The Sicilian Adventure Begins

When we arrived in Palermo, Sicily on Wednesday, we expected that the weather would be cooler because we were going to an island. It was still 30 degrees Celsius, same as Rome, but we learned that it had been 45 (113 Fahrenheit!) the day before. Whew!

The lodging I found for us in Sicily was the Home From Home Bed and Breakfast, a place that had consistently shown up on travel sites with glowing recommendations from past guests. I had originally intended that we would fly into Catania, but changed this plan because Home From Home is 23 miles from Palermo. I just had a feeling that staying there was the right thing to do.

A little background on Home From Home: it’s run my Kathy, a British expatriate, and her husband Toto (short for Salvatore), who was born in Sicily and who worked in Rome for over thirty years. One thing we find too little of these days is people who take pride in what they do and demand of themselves that their endeavors represent the very best they can offer. Home From Home is an example of such pride, a small oasis of clean, tidy order for the weary traveler. But the real treasures found here are Kathy and Toto, the kindest, most helpful people we met on our trip. I can’t believe I don’t have a picture of them…some photographer.

An example: I had forgotten to print the email with directions from the Palermo airport to the B&B, so I phoned from Rome asking for help. I got a message back that Toto would meet us at the airport, and when we’d collected our bags, there he was to guide us smoothly through an airport that, though small, seemed to have more of itself under construction than not. He drove us to the car rental and waited while we collected our silver Fiat Idea (I’ve got an idea, Fiat—how about 50 more horsepower!), then let us follow him back to Home From Home.

I had driven many kilometers in France and other European countries, including northern Italy, so I expected no real difficulties behind the wheel. But driving in Sicily is another world altogether. I may do a separate post on that part of our experience.

Getting from the airport to Palermo is a nice drive taking in the coast on the left and the looming stone mountains on the right. But while driving from Palermo to Bolognetta, the small town where HfH is, I’ve never been more grateful for someone to follow. A coastal town, Palermo has half a ring road that allows traffic to bypass the city on its way past, and those several kilometers are like something from a Bosch painting on a Wednesday at high noon. L commented that it was almost as insane as India. If so, I never want to go to India.

Two lanes are indicated by the white paint, but cars go through the same space four wide, no one wanting to be behind anyone else, constantly merging and looking for the smallest advantage to sneak slightly ahead. It’s less like driving as we know it than like being a blood cell in a clogged artery during a heart attack. Add to the madness of the cars the masses of moped and motorcycles that zip past on all sides, honking and weaving when forced to slow down, usually with two passengers, sometimes one of them a child or even a toddler on board.

This road has several stoplights and at one of them a mass of windshield washers attacked the helpless traffic with grimy rags and dirty water. I think the idea was that for a small tip they wouldn’t wash your windows. Toto deftly anticipated this and guided us briefly onto a side road that bypassed this invasion. Bravo!

Once through the valley of the shadow of death, Toto introduced me to driving on Sicilian highways, and I’ll just have to comment at length on this later. I still haven’t quite recovered and just thinking about it is causing my hands to shake.

Eventually we arrived at Home From Home and found Kathy waiting for us with a snack of cheese, olives and white wine on their patio. Though she and I had been conversing via email for six months, it wasn’t really until then that I was sure I’d made the right choice about where to stay in Sicily. It’s difficult to resist going on and on about how warm, interesting and kind Kathy and Toto are—they became very dear to us during our stay there.

After our snack and chat, we still had an afternoon to begin exploring Sicily, so we decided to visit nearby Corleone. It was not what we expected…