Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 5-11: Catania, Syracuse, Syracuse again, Palermo, Segesta, Agrigento, Selinunte

Dear readers,

I have fallen farther behind on my blog than I would ever have believed possible. I missed one post, then a second, and, pretty soon, updating it had become a millstone around my neck, and I decided to put it off indefinitely. I am now relaxing, past midnight, in my hotel in Salerno, and I am not likely to feel tired anytime soon (On the one hand, I should not stay up this late in front of my computer; on the other, I would not have been able to fall asleep knowing that I had unfinished work to do.). I have pages of notes to sift through. I am going to dive into this and see what happens.

(I am not looking forward to having to put up photos for the actual blog.)

I left off, as an earlier version of this blog post read, with my arrival in Angers. I was reflecting that one can be only twenty kilometers from one's destination, seemingly close enough to touch it, and yet almost infinitely far away from it. It occurred to me how hard it would be to get to the North Shore mountains without a car. Travel away from cities can be difficult. Sicily is not the only place with public transport problems--or, rather, it might be unfair to expect that one be able to take buses everywhere.

I have gotten ahead of myself, though, confusing the bad transport in Sicily with that around Angers. I arrived in Catania reasonably awake and was rudely introduced to Italy: people pushed, shoved, cut in line, and kicked my suitcase—they reminded me of Russians. I looked around me and asked a greying man something in French, and, when he responded in fully fluent French, it was as though I were looking at a setting sun. I sadly reflected that I would be spending the next month-and-a-half amongst gibbering savages.

I perked up when I was given a tourist map and learned that it would only cost four Euros to take the bus into town. The air was warm but light, and it had a sort of misty clarity, like the air in a church when the light hits it; Mount Etna was pale blue in the distance. I got a ticket and tried to help a French family that was trying to talk to the driver in Italian. “I will translate,” I said to them and gallantly got my phrasebook out, struggling through a few words and eventually telling them what they already knew.

I did not really feel that I was in Italy until we started moving. Almost as soon as we left the airport, we went around a roundabout with a small red airplane, seemingly a model from World War II, framed in the middle of it. We passed alleys of palm trees, eucalpyts, and other trees that I could not name—Sicily would be a botanist’s dream. When we reached the outskirts of Catania, we started to pass statue after statue of Jesus Christ—I wondered if the Italians were intentionally satirizing themselves. We started to pass domed churches and block after block of brown and yellow stucco buildings with cast iron balconies draped in drying clothes—the Italians were into monotonous architecture. At one point I glimpsed a Roman amphitheatre through a side lane—it looked like an elephant seal amidst a bunch of flamingos that wondered how it had gotten there. After a few more minutes we passed through a security checkpoint manned by armed guards and stopped at the bus “station.”

The bus station was a huge crowd of buses milling this way and that with no apparent sense of where they were. There were crosswalks for getting across the street, but the Italians acted as though they did not exist, so that the only practical way of crossing the street was to step into it, see if the car coming toward one was actually likely to hit one, and then run across. The environs of the bus station were dusty, full of half-finished construction projects, houses with boarded-up windows, and graffiti-covered walls. Nobody in the whole of Sicily seemed to have a job: groups of three or four men sat outside cafes, old women leaned out of their balconies and surveyed the passing scene, and scores of African migrants wandered at random or huddled together in clusters on the sidewalk; Italians, I discovered, take their ghettos very, very seriously.

Once I had checked into my hostel, the first order of business was to get something to eat, as I was starving. On the advice of the hostel owner, I went to a nearby bakery, where I got enough bread and cheese for the rest of the day for only two Euros (more on Italian cuisine later). I then stopped at a grocery store to get some fruit or juice. I do not remember much of the shop itself except that it was small and that most of its space was taken up by a folding metal ladder and the owner’s motorcycle. I got a carton of juice, blew the dust off of it, and hoped not to die. Both the storeowner and the baker were accommodating of my efforts to speak Italian.

