Un'Avventura Siciliane

January 2025

Fab!(io)

I was having a ball in Rome, and it was about to get even fabber.

One late morn I met up with Fabio, an amazing guy I met in Brighton a few weeks ago at Tom and Rosie's place, where he was staying with his partner Hayley. He's a born and bred Roman, and now lives in the countryside, about an hour from the city.

We met up in the city centre, and both immediately said it was such a bummer that Hayley wasn't around to hang out with us too, as she was working in Morocco.

But of course Fabio and I had a great time anyway. We wandered through the streets behind the main railway station, Roma Termini, and he told me a lot about Rome and its history, and what it's actually like to live there.

Like most cities, Rome is virtually unrecognisable to what it was twenty years ago. I myself can vouch for that, as I last visited here 40 years ago. Back then it was a pretty laid back place, considering it was a capital city. Many of the buildings were rundown, and there were few new developments in the city.

This, of course, was before the Euro currency existed, the currency at that time was the Lira, and things were absolutely dirt cheap.

Walking around the city you had to watch yourself, there were holes in the footpaths and lots of obstacles around. People parked absolutely everywhere (actually they still do). Many old buildings had solid wire fences sloping upwards from the walls not too high above the footpath, to catch falling masonry as it crashed down from the deteriorating buildings, rather than have it crush pedestrians' heads.

There was a pretty easygoing nature about the people, which still exists in some places, but excessive wealth and incredibly high numbers of tourists have had the dual effects of hugely pushing up prices, and probably thinning out people's tolerance and hospitality levels.

Mind you, people are still super friendly in this city, especially if you smile. Surprise surprise.

Fabio explained a little about the changing architecture of this part of the city, as we strolled into the district of San Lorenzo.

2025 is the 100 year Jubilee celebration of Rome. As this year approached, the government engaged on a massive building program, to upgrade some of the iconic parts of the city.

The thing is, it's 2025 already, and some of the projects are nowhere near finished. Fabio wasn't surprised at all by this. "That's Italy," he sighed.

Maybe it'll be finished by 2038, someone has suggested...

We went out for a traditional Roman lunch, at a rustic local restaurant in San Lorenzo. The food was amazing.

Gnocchi, pasta, Pecorino and Fabio's wry smile. What else could a young man want?

Oh, well ok, he could also want the most delicious tiramisu in history, served in an old coffee maker.

This is what Romans call a nasoni (big nose), and they're common here. Fresh and good drinking water, in the middle of a massive city. I like that idea.

A bit more of what Rome used to look like.

As we strolled towards the most beautiful cemetery in Rome, the Cimitero Monumentale Del Verano, the flower shops started.

And the tombstone chiselling shops.

This is one of the biggest and oldest cemeteries I've ever visited. It's where all the somebodies are buried, as opposed to the nobodies.

Of course, when they're dead, the somebodies eventually have nobodies anyway, but that's just a technicality.

The monuments to dead people here are grand and super expensive, ironically some could easily house whole families of poor nobodies.

Lord, give me a sign!

Ok, that's a pretty good sign. Look after the earth, it's the only one we've got.

Divine mosaics.

More layered art. I love how the tree reflection outlines the stained glass. I waited hours for this shot.

Well, maybe not hours. But it was at least two seconds, while I swiped my camera on. I'm actually looking through a front glass door into a tomb memorial, and the stained glass window was on the back wall of the small building.

Left: Memorial to war dead. I've seen way too many of these.

Left: Awwww, poor thing. 

Well, poor parents and family I should say.

Fabio told me that this guy's a famous Italian tv personality and comedian.

Right: Born in New York, died in Fiano Romano (a town about 40kms from Rome), in 1901.

Ashes to ashes. The cheapest housing in the whole place.

This is another free water dispenser. You can get either still water or frizzante, the bubbly stuff, which has just the right amount of fizz (not too much).

Rome is columnbia

Cheaply redeveloped old buildings. We're not too far from the main station here, but on the wrong side of the tracks.

Fabio explained to me that this part of Rome was massively bombed during the war. Newly redeveloped buildings have been structurally reinforced quite cheaply, some in a pretty smart way.

Left: A long part of the ancient wall that once surrounded Rome.

Centre: In case you don't know, Antifa is an anti-fascist organisation.

Right: Rome still has some old trams. Cute. Many are new though.

