Enzo and His Hot Love Liqueur

Seven years ago, I immensely enjoyed a dinner at U Bossu, and accordingly gave Enzo's seven-table restaurant on a forgotten Taormina side-street a star rating in the Frommer's guide I was researching at the time.

Enzo was gregarious, friendly, jocular, and overall a genuine impresario for his little trattoria—and the food was fantastic, especially for a moderately cheap joint. At the end of that meal, he had poured me (and everyone else in the place) a shot of a fiery pepperoncino liqueur of his own invention. I love spicy things, and I love sugar, and Enzo's homemade hooch was a perfect marriage of the two tastes. Also, it packed an alcoholic wallop.

Fast forward to last night. As I entered, I saw the little "Recommended by Frommer's" sticker proudly displayed in his window, and gave a little smile, wishing I could tell him who I was and why he had so deserved that stamp of approval. Instead, I just dug into my dinner with relish, delighted that the food was as excellent as always--tagliatelle alla mafiosa (egg noodles made fresh that morning topped with a ragù of pistachios, tomatoes, cream, pancetta bacon, and mushrooms) and cartoccio di spigola allo scoglio (buttery sea bass baked in tin foil along with a handful of mussels)--and that Enzo was still a great character, endlessly entertaining to his few guests.

The pair of English ladies talking in low voices by the wall looked a bit taken aback at and overwhelmed by Enzo's gregariousness, but the Irish couple sitting behind me, who had eaten here every night of their holiday so far, thought he was a hoot. They shared with me their belief that our host looked like an Italian version of George W. Bush. Enzo made a sour face when he overheard that, but I had to agree there was a resemblance, and had trouble from then on shaking the image of Bush, with a tan and a little paper hat, speaking English in an Italian accent so heavy it was almost comical. When two young Dutchmen strode in, Enzo grinned widely and held out both arms "Welcome back!" then made a show of looking anxiously behind them. "But where are your girlfriends tonight?" When the pair explained that the women were off "For a ladies' night, without us boys." Enzo winked and said, "That's OK. We can have fun on our own. Sit here, I bring you good wine." And he hustled back to the kitchen.

At the end of the meal, Enzo asked if I would like an almond-flavored digestivo. Now, when I had arrived at the restaurant, Enzo had asked how I found his phone number (as I had booked ahead). I told him that he had provided me with a memorable dinner in the summer of 1998, and I'd always planned on coming back. So when he asked me about a digestivo, I said I recalled he had served me a fantastic liqueur of pepperoncino before, and could I please have that?

Enzo stared at me for a moment, bemused, then sighed. "Ah! My great failure." He smiled wanly, said, "Just a moment," and went to the little desk to rummage around under stacks of paper. He returned with a coated, unfolded paper brochure for his Liquore di Venere, and explained how he had tried to make a go of it.

In 1993, when he was still working as a chef in someone else's restaurant, Enzo thought a digestivo as fiery hot as Etna looming in the distance might prove popular. He admitted to knowing nothing of liqueur-making, or even really of basic chemistry, and so went through a lot of failed batches of moonshine before finally hitting on a method for distilling an essence of pepperoncino, mixing that into a sugary syrup, then marrying it all to a liquor base.

At first he served the stuff to patrons at his employer's restaurant as a "digestivo artigianale." By 1995, he had opened up U Bossu--dialect for "The Boss," which he finally was (though he jokingly calls himself little more than a "plate-ferrier," carrying dishes from the kitchen to the tables and back)--and decided to try and make a success of his invention. He picked out bottles, had labels designed and printed, and sent a sample of his liqueur (along with reams of paperwork) to the official governmental body in Rome that regulates such things.

Then, since moonshine is illegal everywhere, he had to have an official distillery to produce it. Since starting one from scratch would take far more money, time, resources, and--most significantly--paperwork than he could handle, it was far easier simply to buy a distillery that already existed on paper but wasn't actually in business. (The sheer bureaucratic inertia of the Italian regulatory systems makes such seemingly oddball solutions far easier than just going about things in a straightforward way.)