My next stop was a little bar-bakery combination, where I got an arancini, which is a fried ball of rice, cheese, and various fruits and vegetables (kind of like a samosa); I had a few of these over the next few days, then quit eating them because of my diet. The store owner was a heavy, older, nonchalant man; he was smoking some sort of flavored tobacco behind the bar. When I left his shop, he came running out, shouting “Mister! Mister!” It turned out that I had forgotten my map there. I decided that Italian people were not all bad.

I quickly reversed this decision on my way to the bus station. There were cars parked two deep, in the middle of the street, literally bumper-to-bumper, and on sidewalks; I would learn, over the coming days, that Italians treat stop signs as suggestions and even drive on sidewalks and pedestrian zones. I struggled across the street, got to the bus station, and spent the next several minutes trying to determine where exactly I could get bus tickets. A couple of guys pointed me some ways off, and, when I did not believe them, one man, who spoke some English, told me in exactly which building to look. It looked like an apartment building, perhaps seven storeys tall. He told me that the bus station would be on the first floor.

I made it to the building, eventually—it was several blocks from any actual buses (you could not, of course, buy tickets in the buses themselves) and blocked by construction work; it was where you would expect a run-down video store or Subway to be. When the woman at the counter discovered that I did not speak Italian, she waved the next customer over and ignored me for several minutes. I got out my phrasebook and managed to communicate that I wanted to go to Taormina and Syracuse over the next couple of days. Could I buy tickets in advance? The lady burst out laughing. “No tickets today,” she said. “You go tomorrow, you buy tomorrow.” She gave me a schedule for buses to Taormina, and, when I asked her for a schedule for buses to Syracuse, she again cracked up. Buses for Syracuse came at ten minutes after the hour, she said. She did not know what tickets cost.

I spent the rest of the day wandering through Catania my overall impression was one of abject, crushing poverty. Nobody seemed to have a job. There were no signs of industry or services, and the city stank of urine. The only things that Italians seemed to take seriously were their churches, which did not even knell on the hour, and their food, which, again, I will explain later. If the Italians put a tenth as much effort into developing an infrastructure, some sanitation, and an economy of some sort as they put into their churches, they might begin to have a functioning society.

I remember passing through some markets and skipping out on the fruit for fear of being poisoned. I stopped by a castle that was holding a display of Pablo Picasso’s work, which I skipped, partly because I think that it is important to pick one’s spots when spending money abroad so that it not flow out of one’s pockets in cataracts, and partly because I am not much interested in Pablo Picasso’s artwork. As I understand it, he painted lots of pictures universally recognized as brilliant, but he mostly struck me as a nutter and a misogynist, and I did not know what looking at his paintings would tell me about the world. I returned to the hostel to rest and, probably, failed to do any writing, which is why I fell so far behind on this blog to begin with.

That night I met a man from Syracuse who had moved to Munich several years previously and settled there. We had an odd sort of conversation. He was visiting Sicily, I gathered, for a vacation because it was so cheap. He told me, tracing out the numbers on his fingers and pronouncing them in a mixture of Italian, English, and German, how much his pension somewhere in the mountains would cost, how long he was going to be there for, how much elevation gain the hike had, and how high the funicular went, by comparison; when I asked him if he missed Sicily, he shook his head vigorously. “Chaos,” he kept saying, pronouncing the word, one presumes, as in the original Greece. “Mountains—good. Sea—good. Nature—good. People—he held his finger up and paused—not good.” He showed me a basalt rock that he had taken from Mount Etna and stepped out to have a smoke, and we went to bed.

