Sicily Wrap-up

9 May 2023

Our favorite place

Agrigento, by a wide margin. There was something pretty powerful about walking among these temples built 2,500 years, thinking about the effort to build them and the effort to reconstruct them from a heap of rubble. They are breath-taking.

The State of Sicily

We saw many beautiful and interesting and historic sights, and we also saw the result of Italy’s neglect of Sicily. Many places clearly don’t have the ability to provide the basic services expected and required of a government: roads were pretty much universally in terrible shape; towns and cities were overwhelmed by trash; buildings were falling down. We saw many apartment buildings abandoned and falling apart; we saw many industrial buildings half-built and abandoned.

There surely are a thousand reasons for this neglect, none of which I know or understand. Whatever the causes, I find Italy’s maltreatment of this wonderful place so sad.

Eating

As is my practice, I took no food pictures. Sorry, I know that’s the style now, but not for me. I can easily summarize our eating experience in Sicily: seafood, seafood, more seafood, followed by seafood. The seafood at all our stops on Sicily was fantastic. I’m writing this after our return from Sicily; we had eleven dinners, on ten of which the main plate was seafood, and on most of which the first course and main plate were seafood. The only exception was at a B & B that served a no-choice “eat what we serve or nothing” dinner and what they served was the best Italian sausage we’ve ever had.

We drank a lot of Nero d’Avola wine from the Sicilian region of Avola. I might also point out that the average price in restaurants of a good bottle of this wine averaged somewhere around $25. Compare that to the average price of a bottle of red wine of similar quality in a Seattle restaurant (probably $50 - $60) and you’ll wonder why such a difference. I don’t know, that’s for sure.

Will we return to Sicily? I don’t know; honestly it’s not high on or list for a return trip and if we did return, it would be to concentrate on some ancient Greek and Roman sites that we didn’t see this trip. Having said that, we’re glad that we came to Sicily. We had a great time!