So, Enzo ran his new restaurant, and he made his Liquore di Venere, named for the kind of burning desire the Goddess of Love could instill in mortal man. He served the digestivo to all his customers, who were generally delighted and would often buy a bottle to take home. Selling the odd bottle to a patron, however, wasn't going to pay the bills--especially since most of the time Enzo would refuse to accept payment, and usually ended up just giving the bottle as a gift, insisting that the customer had already paid him "With excellent conversation." I know, because that's how I ended up taking home a bottle seven years ago. But the testimony of a few satisfied restaurant customers (not even those who would go on to encourage their guidebook readers to sample the stuff) were not going to be enough to turn Enzo and his liqueur into the success he was sure was in the cards. "Cinzano. Martini & Rossi. They all started as just one man with a recipe. Now look at them! Why not me?"

Enzo started sending letters and making phone calls. He contacted every liquor label and company he could think of. No one was interested in distributing a single item from a lone producer in limited quantities. He told them, no problem: he could make more. They all said, essentially, no thanks. They didn't really want to work with an outside producer.

Eventually, about a decade after perfecting his formula, Enzo finally gave up. He started serving a mass-produced almond liqueur from Marsala to his restaurant patrons as the digestivo he always offers "on the house" along with the bill.

"I still have three or four crates of the Venere at home." He said, and for the first time all night he looked sad--not the sad-sack act he puts on when moaning that he's nothing more than a glorified "plate-ferrier," but genuinely defeated. "I give bottles away as gifts, sometimes. I open one or two for special occasions at home. But in the restaurant, it's just the almond liqueur now."

He walked over to fetch a bottle of that and poured me a small glassful. I weakly said something about how unfortunate it was about the Liquore di Venere, because it really was a fine digestivo. "Eh, si." He said, with downcast eyes. "I was going to have great success with that." He looked up at me and smiled bitterly. "It was good! It should have been a success. The liquore would become famous, and I would have been rich."

It was late. The restaurant was empty of other patrons by then, and I was feeling downright awful having inadvertently re-opened what was clearly a painful wound. I tossed back the bitter almond liqueur, and stood up to leave Enzo and his cook to clean up and head home for the night. "Beh,' buona sera and thanks for another excellent meal." I said, sticking out my hand to shake Enzo's. He shook the vague cast of sorrow off his face, and beamed at me. "Tell you what." He said, taking my hand firmly and not letting go after the standard pump-and-a-half. "I'm back here around eleven in the morning, to do the shopping and get ready for lunch. Stop by around 11am tomorrow, and I'll bring a bottle of the Venere for you." Then he let go of my hand.

So, the next morning, I went by U Bossu. Enzo was bustling about in his little paper hat; though the open window to the kitchen I could see the taciturn chef chopping things up. Enzo smiled when he saw me and shuffled into the dining rooms, pausing to take a bottle from the desk covered with stacks of paper. In the clear liquid floated a hot pepper bleached white by time and long exposure to alcohol. Enzo dusted the bottle off with his apron before handing it to me.

"Liquore di Venere," he said with a flourish. "I hope you enjoy it!" I could tell he meant it.

And, just like before, Enzo refused to let me pay.

Jane Eyre, Forbidden Love, and the British Dukedom in Sicily

The old inland SS 120 used to be the only road from Sicily's east coast to Palermo until the Autostrada from Messina was built along the island's north shore. It wraps around the north side of Mt. Etna, passing the bushy grapevines that thrive in the volcanic soils and a number of small towns whose crumbling castles and thriving little medieval centers are a reminder that, though now an agricultural backwater, this used to be a main highway through an empire.

Exactly whose empire we're talking about has changed repeatedly.

Just in the past 2,800 years or so, Sicily has variously belonged to the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish Bourbons, French Angevins, and--only since Garibaldi landed at Marsala in 1861 to start the Savoy King Vittorio Emanuele's conquest of the peninsula--the Italians. Also, just in this one forgotten corner of the island, for a time, technically it was part of the British Empire as well. Well, a Dukedom, really. One belonging to, of all people, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.

The forests through which I was passing, which were blocking the sun from drying out my passport on the dash, lay on the edge of the Duchy of Bronte, a realm which was based around the town of Bronte (famous for producing the best pistachios in Europe) but which was ruled from the Castello di Mainace, a good ways north of town in the forest.