When I got to the bus ticket office—not the station—the next morning, I learned that I had been given the wrong schedule the previous day and that buses for Syracuse left on the half-hour. As we started to leave the city, we passed some spectacular statuary, and it struck me that Sicily was a 15th-century society with certain vestiges of 20th-century technology, like cars. It had plaques on the walls of certain buildings telling of important historical events or people who had lived there, like in Europe proper, but people were bathing in a fountain near the city center. On my way to the bus station, I had lean a line of men leaning against a wall, their arms wrapped around their knees; one of them was shaving another, who appeared to have a bottle of toothpaste at his feet. I had also seen a bus come to a stop in the middle of the street to let passengers on and off despite the presence of an actual bus stop, which flummoxed me until I saw another car, a second later, pull into the bus stop proper and park. The law of the road here is that the more aggressive driver wins. This was most apparent at roundabouts, when the bus slowed enough that I could get a good view of what was going on around it. In short, everyone was cutting everyone else off. Nobody heeded traffic regulations. People on scooters darted between and around cars at the risk of their lives. Nobody seemed to recognize that things could be done differently or that more orderly traffic flow would benefit everyone.

As soon as we hit the highway, I felt insulated from Sicily itself, as I know longer had to cross the road or interact with the island’s residents. The landscapes were initially uninteresting (fairly flat), though the flora again impressed me: we passed trees with lavender buds (perhaps lilacs), shrubs with pink and red flowers, and, most spectacularly, shrubs with petals of the brightest magenta that I had seen in any plant in recent memory. Closer to Syracuse, there were taller hills of limestone (which makes sense, given its having been a Greek colony), and better views opened up over the Meditteranean. We passed a graveyard with an old domed church made of pale yellow stone, traversed seemingly the entire city in a series of spirals, and finally stopped at a bus stop bordering an empty field. I tried to remember where it was so as to return but was availed of the need when I asked a blond woman with a suitcase if she was a tourist from an English-speaking country.

My trip to Palermo was jarring. I arrived at the train station perhaps fifteen minutes before my train was set to depart, having in Western Europe grown used to whipping out my ticket, hopping onto the train, and having a ticket collector stamp later stamp it—I had forgotten that one not only had to validate tickets in advance in Italy, but also, frequently, print them out oneself. When I walked up to a dispatcher and asked her what to do, she led me into the train station, gesticulating with her cigarette, and led me to a machine that did not work. When I went to the ticket office to ask them to manually print out my ticket, as I had been told to do if the machine did not work, the woman working there stared at it for some time. “When you go?” she asked me. It was 9:26. My train was going to leave in seven minutes. The woman contemplated my answer. “Why in Canadian dollars?” she asked, pointing. I explained (in English) that I had bought it in Canada and that, according to the exchange rate, the value was the same as the price in Euros. This seemed to satisfy her. She printed it out and set it on her desk. I did not want to seem impatient, as that might only slow matters; I waited. She scrolled down her computer screen for a while (manually, tapping the ‘down’ key). Then, again apparently satisfied, she handed me my ticket, and I ran to the platform.

Of course, the train was, regardless, delayed by a few minutes; passengers were desperately sucking on their last cigarettes; nobody seemed to be in any sort of hurry. Once the train ride started, I again felt insulated from Italy; we passed hills topped with cypress trees, patches of common broom, eucalypts, and whole fields of yellow and white wildflowers, poppies, and, oddly, cacti, which, it appeared, were being cultivated for something. Silver olive trees creeped up hills of wheat-colored grass, which were so sparsely populated as to remind me of the Norwegian landscape, lone huts or farmsteads sticking out of the hillside. After some time, I saw the sea, the fringes of a sun-baked ghetto, little groups of sunbathers and beach umbrellas, and the crescent bay leading up to Palermo, with white houses dotting the other shore. Tall, densely wooded hills shot up to the left and right of the bay like in a postcard picture of St. Lucia—the landscapes of Sicily are far better than anything that the cities themselves have to offer.

