S I C I L YMay 1, 2012

We caught our flight to Chicago and then had no trouble catching our

4:49 flight to Rome. We lost a day in the flight so it is now May

2nd. It is in Rome that I have anxieties about getting our flight to

Palermo, but so far everything has gone smoothly. We made our flight

to Rome but because of delays we had in leaving Chicago we will miss

our flight to Palermo. The flight attendant said that they will take

care of the matter and, I assume, book us on a later flight. So let’s

hope there’s a flight that’s not too much later.

Fortunately I’ve got lots of food in my backpack. We might be

having hard boiled eggs for dinner. So we’ll be experiencing a speed

bump on our flight. I hope it’s a small one. We spent some time

camping in Rome when I had a VW and was finished with my teaching at

the University of Milan.

We are rescheduled for a 1:15 PM flight to Palermo. So we’ve

been relaxing in the Roma airport. I withdrew 250 Euros from an ATM

in the airport. We have to pay some money to Rosella for her

apartment in Palermo that we are renting. Her apartment was listed on

the Internet and we booked it because of its location—very close to

the Teatro Massimo and in the center of things in Palermo. We caught

the 1:15 plane to Palermo and took an airport bus to the Piazza

Politeama in Palermo, where it stopped on its way to the Stazione

Centrale. On the bus I was seated next to a student who let me use

his cell phone to call Rosella Onorato, the woman who owns the

apartment we rented. Shortly after we got off the airport bus we met

Rosella and her mother and walked to the apartment. It was just five

minutes from the Piazza Politeama and near the Teatro Massimo.

The Teatro Massimo in Palermo

After we paid Rosella the rest of the money due her for the apartment

she gave us the keys and said goodbye. We took a walk and I brought

my cell phone into a shop where they fooled around with it but

couldn’t get it to work. So far my cell phone has been a disaster.

My Map of the Area Around Our Apartment

It’s 8:30 PM and we’re going to bed soon. We took a little walk in

the neighborhood. Tomorrow we will rest a bit and then wander around.

I fell asleep at 8:30 PM and got up at 10:30 PM. I had bad leg cramps

—probably from the long flight. Phyllis fell asleep at 8:30 PM in an

instant. It seems that my cell phone has been ruined by the shop I

went to and we won’t have a cell phone to use for the rest of our

trip. And since the apartment doesn’t have Wi-Fi I can’t use my

tablet. I’ll probably be able to use it only in the hotels we’re

staying in at Agrigento and Catania. All my great plans on the

technical front have come to naught.

May 3, 2012

For some reason we both got up at 3:30 AM. Probably because of jet

lag. I’m in the bathroom, sitting on the John and writing while she

tries to go back to sleep. My nose is clogged so I’m sucking on a

cough drop to see if it helps. I took a sleeping pill, also. We

managed to get some sleep last night. Today we are going to look

around Palermo. There are lots of places of interest within walking

distance. We just made a beach head in Sicily yesterday. Today,

we’ll start seeing things…assuming we’re up to it. I went out for an

early morning walk and found a Carrefour Express and got some milk and

other stuff, so I had some cereal and milk for breakfast. We hope to

find a place for lunch and I’ll make dinner…or vice versa.

We are just five or ten minutes from the Quatri Conti, the four

corners where Corso Vittorio Emanuele and Via Maqueda meet. That is

the point where the four medieval sections of Palermo met and there is

a wonderfully ornate building on one of the corners.

Ornate Building at the Four Corners in Palermo

We did a lot of walking today. We went to see a wonderful

church, saw the Palatine chapel in the Norman Castle (Palazzo dei

Normanni), and then walked

down Via Vittorio Emanuele to a museum in La Calsa that was very nice.

Then we came back to the apartment and slept from 3:30 PM until 5:00

PM. We were exhausted. I made soup for dinner. We will take a walk

in the neighborhood, which is full of little restaurants. We went

through the Vuccina market on our way back to the apartment but it was

closed. In La Calsa, we stopped in a little restaurant and had pasta

with vongole. Lots of clams and delicious pasta in a very delicate

sauce It looked like a neighborhood restaurant and was charming. The

food was delicious. Tomorrow we are going to Monreale and the next

day to Cefalu. We’ll spend Sunday in Palermo, looking around. We

took a short walk after dinner…to the piazza where so many restaurants

are located. It is right near the Archaeological Museum, which is

being renovated and thus isn’t open.

We had a long chat with a waiter in one of the fancier

restaurants. He is from India and has lived in Sicily for the past

fifteen years. He told us that he doesn’t like Sicily and is planning

to return to India in the near future. How many times has he had this

conversation with people over the past fifteen years, I wondered. And

will he ever return to India? It’s very nice in this area—as tourist

enclaves go and not five minutes from our apartment.. Our apartment

is working out well. It is sunny, has everything we need, including

hot water in the shower. It’s very conveniently located, it’s quiet

at night, and there’s a decent supermarket near us.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Today is day three of our visit to Sicily. Yesterday we did a lot of

walking, so we had a nap in the afternoon. There were hordes of

tourists in the chapel we visited. It was oppressive. We’ve been out

of communication since we left. They may have Wi Fi in the local

Starbucks. I’ll find out today and if they do, I’ll go there and send

some emails to friends. If not, we’ll wait until our hotel in

Agrigento.