The castle was named for the Byzantine general Geroge Maniakes, who fought the Arabs in Sicily, won a decisive battle here, and founded the castle in 1040 on the site of an Arab fortification. In 1173 the place was turned into a monastery, which tumbled down (along with most of the rest of eastern Sicily) in the massive earthquake of 1693. A century later, the castle was rebuilt, and these days it mostly goes by the name "Castello di Neslon."

Here's how that went down.

In 1799, the Spanish Bourbons--monarchs over The Two Sicilies--had been forced out of Sicily #1 (Naples) by Napoleon, and had taken refuge in Sicily #2 (Palermo). King Ferdinand wanted Sicily #1 back (my guess: because of the mozzarella), so he looked for outside aid to help slow the juggernaut that was the Napoleonic army.

The British counsel in Palermo at the time was able to secure the services of their Admiral Nelson to lead his fleet against the French (something he was to prove incredibly good at) and drive them away from the interests of the Bourbons. The reason the consul was able to convince Nelson into the fray had nothing whatsoever to do with his talents as a diplomat, and everything to do with the fact that he was Lord Hamilton. Lord Hamilton's wife was Lady Hamilton, and Lady Hamilton was Horatio Nelson's lover.

In gratitude for chasing off the French, Ferdinand gave Nelson the Dukedom of Bronte, which included this castle and estate. This royally granted British fiefdom in sun-drenched Sicily gained a measure of fame back home at the time. One rabid fan of Nelson's, a certain Reverend Patrick Prunty, went so far as the change his last name to Bronte--only he added an umlaut over the "o," for reasons clear only to himself--and passed along the new surname to his bookish daughters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.

Officially, Nelson never even set foot in his Sicilian castle. Unofficially, however, he just may have spent here the happiest days of his life. Voices whisper that Nelson consummated his tryst with the Lady Hamilton here, in the Castello Mainace, and that this is where they conceived their illegitimate daughter, Horatia.

Whatever the case, the bliss was short-lived. Nelson had his fleet to command, and within four years, he heroically lost his life--yet again besting Napoleon--at the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Sicilian estate passed to his brother, William. Lady Hamilton and Horatia fared even worse.

In that era, even when a hero as great as Nelson was involved, the scandal of such a relationship with another gentleman's wife was utterly unacceptable to British society. In the end, Lady Hamilton was reduced to serving as a maid back in London, where she died destitute. The bastard daughter Horatia descended into poverty as well, and disappeared from history.

Castello Mainace, however, stayed in the family of Nelson's brother, and was passed down to his niece Charlotte, who married the Baron Bridsport. The Bridsports held onto the joint all the way up until the land reforms of the 1960s did away with noble holdings. By 1981, everything but the little English cemetery across the road became the provenance of the local comune, which has set it up as a museum to the distinguished Nelsonian connection.

The most interesting item in display in the upstairs living quarters, isn't the lovely tilework on the floors or the period furnishings behind velvet ropes, nor is it portrait of the petulant teenage Bridsport who served as the last Duke of Bronte, nor even the engraving, signed by both men, commemorating the only meeting, in early September 1804, between Nelson and Arthur Wellesley (this was five years before Wellesley was elevated to "Viscount Wellington," and ten years before he got bumped up to "Duke").

No, the most interesting artifact on display was a set of crystal: a wine carafe and two glasses set into a wooden base, with little metal clamps that swiveled over the foot of each glass designed to keep it steady and in place as the ship pitches and yaws. It was the drinking set the Admiral used onboard his ship just before the phyrric victory at Trafalgar.

It was this everyday item, a token of the nuance of Nelson's shipboard life, which struck me the most. The idea that the Admiral might have done something as gloriously mundane as enjoy an aperitif before the fateful battle sat well with me, and it reminded me of Enzo and his fiery Liqueur of Love. But that tale will have to wit until the next post.

All Wet

I am staring at the reflection of my passport photo in the windshield. I'm on a road winding through the forested northwest slopes of Mt. Etna, and every time I pass from the treeshade to the sunlight on a curve, there it is: my face, with a silly grin; my signature, in Sharpie; the bold words USA (in frills), PHILADELPHIA (where I was born) and New Orleans (where the thing was issued, but which European hotel clerks always assume indicates where I live, so that's what they write on the check-in form I have to sign).

