Sights to be seen

   I mentioned the church bells chiming the time. Did I mention the siren? There is a siren. It sounds like an old air raid siren. It probably is. Sicily was bombed fairly heavily during World war II. It sounds at 8:00 AM, noon, and 4:00 PM, key times in rural Sicilian life.
   This is the daily rhythm: up at dawn and about your daily business; stop working at noon for lunch and a siesta; back to work at four, and work 'til dark; home for dinner and time with the family. Even the stores follow that schedule. Concetta's bottega is open 8:00-1:00, and 5:00-8:00.

   Everywhere you turn in Italy, you find a church. I mean everywhere you turn. Mandanici is a small farming village. At its height of population almost 50 years ago it may have held 3,000 people. It has five churches. The little town I grew up in had five churches to service a similar population, but they were five different churches. There was a Presbyterian church, and Anglican church, a Lutheran church, etc. These are all Catholic churches.
   Not all of them are in use today, of course. One of them was destroyed in a flood in 1620, and was only rebuilt recently. It is being used as a museum. Another, the oldest one currently standing, has fallen out of use, and was closed for years. Today they open for one Sunday a month. There is the Duomo. You know, the one with the bells. And the siren. We never got to see the other two. I suspect they are in serious states of disrepair in an older, little used section of the town.
   Little used buildings are everywhere in Mandanici. From a burgeoning town of 3000, it has shrunk to little over 800 people. There are few jobs for young people in rural Italy, and most of them move to the city as soon as they are old enough. Abandoned houses are the other thing you see everywhere you look.



   Yesterday (don't ask me what day that was. At some point I stopped making note, and I don't have a clue), we visited Taormina, where we saw Il Teatro Greco, the ancient Greek theater. They call it that, although the ruins are mostly Roman, the theater having been destroyed and subsequently rebuilt after the Romans annexed Sicily in the third century BC. Taormina is even more densely packed with churches than Mandanici, I guess because it is so mucholder. Some of the piazzas we walked through were bordered by churches on three sides.
   The streets of Taormina were packed with tourists, and the bars, shops, and restaurants were doing a booming business. Ciccio told us that it is off season, and most of the hotels are operating on a reduced staff. In July and August the tourists must be jammed shoulder to shoulder, like sardines.

   The day before we visited Lipari (Lee-ba-ree), one of the Aeolian Islands, off the north coast of Sicily. The entire group of islands, which includes Il Vulcano, are commonly referred to as Lipari, as is the island we visited, and it's main town. Lipari is a pretty little port town that is very popular with tourists from all over Europe, and from around Italy as well. The rest of the island is populated by private villas used as vacation homes by wealthy Italians, with the exception of two large pumice mining operations.
   One of Pat's cousins is married to a man who works as a personal assistant /property manager for the owner of one of these properties, so we were treated to lunch at the private villa of an Italian millionaire (only because he wasn't there at the time). we didn't actually have the opportunity to visit the sulphur baths on Isola Vulcano and plaster our naked bodies with steaming mud. Maybe next time.