On Tuesday, June 13th, after getting some last photos from the hotel roof terrace and from our room’s little balcony overlooking Via Roma, we got on the bus and headed west for Segesta, the ruins of an ancient Elymian city, with a theater way up on top of a hill, and a beautiful Greek-style temple, apparently never finished.
From there, we went to Erice, an old town on a mountain overlooking the city of Trapani. Outside of the village, at a sort of conference center, we had a wonderful buffet lunch (see Rick Steves’s video blog of his participation in the tour on this itinerary a few weeks before, if you want to see what we had to eat!). Then we had a pastry-making workshop with the most famous pastry chef in Sicily, Maria Grammatico. Many, many years ago, the orphaned Maria had learned her trade with the nuns who brought her up. Now, she taught us how to make two different cookies with almond paste. I hung back, but Mary Joy got her hands dirty, or, rather, floury.
We were dropped off in Erice, but Mary Joy and I spent too much time in the Cathedral, so we were unable to find any of what Lonely Planet calls “the spectacular vistas.”
We all took the cable car down to Trapani (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable), and went on to our hotel in the old town, the Residence Badia Nuova, where we had a rather large apartment, with bedroom, kitchen and walk-in closet. After a group meeting and happy hour, with free wine and snacks, Virginia took us on an orientation walk, where she used her expertise (gained from having a gelato-maker as a former boyfriend), to tell us about what to look for in gelato.
I forget if we went anywhere to eat, but if we did, we didn’t eat much, because of everything we’d had that day. Mary Joy had worried about what sort of food we’d get on this tour, but it turned out that it was almost all wonderful. This was by far the best-fed we’ve ever been on a bus tour. We joked that the name of the tour should have been “Best Food of Sicily in 11 Days.”
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