My cell phone was broken by one of the clerks at TIM and my tablet is

useless because the apartment doesn’t have Wi-Fi.

We went to Monreale today. We walked to the train station, which

took around twenty minutes, and bought round-trip tickets. We visited

the Norman cathedral. It was quite fantastic. It’s in a big plaza

with many restaurants. The cathedral’s architecture is unusual. One

would never know from its outside how fantastic the cathedral is

inside, with many wonderful mosaics.

Norman Cathedral in Monreale

Then we came home, had tea and cookies and rested for a while.

We’ve only been away a few days are still tired from the flights here…

and our exertions as tourists. We had dinner at a little restaurant

not far from our apartment. We sat outdoors and had a delicious

appetizer, pasta Bolognese, then sausage and a salad. Tomorrow we’re

going to Cefalu, a little seaside that is supposed to be very nice.

Palermo, we find, is relatively easy for us to get around. Many

things are within walking distance, including the Stazione Centrale,

the Central Station… and Palermo, since it will be the largest city

we’ll be visiting, will be the most difficult city for sightseeing…or

so I imagine. There’s a lot to see in Palermo and it isn’t the noisy

and oppressive city we thought it would be. The guidebooks are not

very positive about Palermo, so we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the

city. It certainly is worth a few days. We gave ourselves time in

Palermo to recover from jet lag, too.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

We are going to Cefalu today, to look around. And we may go to the

beach here on Sunday…and to a puppet show, which is in a theater just

around the corner from our apartment. We have to find the bus stop in

Piazza Politeama. We’re spending the right amount of time here in

Palermo. It’s a good base to use to visit Monreale and Cefalu. Then,

when we’re done with this area, we will take a bus to Trapani and see

what it has to offer.

We walked to the Stazione Centrale and caught the 11:10 train.

We will get to Cefalu around noon, will look around, and come back in

the afternoon Cefalu turned out to be a really beautiful seaside

village that is full of tourists and pricey restaurants. But it is

really a handsome place, with beautiful old buildings and countless

restaurants and coffee shops. We had an ice cream at a café and sat

there, for a long time, looking at the sea. Then we looked at a

church. It didn’t have anything of interest inside. At one time, when

I was planning out itinerary for Sicily, I had thought of staying in

Cefalu instead of Palermo, but decided it was too far from other

places we wanted to see. After we wandered around Cefalu for a few

hours, we returned to Palermo. We had a light dinner and went to bed.

We were too tired to do very much.

Getting to our apartment in Trapani might be a problem. Our

landlady here, Rossella, will call the people we’re renting our

apartment from in Trapani and that may solve the problem. Not having

a cell phone is complicating our lives but so far we’ve been able to

get by since other people let us use their cell phones. We don’t use

sleeping pills but a kind of relaxant called Lorazipam (Ativan). It

allows you to get four or five hours of sleep but doesn’t knock you

out the way real sleeping pills do…and you don’t feel dizzy when you

get up. I feel asleep at 9:00 PM without using a pill and woke up,

for some reason, at 11:45 PM. Phyllis was up and bothered by a kind

of beating sound out on the street. It sounded like an amplified

drum. I went to investigate. It turned out to be that…and was coming

from a night club around the corner from our apartment. It was full

of young people dancing and the sound inside the club was

overpowering. Then I walked around for a few minutes, wandered into

Olivella Square near the Archaeological Museum and got a kebab to go

from one of the restaurants there. So we had a wonderful midnight

snack. Then we took Lorazapams and finally got some sleep. We slept

from around one o’clock until eight o’clock the next morning.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

We are exhausted and plan to take it easy today. We will just wander

around a bit and then, tonight, we will go to the puppet show. We’ve

had four strenuous days and now have to rest. It turns out that the

bus to Segesta is very near Piazza Politeama. We will go over and

find out exactly where it is located. There are a lot of Indians and

Pakistanis working in this area. They sell trinkets to tourists and

spend hours waiting, patiently, for customers. I wonder how they make

a living? I guess they must. Perhaps, in the summer, when there are

many more tourists in Palermo, business picks up?

We were so tired that we fell asleep after lunch and had long

naps. Now we’re resting and getting ready to go to the puppet show at

6:30 PM. It should be good fun…We went to the puppet show and enjoyed

it very much. Since it was in Italian, we didn’t understand

everything that was said. The puppeteers created some really

fantastic characters and the show was full of action. The children in

the audience loved it. There were also a lot of young couples who

attended the show. We got a pizza for dinner and went to bed. We had

more or less finished with our stay in Palermo and were tired from all

the walking we had done. Trapani awaited us.

