Cefalu

After somber Corleone, arriving in Cefalu was like arriving in paradise. Sure, it’s touristy, but a little touristy isn’t a bad thing when you’re, well, a tourist.

Cefalu is a beach town, fishing village, tourist stop and destination for vacationing Italians. The beach was packed with pay-to-stay businesses selling access to their little tracts of sand and use of their chairs and sun umbrellas. The guy shown above walked back and forth on the beach, hoping someone would buy something and lighten his considerable load. I got the feeling this gig wasn’t what he had in mind when his uncle said he could offer him a great opportunity in sales.

Also unlike Corleone, there were lots of quaint little shops of ceramics and local food items and so on for the serious shopper to amuse herself in while her husband took photos of things that only he found interesting. The streets were lively, even in the siesta part of the afternoon, which, to be fair to Corleone, we caught the tail end of. Lots of villages we would soon visit nearly completely shut down after lunchtime, but came back to life a few hours later. And even when all the stores were closed, there were signs of life. Cefalu pulsed with activity all afternoon (a big benefit of going someplace that welcomes tourists), and there were interesting things to look at everywhere.



We walked out on the quay and watched the old man and the sea untangle a net he’d used for the morning’s work with the help of a few friends who’d arrived on a decrepit scooter. They laughed and joked as they worked in the hot sun, all of them as tanned as saddles as kids played on the beach behind them.



The main church has a fantastic ceiling and Christ above the altar, and until we got to Monreale I thought I had seen something that would never be equaled, let alone surpassed. As much as I like photography and pictures, sometimes an image just doesn’t convey what seeing a thing with your own eyes is like:



After a very good lunch, we climbed to the top (almost) of the mountain behind the town. The view of the coast was great, and it was interesting to look down on the city we’d been exploring.



As a reward for our exertions, we sampled the local gelato, which was fantastic. Well-fueled for another drive, we continued north to one of the island’s ceramics meccas, San Stefano di Camastra. This is the town known for that distinctive red ceramic look of the first trinacria I posted last week, a style shown here in a serving dish:




We bought a few gifts from a guy whose wife was born in San Francisco and who had returned to Sicily to join her new family’s ceramics business. That guy was so excited to talk to someone from San Francisco (which is where we say we’re from when abroad because no one has heard of Oakland) that he just went on and on about how much he enjoyed his visit a few years ago and how nice the city was. He kept remembering places he’d visited and his face brightened with each recollection as he shouted out in his thick accent, “Golden Gate Bridge!” “Fisherman’s Wharf!” “Coit Tower!”

I should mention that nowhere in Rome or in Sicily did we pick up any bad vibe about being American. Even the jerk at Caccamo seemed not to care. Although, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he thought we were English, not American. When he said ‘Inglese,’ I thought he was wondering what language to speak, so I said yes. But now I think he understood me to mean we were English. Oh well.