My passport is there, up on the dashboard, staring at me accusingly, because it needs to dry out. It needs to dry out because I took it swimming with me this morning, breaking a half-dozen of my own iron-clad travel rules in the process.

As my Brazilian friend Daniel would say: lemme 'splain.

When I left Taormina this morning town, I followed the same twisting road winding down to Giardini Naxos that Jay and took on scooters seven years ago (on which ride, if I recall correctly, I bent my right thumbnail back almost in half flicking the starter, which still ranks as my one and only scooter-related injury). I followed the valley of the Alcantara Torrent inland to the point at which it issued from the tall, narrow basalt walls of the Gola di Alcantara, which means Alcantara Gorge but actually translates literally (and more poetically) as the "Throat of Alcantara."

South of the Taormina promontory, all of Sicily is Etna-formed territory, and the Throat of Alcantara is one of its most striking features. The volcanic basalt here cooled into long, geometric columns ranging from pentagons to octagons -- geological cousins to Giant's Causeway in Ireland and Devil's Tower in the States -- all fitted together in giant woodstacks and pipe organs. These formations have subsequently been lifted, twisted, and turned by volcanic convulsions, carved into a narrow, twisting slot of a valley by the Alcantara, and polished to a smoothed, gleaming leaden gray by millennia of water flow.

The effect is remarkable, and in the wide valley floor where the close walls of the Throat open up, allowing the Alcantara to braid itself into several streams rushing around low, pebbly island flats, Italians by the dozen were strewn out, raisining themselves. Their kids, too impatient to lie there roasting for hours on end, were splashing in the shallows or wading up to the opening of the Throat, where the water swirled above their heads in a deeper pool and they could haul themselves up onto some rocks and challenge each other to jump in.

I, of course, stripped off my shoes and socks, zipped off the legs of my convertible pants (momentarily becoming more interesting than their sunbathing to the surrounding Italians), undid my belt with the camera bag on it and slung it over my head and one arm like a bandoliero, emptied my pockets of cell phone, wallet, and change and stuffed them into my shoulder bag along with the pants legs, took my shoes in one hand, and started wading across to the far shore of the braided streams and as close to the Throat as the dry land went. There, under a scrubby tree, I broke another major travel rule. I put down my shoulder bag -- which contained several thousand dollars worth of electronics, my irreplaceable notebook, and various and sundry other items -- took off my shirt and left it on top, and then walked away from it all, around a corner and well out of view.

I waded into the deep pool at the Throat, holding my camera bag and belt way up over my head, and sort of breast stroked/doggy paddled to the slick rocks at the entry to the gorge. One of the Italian kids, a morbidly obese little guy of about 11 called Tancredi (it's nice to know that some names from Sicily's early medieval Norman dynasty survive down to today), saw me and called down for me to hand up my camera to him so I could use both hands to scramble up the slippery rocks.

I thanked the kids, left them to dare one another to jump off the rocks, and continued wading up the now much deeper waters inside the Throat, taking pictures and fretting endlessly about the camera over my head and the unattended bag way back on the beach. I got several hundred yards in, just before the turn where the Alcantara rushes down over a series of waterfall rapids, when it became too deep to go any further--not to mention too cold. Tancredi had told me the water temperature was about 14 degrees (57 degrees Farenheit). "In the afternoon, it gets as high as 16 degrees, but now, it's about 14. Maybe even 13!"

By the time I got back, it was getting on lunchtime. The little pebbly beachlets were clearing out, and the kids were gone. I managed to slither down the rocks, swim/wade back to dry land, and located my (thoroughly unmolested) bag. In wading back across the stream braids to the far shore -- at some point I had lost my Molefoam, and the sharp river pebbles were murdering my heel blister -- I even managed to find a nice souvenir stone with just the right leaden color and smoothed geometric form to recall the geology of the gorge. I sat on a rock to dry out a bit, reassembled my pants and footwear, and hobbled back up the trail to the cafe-cum-car park at the lip of the valley.

