beautiful clear water and the main attraction is to visit the pools that have formed with waterfalls. Here, people sit around the rocks and suntan or go swimming in the frigid water. I’m not exactly one to enjoy cold water, but it was very relaxing to sit along the side and enjoy the scenery. I mean, we were in a canyon in Italy, soaking up the sun, and swimming in pools of crystal blue water. What’s not to like?!
Nicole loved it and spent a fair bit of time swimming around the water. Clearly, cold water doesn’t bother her after previously doing polar bear dips in Alaska. Eventually, I jumped in to cool off, but my swimming time was much shorter lived than hers. What can I say, I like tropical waters! Nonetheless, an amazing experience that I will always remember.
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After a couple hours at the canyon pools, we hiked back up to our car and finished our trip to Syracuse. The first thing we noticed when arriving in Syracuse was how beautiful and clean the city was. We were staying in the newer part of the city on the island of Ortigia — which is south of the old town. Our B&B was huge. It could have easily fit a family of four (or more). Everything looked brand new and the location couldn’t be better. It was right near the middle of the island and a short walk to anything we wanted.
Syracuse was such a perfect city to end our trip on. Ortigia is a heavily pedestrian focused island and a night and day comparison to many of the other cities we visited. I think it is probably the safest we’ve felt on our whole trip. Whether it was walking through one of the many gorgeous Italian alleyways, walking along the ocean, or checking out some of the sights, it was very relaxed and peaceful. There were definitely tourists everywhere, but it didn’t feel overrun or packed. It was nice.
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Just like everywhere in Italy, ruins are not hard to find. A short drive into old town Syracuse took us to an old historical site where many Greek ruins still exist. There were caves, grottos, gardens, and even a giant Greek theater. Much of the historical site was closed off, but we were able to walk around some of the ruins and even into a massive pitch black cave called the “Ear of Dionysius”. I tried to take a picture to show just how big this cave was, but it was, well, dark.
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As our time in Italy was slowly coming to an end, we spent most of our time just relaxing and walking the streets. We made more than a few stops to the gelato shops, visited the Temple of Athena, walked the through the market, and enjoyed the sunsets at a favourite viewpoint. It was great to end the trip without the hustle and bustle of a busy city or packed itinerary of things to do. While at the market, we were told to source out a sandwich shop. Actually, this is going back all the way to Cinque Terra where Massimo (our chef friend from Vernazza) told us to find the sandwich shop for the best sandwiches of your life while we’re in Syracuse.
There are a number of sandwich shops here so we really didn’t know where to go. So, we turned to our trusty Trip Advisor app and wouldn’t you know it, the #1 restaurant in Syracuse was indeed a sandwich shop called Caseificio Borderi. We figured this was the place and made our way over to the market for lunch. I love markets. Walking through seeing all the fresh produce and foods while the stand owners yell out trying to get you to stop by. There is just something about it that I love. Eventually, after we walked through the market, we found a store with a line-up out the door and realized this was the sandwich place we were looking for.
While waiting in line, a guy asks how many you want. There is really only one sandwich to order — you just need to decide if you want a half or a full. Now, these sandwiches are HUGE. I actually forgot to take a picture of it while in my hand, but it was massive. A full sandwich is a large baguette that is probably 18" long. And they stack over 20 different ingredients into this thing. I had to squish the sandwich just to fit in my mouth. A full size easily feeds two people. But hey, it was only €5 (around $8 CAD)! You’d easily be paying $15 for a sandwich this size back home.
The shop really puts a lot of love and care into their sandwiches. True sandwich artists — not like the kind Subway tries to sell you. They’re also entertaining and engage with the customers, make jokes, and take pictures. And oh my god, the ingredients are sooo fresh! All the cheese was made in-house and while waiting in line we were able to sample some. A smart sales move on their part because as soon as you taste some, you know you can’t leave without buying a block of cheese. Or in our case, two. The smoked (yes, smoked) mozzarella was unlike any cheese I’d had before and melted in your mouth with a subtle, but amazing smokey flavour. We bought two blocks of it to take home to share with our friends and family. After getting our sandwiches, we made our way to the oceanside where we sat to enjoy and listen to the waves crash. I could easily spend every afternoon doing that.
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On our last night in Italy, Nicole told me we weren’t allowed to leave without eating in a back alley restaurant and re-creating the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene. You know, the one with the two dogs eating the same piece of spaghetti? I laughed, but she was serious and so we went out looking for a restaurant that would be perfect for setting the scene. It took a little bit and we probably annoyed a couple waiters with our moving of tables and weird requests, but in the end, I love the photo we got and it was all worth it.
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FINAL TRAVEL STATS
Churches: 27
Espressos: 70
Cities: 20
Gelatos: 21