When I got to Palermo I saw people smoking in a train station—not just on the platforms, which is illegal in many countries, but in the station itself—for the first time. The area just outside of the train station was, of course, a disaster—there was no way to cross the street except to walk into it and hope for the best, as the crosswalks criss-crossed seemingly at random and were not attached to any sidewalks, and Sicilians ignore them regardless. I found my hostel quickly and, with nothing to do, visited the tourist office and started wandering the city. It had the same narrow, winding lanes and laundry-draped porches as in Catania, only it did not seem quite as poor or dusty; there were outdoor markets everywhere, and I even walked through one lane populated entirely by bicycle shops. The style of vendors’ stalls here is curious. While in Vancouver a store (or stall) will often have a few items placed very carefully some distance from another another, so that each looks individually attractive, and while vendors back home often focus as much on the set-ups of their displays as on the items themselves, in Palermo one comes across tables and stores of which every single square inch, to all appearances, is taken up. Handbags, iPhones, sbeaded necklaces, suitcases, and all other manner of junk crowd one another like teeth in a too-small mouth—not a single bit of space is wasted. There are little toy trucks, with barely enough space for the driver and a crate or two of fruit, everywhere here. While the sidewalks were larger and more copious than those of Salerno, they are still missing in many side streets, and people drive their motorcyles everywhere—through the market, in pedestrian-only zones, on sidewalks, and, of course, between cars and car lanes on the streets themselves. There are stray dogs everywhere, and there are very few parks or benches on which to sit. At one point, I sat on the curb where motorcycles were supposed to park, far enough from the edge to see them coming, in an alleyway to have lunch. Palermo did not seem dangerous, and, anyway, with flecks of loquat flesh on my shorts and my undergarments unintentionally showing, I probably did not look like a prime target for a robbery.

The city is, despite its shortcomings, a vast improvement over Catania. It is obviously a city of greater wealth, with vast statuary monuments in honor of former soldiers and important statesmen, a massive theatre (into which I walked and asked if it cost money to enter the cathedral; the attendant and I shared a laugh), open plazas, and churches (of course). At night, it is full of bars that seem part of an entertainment district, not places where one might get knifed, and it has a functioning waterfront, where people run, walk, and walk their dogs in the evening. I was impressed that Italians could manage a waterfront, though I was frustrated as I tried to get there, as I had to cross a road on which I saw someone pull a U-turn into heavy traffic and someone else (briefly) driving on the wrong side of the road. Italians gun their engines when one tries to cross the street as though they were daring one to even try. It is obvious to anyone who visits that things should be different but will never change; someone whom I met at my hostel posited that the mafia’s embezzlement of government funds was partly to blame for the island’s lack of development.

My first day-trip from Salerno was to Agrigento—or, rather, I went to Segesta first. I had intended to see both Segesta and Selinunte, on one or two days, but that proved impossible, and I confused them when trying to explain my itinerary to someone at the tourist information office (who proved competent). Southeast of Palermo there are huge, towering rocks and hills scraped clean of foliage in places; in the nearby towns, there are whole streets, each several hundred meters long, lined on both sides with walls of garbage, as though Sicilians had not yet discovered the garbage dump. Segesta itself was spectacular—I will describe Greek architecture later int his post (I think—I am still trying to catch up)—and getting back from it was even reasonably easy. The site consisted principally of a very well-preserved temple on a hillside, a well-preserved amphitheatre and a few outbuildings on a different hillside, and the eroded remains of a defensive wall and outpost, reminding one that the Greeks did not only build temples and amphitheatres. The hikes to both major ruins were pleasant; the Sicilians (I almost called them Greeks.) do a good job of juxtaposing major ruins with greenery, often cypress trees, and the views from the hills showed nearby valleys, farmland, windmills, and distant settlements that almost looked like glitter far below. I do not remember a light breeze’s playing through the tall grass, though I wish that I did, so that I could record it here. There were lizards everywhere, an exoticism for me, and a couple of stray dogs, one with swollen teats and some sort of rodent in its mouth, as well as a cat with half of its face missing, which I fed without realizing what I was doing (I am still alive.).