It was when I went to the bathroom and unzipped my fly that I realized there was one precious item I had not left unattended in my bag on the beach. My moneybelt was still safely clamped around my waist under my clothes, and it was dripping wet. Inside it was a small Ziploc-type (and, apparently, not waterproof) baggie filled with folded-up twenty-dollar bills, and a soggy, lumpy roll of some kind of cardboard that turned out to be my passport. Cursing, I took it out, flattened it as best I could, and placed it on my dashboard when I got back in the car to hit the SS 120, the old back road towards Cefalù.

Breaking the Rules and Wasting a Morning in Taormina

I must be seriously out of shape, mentally. This trip started with me breaking a trio of travel rules right off the bat: (1) I picked up a rental car at the airport (which always incurs an extra fee), (2) merely to drive it into downtown Palermo (never drive in a city--especially not an Italian city; and especially not a Southern Italian city--if you can avoid it), and then (3) paid for it to sit, parked, for two days whilst I traipsed about town on foot and by bus (always pick up the rental on the day you leave the first big city on the trip, that way you avoid paying for those few days of a needless rental, for the parking, and for that airport pick-up fee).

Another disturbing indication of my mental flabbiness occurred during the drive from Palermo's Punta Raisi Airport--now renamed (though not all road signs have got the memo) Aeroporto Falcone-Borsellino after the two crusading anti-mafia magistrates assassinated in the early 1990s. During the ride, I started getting really aggravated about all the slow, timid, and downright stupid drivers all around me. It was while I was accelerating to weave through the traffic, throwing Italian invectives and complicated hand gestures at other drivers, that I realized what was wrong with this scenario. One does not find European drivers to be slow and timid--especially not Italian drivers, and especially not Southern Italian ones.

That was all a week ago, when I first arrived in Sicily. Yet my mind has still, apparently, not gotten itself back into whack. I managed to infringe upon yet another travel rule before I even woke up this morning. Yesterday, when I checked into the Villa Gaia in Taormina, I asked the hotel clerk if there was anything exciting going on in town--concerts, spectacles, or simply anything new to see or do that hadn't been available seven years ago on my last trip here.

Turns out that, as with all the other ancient Greek theaters in Sicily that have been rehabilitated (and spoiled, visually, with ranks of aluminum risers where the stone seats have crumbled away) to serve as summertime stages for all sorts of entertainments, I managed to pick the one week out of the whole summer during which every single one of them is "between series."

Segesta had just finished a run of classical Greek plays and was gearing up to start classical concerts next week; Siracusa was taking a breather between experimental modern theater and a schedule of ancient dramas; and Taormina had just ended one set of theater and art shows and now had a team of workmen scurrying around trying to turn the 2,500-year-old Sicilian stage into a sheet of ice (on the day when local temps hit 100 degrees) for a revue of skating prowess that was to take place two days hence, which was to be followed the next day by a concert by Diana Ross (whether or not the Supreme would also be required to wear ice skates was not clear).

At any rate, I was out of luck in terms of actually getting some use out of the visual eye sores represented by the intrusion into these glorious ancient spaces of modern seats and scaffolding-pipe erector sets serving as grandstands and to hold lighting arrays. However, the hotel clerk told me, Isola Bella was now open to the public. I had only ever been able to admire from afar this tiny, gardened islet cupped in one of the pocket-sized swimming bays on the coast below Taormina's promontory. Yes, the clerk said, this summer they were ferrying the public to the island on tours at 10am and 3:30pm every day. I knew I had to take off next morning (in order to go swimming with my passport, then drive to Cefalù), but this sounded like a worthy diversion, so when she asked if I'd like for her to call and book me a spot for the next morning, I said sure.

Travel rule: Never rely on a hotel clerk to provide some service you can do perfectly well on your own. At worst, the clerk's going to turn out to be all rotted out underneath the smiles and language of deference and will end up scamming you into something shoddy and at an immense profit to themselves. At best, you're relying on someone else's ability to recall a passing promise made to some stranger from New Orleans they're trying to get to sign the check-in register so they can go back outside and finish that cigarette your arrival interrupted.

What I got was the "at best."

