When members of the Lissandrello family visit Sicily, they usually go to Ragusa where our grandparents came from. When researching places to stay I chose Taormina because it is a smaller city, it looked prettier, and it's closer to the sea. We didn't get as far south as Ragusa, but there was a Ragusa pharmacy in the Duomo Piazza near our villa, so Mark took this photograph for my father:
On Monday we decided to take our rental car and explore the countryside without any particular destination in mind. We discovered that most of the countryside is mountainous, so driving involved a lot more of those hairpin turns. We stopped in the little town of Rangazzo and had more pastries at the Ristretto Bar where the owner boasted that he had the best arancini. We promised to be back for lunch. Then we were off to see more countryside.
We drove to the base of Mount Etna where we saw a lot of black lava which wasn't very picturesque and decided not to drive up the mountain where so many tourists go. We explored a lot of back roads and a mountaintop village, then headed back to Rangazzo for lunch. It was about 1:00 and all of the arancini was gone, so we had to settle for scaccia which was pretty good, too.
We were back in Taormina on time for a siesta before dinner, thinking that we should eat early so we could get good seats at the opera house. As I mentioned in the previous blog, we didn't make it to the opera due to my digestion issues. Which brings me to the topic of Italian toilets and how many of those in public places do not have seats. I will say no more about this, but you can use your imagination when deciding whether or not this is something you want to deal with while subsisting on a diet your system is not used to.
Finding public rest rooms in Italy, with or without seats, can be a challenge. The funniest experience was taking an elevator in a Taormina restaurant to get to the rest rooms in the basement. The elevator was packed with people going to use the facilities, which it turned out consisted of just one stall for each sex. Since there were more women than men in line, some of the women used the men's room. While waiting for the elevator to take us back upstairs, a Dutchman who knew some English, informed the rest of us that he had spotted a camera in the men's stall. What was that about? Maybe another Italian surprise . . . .
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| For Dad |
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| Photographer: Mark VanLaeys |
We were back in Taormina on time for a siesta before dinner, thinking that we should eat early so we could get good seats at the opera house. As I mentioned in the previous blog, we didn't make it to the opera due to my digestion issues. Which brings me to the topic of Italian toilets and how many of those in public places do not have seats. I will say no more about this, but you can use your imagination when deciding whether or not this is something you want to deal with while subsisting on a diet your system is not used to.
Finding public rest rooms in Italy, with or without seats, can be a challenge. The funniest experience was taking an elevator in a Taormina restaurant to get to the rest rooms in the basement. The elevator was packed with people going to use the facilities, which it turned out consisted of just one stall for each sex. Since there were more women than men in line, some of the women used the men's room. While waiting for the elevator to take us back upstairs, a Dutchman who knew some English, informed the rest of us that he had spotted a camera in the men's stall. What was that about? Maybe another Italian surprise . . . .
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