My second, more eventful trip was to Agrigento, the Valley of the Temples. The first part of it was easy—I hopped on a regional train and set off; I looked at pretty hills—but the train broke down at the edge of town, forcing us to take a bus to the train station, then wait for another bus to the archaeological site itself. When that bus came, the driver told me to get a ticket in the bar in the train station (it was a Sunday, if I remember right; everything was closed); I ran into the station, got my ticket, and discovered that the bus had already left. The next bus took me there, I again enjoyed looking at Greek ruins, and I even found my way out, with the aid of a bit of Italian and a man at the ticket booth who pointed out the bus’ coming. When I stepped onto the bus, the driver told me that my ticket was no good. I explained that I had bought it in the bar in the central station—a two-way ticket. The bus driver shook his head knowingly—that bar always sold bad tickets. (It was, of course, the only place at all at which to buy them.) The driver told me to pay for another one when I got to the station—he would take me.

I sat down with the relief of having dodged a bullet—I would not have been stuck in Agrigento forever, as trains go with reasonable frequency between it and Palermo—but I wanted to get the next one back so as to have the evening to myself. I got to the station perhaps forty minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, though it had, of course, been cancelled due to a problem with the tracks—I was going to have to find a bus to the nearest station. It had started to rain. The bus stop was empty. I considered sitting and feeling melancholy, and I considered waiting at the bus stop and assuming that the bus would come to take us at the train’s appointed departure time, just as it had dropped us off, but I decided instead to start looking at random how to get a bus to the nearest station. I walked up to an African man waiting by the bus stop (I have found the Africans with whom I have spoken here much friendlier and more sane than the Italians.) and asked him about the near bus station. He tried explaining it to me, but, when I did not understand, he offered to take me. He asked where I was from and said that he was from Ghana; I mentioned Zev’s having worked in Kumasi. The man told me that he had lived in Italy for fourteen years but that there was no work now. He stayed at home and paid the rent, he said, but in a funny accent, so that it sounded more like “steal at home,” which flummoxed me at first. He had just been back to Ghana for two years but had not found work there. When I asked him about the north of Italy, he said that the situation there was the same. We got to the bus station and found that there would be no buses to the nearest train station—it was Sunday; hardly any buses were running. The man asked if I wanted to run to the station—it was only ten or so kilometers, he said—but I pointed out that we had no time. He mentioned living nearby and seemed on the point of offering me a ride, but I realized that it would make more sense just to trust that the bus would come—one can never tell, in Sicily, if buses will come according to schedule or come at all—and hurried back to the bus stop, where a bus, did, in fact, show up, after which my ride went smoothly, though the train rocked from side to side, as trains always do in Sicily.

My trip to Selinunte, yet another site of famous Greek ruins, proved a failure of a sort, insofar as I did not make it there. When the tourist office explained to me that I would need to take a bus to a nearby town, Castelvetrano, and catch a second bus to the archaeological site, I envisioned being let off at a station from which buses ran frequently to Selinunte, given its cultural cache—if I missed the first bus there, I figured, due to the schedules’ being misaligned, I could always catch another one thirty minutes later. As it turned out, the driver let me off at a bar on the edge of town, far from any signs of civilization. When I asked him how to get to the bus stop for Selinunte, he barked at me that he did not know, and, when I said that I did not speak Italian, he said something like, “Well, you are in Italy now!” I went into the bar, asked one of the waiters there how to get to the bus station, used the restroom, and, out of contrition, bought a lousy sandwich with too much mayonnaise. The barman told me that I could go in one of two almost opposite directions (to get to one of two stops) and that the bus station was a kilometer or so away. I started walking along the edge of the highway, there being no other option, and passed what looked like a giant hardware store and a grocery store. I noted that Castelvetrano called itself the “City of Temples” and that gas was 1.64 Euros, diesel 1.49 Euros (per liter, one assumes), which surprised me, as I did not think that most Sicilians made that much per month. After some time I stepped onto what looked like a little college campus and asked the watchman—in Sicily, as in Russia, watchmen are posted, like doormen, at the edge of college campuses to ID everyone who walks past them—which way it was to the bus station, and, yelling incoherently, he angrily pointed in the direction from which I had been coming.