I duly slept in a bit later than I had planned to do when I had planned on an early start. I took breakfast in the garden, where I taught an older American woman sitting near me to ask for "Hag" if she wanted a decaffeinated espresso. Then I watched in horror as a newly-arrived middle-aged Australian man abused first his girlfriend, who showed up a few minutes after he did, then was nasty to the hotel clerk and ordered her to take away the "nasty pastries" and go inside and bring him some sliced bread instead--"Can you do that, d'ya think?" he sneered--which he proceeded to slather with avocado and slices of raw tomato he produced from a plastic shopping bag. He then ordering the clerk back inside to bring him a phone, whereupon he called his boss (who was apparently staying down in the beachside resort community of Giardini-Naxos) and suddenly turned all oily sycophancy, bitching crudely about this "god-awful little town" and eagerly arranging to go down to Giardini-Naxos to see the boss's hotel and make arrangements to stay there instead.

In the face of his maltreatment, I put off bothering the put-upon clerk about my Isola Bella arrangements until about 9:15, at which point I inquired politely. She blanched, said "Scusi!" and dashed back inside. A minute later, she returned, apologizing that it was no longer possible to take the 10am tour, as I would have already had to have left to take the gondola down to the beach. "Do you want to do the one at 15:30?" I sighed inwardly, smiled outwardly, and said "No. Unfortunately, I have to get on down the road."

Still I tarried in town (more on that in a moment), and spent 45 enjoyable minutes wandering the back streets where Taormina's annoying, polished resort air falls away. Laundry flaps on balconies, street corner shrines support tiny vases of dried flowers, and an itinerant fruttivendolo (fruit and veggie seller) operates out of the bed of a teensy three-wheeled ApeCar pickup, selling his produce to a small clump of local ladies of a certain age and with each sale gallantly offering to carry her purchases back to her house.

The Madonna of Tears

This is the story of the Madonna della Lacrime, the Madonna of Tears. A Siracusan family buys a little factory-made plaster plaque-relief of the Madonna back in 1953. They hang it on the wall.

The next morning the husband goes off to work, after which the gypsum Madonna image starts crying, at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Wife calls husband. He comes home. They marvel at the thing, a bit scared, and try to figure out what to do.

Relatives they call start coming over to see it and confer.

Then neighbors start arriving to see the miraculous Madonna (that'll teach them to reveal secrets to nosy Sicilian relatives).

Then strangers start showing up at the door.

You can see where this is heading.

Within days, hordes are descending on the residential block in Siracusa. The family lets them troop through their modest living room, pray, and tramp out the back door. The local top prelate, at a loss for how to call this one (genuine miracles in this century have been few and far between), starts making phone calls. The town doctor and local pharmacist show up as representatives of the world of detached authority figures.

The pharmacist performs perhaps the most common scientific test known and announces that the water leaking from the Madonna's eyes tastes just like human tears. (Careful kids, don't try this at home. It takes years of pharmacology training in order to know how to lick salt water off a chunk of plaster.) On the third day, a scientific team arrives in time to take samples of the last tears to flow down the plaster Madonna's cheek. She stops weeping at 11:40 a.m. on September 1, 1953.

The samples turn out to have the exact chemical composition of human tears, and basic chemistry precludes that either gypsum or the paint on the relief could have produced such a liquid. No longer weeping, the Madonna proceeds to perform a whole passel of miracles of the curing-the-blind and healing-the-maimed variety.

The little mass-produced plaque is quickly proclaimed a holy, miraculous relic and Siracusa sets about building the requisite God-awful enormous church to house it, across the street from the archeological museum. Recently completed, the oversized shrine resembles nothing so much a giant alien badminton birdie that landed out of bounds smack on a site that turned out to be, as they dug the foundations, a temple to Demter and Kore/Persephone, Sicily's oldest goddesses (lots of ancient devotional statuettes for the Archaeology museum).

I, until this morning ignorant of all this history but knowing vaguely that some Big Time miracle thingy from the 50s was cooling its holy heels in that skyline-defining ice cream cone structure, decided to stop by this morning on my way to the San Giovanni catacombs.

If you will kindly recall from a few paragraphs ago, the Madonna of the Tears started weeping at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Today is Aug 29.

