Mt. Etna and Taormina

On Sunday, June 18^th, our bus headed for the slopes of Mt. Etna, where we met a German volcanologist named Boris  As we went up and up, it started to rain, and the temperature on the bus’s digital thermometer kept dropping, from 27 (80 degrees Fahrenheit) to 23 (74), to 20 (68), to 17 (62) and finally to 13 (56).  We had sweaters and Mary Joy had a jacket, but once we got off the bus at Crateri Silvestri and headed up a cinder cone, the wind and rain hit us—it was cold!  This sort of weather was apparently not what had met the last few tours that Boris had taken up.  He cut his onsite remarks very short, and we went into the restaurant for more remarks and a snack—an arancino, the orange-colored fried rice ball that is one of Sicily’s signature dishes, like caponata and cannoli.

Further along, stopped for a wine-tasting and snack at a vineyard.  Finally, we arrived at the spectacularly-sited city of Tormina, just in time to watch, from the roof terrace of our hotel, the Continental, as the Italian military’s precision flying team did stunts for an air show.

We went down to the Piazza del Duomo, right below the hotel, and Mary Joy and I attended mass at the 13^th-century cathedral.  There was a good girls’ choir singing.  Since this was the feast of Corpus Christi, we had heard from our hotel the procession, complete with brass band (which seems to be standard for religious processions in Sicily—we had seen a procession in honor of San Onofrio, with band, pass by while we were waiting for a table at our restaurant on the Quattro Canti in Palermo).  After mass, the procession would start off again.  There was an old lady strewing flower petals in the path, and then an honort guard of police and carabinieri, then the priests with the monstrance, covered, I think, with a canopy.  There were altar boys and girls and the choir and finally everyone, as the band struck up.

We went to dinner at Lonely-Planet-recommended Tischi Toschi.  At the next table was a young couple—he was from Northern Ireland and she was from Bristol, England--who had also found the restaurant in Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor.  Did Lonely Planet finally strike out?  Nope.  Then we got a gelato at a gelateria on what Virginia would call “the main drag” (Corso Umberto) and wandered around awhile.  When we got back to the hotel, I experimented with taking some low-light pictures from the roof terrace.