At this point, I mostly just wanted to get back to Palermo in time to catch the ferry to Salerno. I had accepted that I would not be able to see all of the worthwhile sights of Italy—I would be skipping Castel del Monte, Lecce, Canosa di Puglia, Aquileia, Caserta Royal Palace, the Grotti Giganti (near Trieste), Gubbio, and innumerable other places of interest—and I was in the middle of nowhere with no obvious means of transport back. I decided to walk onward in the hopes of eventually finding signs of life—while I had not passed a single pedestrian, the same signpost proclaiming that Castelvetrano was the City of Temples had also pointed in the direction in which I was going for the “city center”—and, eventually, a sidewalk appeared by the side of the road. This was followed, in turn, by a sprinkling of stores, cafes, and even people. While there were no signs anywhere, each successive person whom I asked where the bus station was gestured in more or less the same direction. At this point, I had decided to skip the Valley of Temples entirely and just get back to Palermo so as not to miss my ferry and get stuck in Sicily forever—to make a long story short, I walked some more, found the train station, bought a one-way ticket, and was soon on my way.

Of my escape from Palermo via ferry I have little to say. The harbor was a catastrophe for pedestrians: it was nearly impossible to find what one was looking for. The ferry itself was pretty interesting—it was a sort of water-borne hotel, complete with reception. The views were, of course, spectacular; I do not have much time to describe them, as I have been putting off this letter for days and have to get it out so as to move on to the Amalfi Coast; but I will say that Italy looks a lot nicer from the water, just as it does from a bus or train. I was delighted, once we got going (late, naturally), to see Sicily forever receding into my past. Palermo itself looked beautiful, framed as it was by verdant, sunlit hills to the left and right. I took a great many pictures that should, in this case, give you a much better sense of the harbor’s beauty than words can (again, I am short on time and cannot really remember what I saw except in the broadest strokes).

I have a lot of general notes about Palermo and, more generally, Sicily. One was that buses and trains were always late, just as they have turned out to be in the rest of Italy. I noted Palermo’s having bars, restaurants, narrow alleyways and apartment blocks rife with balconies, just like Catania; I noted, I believe, its obviously being the much wealthier of the two cities. The hills on the way to Selinunte looked like a movie set—they honestly looked so picturesque as to have been plastered onto the sky. I have been on a diet of lots of bread, cheese, and cold cuts, fruit juice, fresh fruits (mostly cherries, apples, and loquats, which are amazing; they taste like a mixture of peach, melon, and mandarin orange)), canned peas and carrots (occasionally), canned fish (rarely), milk, some cereal, and, more recently (in Rome), free dinners of pasta and pizza. I bought some fresh greens and a grapefruit recently to round out my diet, but I have not yet found occasion (due to the free dinners) to eat the former. I have had ice cream twice, I believe, and baked goods two or three times. In short, Italians seem to be into pastries with heavy, shortbread-like bases and, often, thick marmalade; they make Napolean cake (which I have not, due to complicated and uninteresting reasons, tried) and rum babas (I have not, as above, had one of these); they make little French tarts; and they make some pastries, again as per the French, of lighter, flakier dough. I tried some very tasty cookies made of some combination of shortbread and almonds in Palermo, my first time eating baked goods in several days, and since then have had a couple more shortbread-based desserts, but that has been it; alas, my diet is in full effect. I have been running fairly often and lifting weights when I can, and I have even planned ahead so far as to have decided to have ice cream once each in Florence and Milan and, probably, baked goods in Siena on a day-trip from Florence. I have not eaten out but once since on this trip; it turns out that Italians are fond of eating meals of many courses, which has scared me off due to their total price (and my relative inability to tell good restaurants from bad or mediocre ones), but I plan to try some more Italian food in Florence and Genoa (though probably not Bologna; one has to pick one’s spots, and I want to eat healthily and cheaply on this trip). In short, I am not getting the best sense of Italian food, but, just as I have given up trying to see all of the cultural monuments in Italy (and the world at large), I have decided that there is little sense in trying to try every kind of food.