I showed up at the church around 9am, and ran headlong into the Mass celebrating the exact moment of the 45th anniversary of the miracle. The miraculous Madonna plaque itself was in attendance, looking kind of funny and out of place. Up at the altar was this itty bitty kitschy Christian cast-off, mass produced to be placed above the mantle of people who are just a little too religious.

And here it was, surrounded by legions of the faithful in a structure built for it alone and that clearly follows the architectural premise that if you pile cement high enough into the sky, God will notice. There were grown-ups dressed like ersatz cub scouts passing 'round the collection plates. Throngs filled the church. People wiped their hands down their faces repeatedly as they prayed and moaned. Weird weird weird.

Later, I got to voice my discontent at the archaeology museum. After going through what I could tell were normally some of the best collections in all of Italy of prehistoric and Greek-era artifacts, I approached the guest book, which invited me to leave comments. So I told it that a museum which has loaned almost every single major piece in its collections out to special exhibits elsewhere and has stuck in their places just photographs has no right to charge the full admission price. I could even cite you the (more conscientious) Italian precedent of the archaeology museum in Taranto, Apulia, which is currently charging half price since half the galleries are closed for rearrangement.

I spent the later afternoon tramping about the Siracusan farmland, bushwhacking through reeds and Dr. Seussian papyrus plants, fording streams, jogging down the middle of railroad tracks, and broad-jumping over irrigation ditches in what turned out to be a two-hour fruitless attempt to follow the Ciane River all the way to it's source. The source is called the Fonte Ciane, where the nymph Cyane — who rooted for Persephone during her the abduction by Hades — was turned into this very stream by the angry underworld god. Either that, or (other myths say) it's where Pluto plunged back into the ground to take his newly acquired bride back to hell after bursting out way up in Lake Pergusa near Enna and grabbing up Kore as she picked flowers.

(Siracusa is full of these things; down near the docks on Ortigia, the island core of the city, is a very pretty little natural fountain and pond planted with papyrus and swimming with ducks. It was formed, so they say, when, way back in the Peleponesse, the nymph Arethusa was bathing in the river governed by Alpheus, and the River God took a liking to her. As he grabbed her by the hair an began trying to rape her, she pleaded for mercy and Artemis heard her. In pity, Artemis turned Arethusa into a spring, and the nymph plunged underground, racing away from her captor.

Alpheus, not to be deterred, took on watery form himself and followed her under the earth. When Arethusa burst back above ground, she had made it all the way under the Mediterranean and popped out here in Siracusa, gushing from a grotto as she still does today. Alpseus was hot on her heels though, and he swiftly came flowing out of the grotto too, mingling his waters with her for eternity. This, to the Greeks, was romance. They used to think if you tossed a chalice into the river Alpehus in Greece it would eventually come bobbing up in this pond in Sicily.)

But anyway, back to other watery nymphs and the Ciane, all this tramping around activity only served to bring back my chronic heat rash with a vengeance, so I am hobbling around again, experiencing both intense pain and embarrassment simultaneously. Back at my hell-tel and after a welcome shower in a bathroom I survived only by shutting my eyes to the squalor, I returned to my room to regroup my energies and clamp a freezing bottle of Gatorade between my thighs in an attempt to find some rash relief (this was an extraordinarily delicate procedure, requiring me to ice certain parts of that general region while keeping other, neighboring bits of my anatomy from any contact whatsoever with the icy glass, for obvious reasons).

I got in free, thanks to the nice tourist office lady, to a show tonight in a medieval church with no roof but lots of hibiscus and flowering vines spilling off the wall tops and down the columns of the nave open to the stars. The entertainment consisted of an actor performing monologues from various Shakespeare plays, then a baritone (accompanied by piano) singing the operatic version of the same scene from operas by Verdi and other based on the plays. Interesting concept; it was weird to hear Shakespeare in Italian—odder still that Shakespeare, even in foreign lands and languages, is often considered perhaps the greatest playwright of all time.

Had a late dinner of pizzas named after biblical characters under dwarf palm trees, and a small beer at a pub while I compose this message. I think I am now sufficiently tired be able to return to my hotel room and fall asleep quickly so as not to spend much time conscious in that skanky place. Tomorrow morning I transfer to what can only be happier quarters.

Copyright © 1998 by Reid Bramblett