Good to see a woman gracing this poster

"Discover Rome and Smile with the Whole Family!" (In other words, get your wife to somehow run whilst pushing your annoyed toddler daughter in the pram, flash your Colgate smiles, let your fully trained dog run along with you without getting into any skirmishes with other Fun Run dogs that are much larger and more dangerous, and make sure you wait for nonno, because old people are slow and will always be last).

Only joking, hopefully it'll encourage some people to get running.

Fabio and I took a local bus to the coach station, sat across the road for a couple of beeries (Peroni, of course), and then sadly had to say goodbye.

I love the guy. He's warm, sweet, quirky, and so interesting. He thinks (and lives) outside the box.

I really hope I can visit his outside box one day.

But for now it's time to head further south.

Sicily awaits!

Fasting Forward

Life is so bloody hard sometimes.

And sometimes it’s not.

Right now it’s bloody hard.

Nah, only joking, it's a bloody dream right now. Sorry to be so annoying by saying that all the time, but I guess it's better than you having to put up with a constant barrage of complaints.

Yeah, how could it not be good? I’m sitting in a café in one of the outer suburbs of Valletta, Malta, waiting for my little food and drink order to arrive.

It was really hard to decide what to get. Prices are surprisingly cheap here, about a third of the price of Switzerland, and considerably cheaper than Roma. Due to the fact that Malta has to pretty much import everything, I thought things would be prohibitively expensive here.

But there’s pretty much no prohibition here at all, as far as I'm concerned.

Ah, here it is. This is fiorentina, a very traditional Florentine cake, which has a layer of almond flavoured solid custard inside thin layers of sponge. It's delicious.

And the mocchiata is washing it down very well.

But actually, I’m really getting ahead of myself.

First I wanna tell you about my trip to get here, all the way from Roma, a place which somehow already seems like a lifetime away.

From Roma

I guess if all roads lead to Rome, then they all lead away as well.

After spending a beautiful day with Fabio, I made it to the Tiburtina Coach Station. My bus to Catania, in Sicily, was dutifully waiting for me.

And guess who was on the bus? My ex-wife and friend Carmen, and her buddy Claudia, whom Carmen’s known since her nursing days in Germany, and who I’ve also known for many years.

What a fluke!

Nah, not really, meeting them wasn’t a coincidence at all, we’d planned it that way. Our mutual friend Amy from Brighton had generously offered for us to stay in her mum’s apartment here in Valletta, and we decided to travel over together. Lucky us!

Carmen and Claudia plan to leave Valletta in a few days, but I’ll be staying longer.

I said goodbye to Fabio. He’s a beautiful man, and it was really special to spend time with him in his home city of Roma.

As usual, it was another long overnight bus ride, but I slept like a drunk baby. That could have something to do with the fact that I was actually drunk, baby. Well, a little drunk, after Fabio and I drank wines for our late lunch, and farewell beers before I left.

I always make sure to book a window seat on these night bus trips, and I stuff a down vest inside my Romanian furry hat to make quite a comfy little pillow.

I’ve had a bit of experience with overnight buses lately, as you probably know, and now I feel like I've patted it down. And luckily I can sleep pretty much anywhere anyway.

It was dark as the bus left, so unfortunately I didn’t get to see too much of the countryside as we headed south, zipping along the lower front shin of the beautiful country of Italy.

By 5am our bus was on the ferry, sailing the short distance from the mainland town of Villa San Giovanni over to Messina in Sicily. The ferry was pretty dead. Most people stayed on the bus and tried to sleep.

It was a short trip, but not short enough for me not to eat something. I found an apricot jam-filled cornetto (croissant). It was delizioso.

Nearly in Sicilia

Our bus was heading to Catania, a city on the central eastern Sicilian coast, and the second largest city in Sicily (which isn’t saying that much, as Sicily’s not a big or massively urbanised place). The largest city on the island is the capital of Palermo, which sits on the north coast.

Above: The apartmental inner burbs of Catania.

We got out and decided to take another local bus to Siracusa, a large town closer to where our ferry was leaving from, Pozzallo. We’d heard Siracusa was nice.

The location of Catania, on a stone, being kicked by a rotated Italian boot. Italians are really into football.

A few snaps from the bus.

Centre: A weird looking church in Siracusa, this is the Santuario Madonna delle Lacrime, which is quite a fitting name, as the architecture is quite criminal. It actually looks better from further away.

We headed to a park, had some brekky muesli, and strolled off looking for the centro historico, the old town.

Siracusa, and Sicily in general, gets a lot of tourists at certain times of the year. But this isn’t one of those times. There was hardly anyone around. It was really nice.