Again—this will be my last expostulation of the sort—I have to keep this brief. (I will write about the Amalfi Coast tomorrow, which will leave only Rome, which I might be able to describe in one long day. More on this—the frustration of not having time to write—later.) One interesting difference that I have noted between Italy and France, besides the latter’s being a developed country, is that the Italians do not appear to have ever been into timber-framed buildings (as were the Germans, English, Danish, &c.). Perhaps this is because wood was impractical for the climate, they lacked the resources of technology to use it, or it was expensive—one does not know. I have found myself starved for intercourse with French tourists; I melt as soon as I hear their language (this is because they strike me—sorry, lovers of Italy—as paragons of civilization compared to their southeastern neighbors). I have enjoyed interacting with tourists generally, perhaps because they are so much friendlier than Italians or because it is curious to meet other people from other countries who share a common goal in their sightseeing. I was supposed to describe how Greek cities were designed—it is interesting that, while one most often thinks of temples and amphitheatres when one thinks of Greek architecture, the Greeks also made defensive structures, sophisticated drainage systems (much more sophisticated than those of modern-day Sicilians), houses, and all sorts of other buildings. Their skill in choosing places for outposts, building sentry tours and buttressing them on hills, transporting water, &c. was, one presumes, world-class at the time. Their temples, too, were fashioned in all sorts of different ways, which archaeologists and architects seem to understand, based on the plaques by the temples: styles and ideas of beauty and function changed with time, as reflected by the number and design of columns, steps, altars, and other architectural elements of their temples. People were even—surprise, surprise—vain and capricious in the time of the ancient Greeks; some architects had their initials carved into or embossed on their work, while others made inscriptions praising one or another public dignitary. (I may be confusing these inscriptions with those left by the Romans, of whose architecture I have seen much more, at this point.)

I must now shower and head to bed. I expect to have caught up on my blog posts by the time I leave Florence for Bologna, which will, I hope, free me up to work on other projects. I have found it incredibly difficult to work (i.e., pursue other writing projects), travel, write about my travels, plan future travels, &c. all at once. I have learned that it is better, given how busy I have now become with my writing, to occasionally plan rest days in which to do entirely normal stuff (like exercise, buy groceries, &c.), in addition to getting caught up on my blog; I first came up with my model for seeing as many places as possible before I started seriously writing, when rest days seemed to me like wasted days (I also was not trying to lose weight.). I even came up, the other day, with a clever metaphor for seeing too many places without leaving myself time to write about them: it is like filling the dinner table with dishes and then continuing to pile them on, resulting in their falling from the table or spilling onto one another. It even—get ready—compels one to leave some of them in the kitchen. The metaphor aside, I need time to write to give these experiences any meaning, especially as writing is my only real link with home (when I travel), and, since I have other writing projects to attend to, I will have to set aside days in the future that are dedicated specifically to writing. I have found that once I fall behind in my writing, I no longer want to do it, as it comes to seem like a burden, causing me to put it off when I have spare time and to distract myself. (The other projects were, obviously, frustrating as well, as they clashed with my travel writing.)

At this point, I am rambling. I am off to take a shower and prepare for a too-early train to Florence, where I hope to get settled in quickly so as to continue writing about my trip. (I had one another note, which was that it was strange being so near a war (when I was in Sicily), but I do not much know what to do with that thought.) Thank you for your patience in awaiting my letters!