Before we left Tre Fontane I had another look at the surroundings. It is the middle of the dry season and the weeds are high and brown. Everything around sicily would look so much better if they had some control over the weeds and rubbish - the roadsides are strewn with plastic bottles, bags and other stuff that blows into heaps and straggles everywhere.. The roads around our accommodation have a clear area for traffic but beyond that the sand drifts are deep enough to bog a car and are worrying when you hit one of them that edges onto the road as there is a momentary loss of control in the loose sand. In short the town looks a little desolate and this is the middle of the holiday season. I imagine it looks like a ghost town in winter.
On the road again our first stop was Valle dei Templi near Agrigenta where we were promised more tmples than we'd see anywhere. We found the entrance to the park, but couldn't see a sign for parking, so after 15 minutes circling we found a back road that led to a chaotic dusty carpark among olive trees with all the first comers parked haphazardly under the trees with awkward manoeuvring room between them to get to the spare spaces. Anyway we wedged ourselves baside a large 4WDfor protection and headed up the hill in soaring temperatures and humidity. An american I met said he had been there 8 years earlier in August and it had been much hotter. The temples are arranged along the top of a ridge with a sheer cliff below them. 3 of them are partially erect and the others are just the foundations. We gather there is not a lot known about the history of the city in Grecian times and their remains have largely been overbuilt by the Romans, Bysantines and Arabs and as a final insult the area was heavily bombed and shelled towards the end of WWII. The first temple at the eastern end (attributed to Juno) has about half the columns standing with a section of the pediment in place. We viewed it from below but decided the sweat to climb up to it was too much so started the walk to the next temple (named Concordia after a Romen inscription found there) which has been almost completely restored. At this point an electric shuttle paused near us and we hopped on to save our legs, but ended up 1 km down the road at another entrance to the park and the site of the third temple which was in ruins.
At this point Gillian had had enough of the heat so rested under a tree while I poked around and puzzled over a twin water channel cut in the rock - was this separated for fresh water and drainage? Or more to the point why did they have a water channel at the top of a hil in a dry area? We started the walk back to Concordia and came across a man lurking behind a parked van selling bottles of ice cold water - hallelujah! He saw that Gillian was suffering from the heat and donated a large chunk of ice to wipe over here face and shoulders to go with the bottle we bought. However as someone official looking buzzed past on a motor scooter the water seller magically disappeared - obviously unofficial.
When we arrived at Concordia access to the immediate area was blocked by preparations for some big event with lighting and sound towers and seating. However we learnt that the temple owed its longevity to a local bishop converting it to a church in the 600's and it had been restored a few times in last 200 years. The building is magnificent and gave us a feeling of the scale of these buildings that the Greeks scattered over most of the then known world. I would love to see one fully roofed as I find it difficult to see how they spanned the space given the technology of the day. I assume they used wooden roofing as I have never seen indications of roof tiles around the sites.
During the Christian era the area was extensively used as a graveyard with shaft burials and burial chambers hewn out of the rock.
We retrieved our car from the olive grove and headed towards Enna where there are Rmon sites including a large villa, but decided we'd had enough of the old stuff for the day and continued following our GPS to Aci Trezza, just north of Catania.
I must at this point comment on the Italian roading system. While the urban roads are diabolical and the small country roads require care and accuracy and good brakes when meeting other traffic, the main roads are astonishing. The regional road we took had viaducts over shallow valleys that made the Newmarket viaduct look like a toy and reaching a town there was a 2km tunnel to avoid the local traffic. When we hit the autostrada the rule was "Do not go around anything, over or under." 10s of km of bridges and tunnels to achieve a high speed route, much of which is under a 50km/h speed restriction which everyone ignores.
Well the GPS did its best but for a start tried to put us on a ferry so we ended up on the wharves and retreated under the watchful eyes of the wharf police. Heading north again a couple of closed roads totally confused the GPS so we ended up squeezing through a another network of narrow Italian suburban streets with little idea of where we were heading. Eventually we found our way to Villa delle Palmes which is located on the main road north along the coast. The village of Aci Trezza Is about 1 km south and is an area of 3 storey buildings crammed around a small harbour that is packed with small boats. This is not the usual scene of boats spaced along a quay - there are a series of rafts of boats tightly tied together to fit in the available area. Our accommodation is a series of 3 apartment blocks, each with around 10 apartments, and a recreation area with a good swimming pool,and a shaded area with table tennins and other amenities. Very pleasant.
Yesterday we decided to look at the east coast and took the autostrada south of Syracsa. Taking a local side road down to the beach we squeezed between high stone walls past substantial life style type houses to the dead end of the road (no turning option) which ended at the top of a cliff. The shoreline here was rocky with a verticl drop to the water of around 10-15 m. After waiting for another car to clear the road we continued on to a recommended beach at Lido di Noto. Alas we had forgotten it was Sunday and there seemed to be no parking available. Eventually someone pulled out and we squeezed or Clio into a space designed for a Bambina. There was a small area of teh beach that was public, but any suitable space was already cover by towels and sun umbrellas. Not daunted we changed and dumped our towels on an area of concrete blocked and walked into the sea. While the beach is narrow and backed by a high concrete retining wall, the sand is good, there was little rubbish and the water was the warmest sea water we have come across yet in our trip - very pleasant. We continued on down to the Isolle de Cossella which is the southernmost point of Sicily. The area around here is absolutely covered in vast arrays of tunnel houses, most of them empty at this time. The scale of the horticulture is astounding. We headed off down one side road past a huge ruin that we assumed had been a monastry as there was a large chapel perched on the second floor level.to find a lagoon populated by flamingos (white not pink) and a pebbly beach with limited access and no more than 10 umbrellas along its 1km length. Continuing to the cape we found a packed beach protected by a small island with a low modern lighthouse.
This morning I heard what sounded like explosions from behind where we are staying and can only assume it is Etna reminding us that it is still there.
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