Centre: This is the remains of an Ancient Greek temple, the Temple of Apollo. There's rather a collection of these in this part of the world.

The old town’s so great. It’s a maze of little alleyways, tiny squares and dead ends, all filled with quirky, quiet and private little apartments, whose outer walls look like they haven’t been renovated for decades.

Or longer.

It’s really beautiful

Eventually we hit the coast, the Adriatic Sea. Across the ocean from here is southern Greece. I hope to travel through there when the weather's a little warmer, insh'Allah.

Eventually it was coffee time.

And bruschetta.

While we were having coffee we met a lovely couple, Antonio, a local, and his Texan (girl?)friend Dianna. Dianna’s lived in Siracusa for three years now, and loves it.

They were super friendly, and chatted all about life here. It seems like a super cruisey place, but they said it can pack out in summer.

Eventually we walked on, and reached the end of the Isola di Ortiggia, the island that the old town sits on, connected to the newer parts of Siracusa by the small bridge that we crossed by the Greek temple.

Right at the headland is the Castello Maniace (the maniac’s castle). Nah, not really, the castle is named after a Greek general, Maniakes, who captured Siracusa from the Arabs in 1038, which eventually helped him to become the Catepan of Italy, meaning he got to rule the whole of southern Italy, pretty much from Naples all the way down.

Imagine, all that free pasta and sweets. And the wine ...

Across the square, and looking out to sea, is the amazing statue of Ikaria Grande, created by the Polish visual artist Igor Miteraj. He's a really famous sculptor in Europe, and his stunning and monumental works grace many cities. I love his stuff, and not only because he's sort of a countryman.

According to the artist, the statue represents the power of women, breaking free of the male grasp, (grope, gaze, whatever - notice the man’s hand around her ankle). Bad luck Jack, she's gone mate.

Of course the statue was inspired by Icarus, the mythological Greek dude who tried to escape from Crete with his dad by attaching waxed wings to his back. Despite his father's warnings, Icarus decided to fly towards the sun, and, predictably, the wax on his wings melted, the feathers fell off, and he plummeted to the sea and drowned.

Blind ambition can be your downfall.

Of course, Ikaria wouldn't do something so silly.

And who should rock up on their bicycles while we were there? Antonio and Dianna! They were sitting a little way away from us, but then we heard the beautiful sound of a flute, and realised it was Antonio. I couldn’t help but go over and ask if I could join in. Our jazz jam was short and very sweet, he’s actually a sax player, but was a bomb on the flute.

Eventually we needed to move, to catch our train further south.

Cutissimo!

So many parts of Siracusa are beautiful.

Portuguese tiling

To Malta

It was eventually time for Carmen, Claudi and I to leave Sicily. There's so much to explore on the island, and I'll be back here later.

We jumped on a train to Pozzallo. But it didn't end up leaving, due to an accident on an intersection up the track. Hmmm. But luckily another one took off about an hour later, and Sicilian Railways gave each of us a carry bag with a bottle of water and a chocolate bar for our troubles. How sicivilised!

German Deutsche Bahn wouldn't dream of doing that.

There's been lots of rain, and the countryside's looking very lush.

Pozzallo railway station and surrounds.

We arrived in Pozzallo, strolled to the coast, had some food, and jumped on the ferry to Valletta, the capital of the independent country of the Republic of Malta.

Bananas, beer, boats

Buon viaggio, bullshit, buggered.

The ferry to Malta was a pretty cruisey ride of only a couple of hours, although Carmen and Claudi weren't fans of the ocean swell, and had to take action to stop themselves from joining the queasy vomiteers on deck.

We had a long walk to Amy's mum's place, made longer by the fact that we mistakenly thought it would only be 20 minutes. I had nothing to do with that miscalculation. Just saying.

Anyway, after what seemed like nearly an hour, we made it.

We have our very own apartment in Malta!

This was my route through Italy this time, from north to south.

Exploring Malta

The apartment's in such a great spot! It has killer views, is close to the action, but not right in it, so it's super quiet.

And there's so much to see in this country.

Over the next few days Carmen, Claudi and I plan to check out not only Valletta, but some of the surrounding towns and islands as well.

We're planning on taking a ferry over to Gozo, the next biggest island in Malta after this one.

Yeah, after loads of moving around it feels so great to be able to chill for a bit. We have the comfort of our own place, getting around here seems to be super easy, and there's so much to check out.

And just to add something special, there's a big religious fiesta coming up in a few days!

Yeah, it's time to check out the unknown wonders of this beautiful island nation❤️

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