Monday, May 7, 2012

We caught the bus to Trapani on a street near Piazza Politeama and

took the bus to Trapani. There, at the maritime station, we met

Debora, the young woman who own the apartment, and her brother. They

run a travel agency in Trapani. They gave us a lift to our apartment

and before we knew it we were installed in a lovely and very modern

studio apartment on 18 Via Barache, one block from the docks where

fishermen bring their catches, in Trapani. We are located in the old

section of Trapani. Our hosts provided us with a big basket full of

juice, packaged sweet rolls, tea bags, decaffeinated coffee and other

goodies that will take care of our breakfasts in Trapani. The

apartment provided a tiny Espresso maker so I’ve had espresso every

morning.

We took a walk to the Torre De Ligne, a seventeenth century

squarish building that is at the end of a curved promontory that was a

fortification. While we were walking to it, we noticed that many

people drove up to it, then turned

around and drove away.

The 17th Century Torre de Ligny

We took a long walk around Trapani and managed to get lost. We

purchased a “Trapani Card” that provided free transportation on the

buses and also had a pass for the funicular to Erice. It’s the

architecture that gives Trapani its charm…and the sea. Wherever you

are, in the old section, you’re not far from the sea. After a half

hour of wandering around, we found the “Jewish Quarter” but there was

nothing there to speak of. Not worth the effort of looking for it.

.Via Vittorio Emanuele in Trapani

We found a bakery on the Vittorio Emanuele near us and a supermarket.

We looked for an Internet Café that was supposed to be near us but

couldn’t find it. The weather, as usual, was marvelous. The sun was

out and the sky was a wonderful deep blue color. Life was good.

There are wonderful fish stores, full of many strange and really

bizarre looking fish, that are just around the corner from our

apartment. And during the day there are fruit stands near the fish

stores.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

At 7:00 AM I went out for a walk and found the joint jumping. There

were people crowding one another in the fish markets, there were

stands full of luscious looking fruit, and peddlers selling various

things here and there on the street. People leave their garbage

hanging down in pails on long lines for the garbage collectors. So,

early in the morning, the streets are full of hanging baskets of

garbage. We leave our garbage in a pail outside the door. The people

on our street have adopted a dog and he lives in a little shelter

twenty feet from us, on the opposite side of the street. People come

and leave food for the dog…scraps of food, pasta. He doesn’t look as

if he’s hungry.

We took a bus to the area where you get funicular and took one up

to Erice. The view from the funicular is spectacular. And Erice is

quite special.

View from Funicular to Erice

Erice is a medieval town whose narrow streets are full of tourists,

wandering around, eating ice cream cones, and getting a sense of what

life was like, architecturally speaking, during the medieval period.

It’s the spatiality of medieval towns like Erice that we love. We

don’t feel insignificant the way we do when on gigantic boulevards and

ten lane highways.

We made a mistake on the buses getting to the funicular. We

didn’t get off at the right stop but some high school students came to

our aid. It took twelve minutes on the funicular to get from Trapani

to Erice and the view was spectacular once we got there. It got very

cold that night and I wore my hooded jacket and so did Phyllis. Once

the sun goes down, Trapani can be quite chilly. We also discovered

bus number two. It is a free bus that anyone can take and goes all

over Trapani, so we’ve been using it a great deal. We had a long

conversation in our primitive Italian with an elderly lady at the bus

stop for the number two bus. It took us to a bus station and there we

caught a bus for Segesta.

People go to Segesta for two things: the ruins of a Roman temple

there and the remains of a Roman amphitheater. Our outing in

Segesta turned out to be wonderful. The sun was shining and the

temple was very beautiful. There were many school children there and

we met some people who were on a cruise and

The Temple in Segesta

decided to go to Segesta on their own instead of paying a great deal

more to go with the ship’s tour of Segesta.

What is it about ruins that attracts people? Perhaps it is

because people are curious about the past and want to get a sense of

what things were like by visiting ancient temples and other ruins.

Travel, for many people, is a combination of archaeology and amateur

cultural anthropology. At places like Segesta, one becomes a time-

traveler of sorts.

This is the Roman Amphitheater in Segesta

After we looked at the temple, we walked over to see the remains of a

Roman amphitheater that was nearby. Then we found our way back to the

train station and returned to Trapani, caught the number two bus

(after having some trouble finding where it stopped) and returned to

our apartment.

The next day we went to Marsala and looked around. It has one

significant tourist attraction, a museum with the remains of an

ancient boat. We walked to the museum, which also has many wonderful

ancient jars and other items of interest. The museum is a handsome

building that overlooks the water and it was very windy while we were

walking to the museum from the station.

There isn’t very much of the ancient ship left…but there are iron

pipes that show you how big it was and you can get an idea of what it

must have been like.

On the train back to Trapani we got into a conversation with a

Canadian woman—a doctor who is basing herself in Palermo and taking

trips to various parts of Sicily from there. She doesn’t have to

bother changing living arrangements but she has to spend a great deal

of time on trains and buses. Our arrangement—renting apartments for

four or five days in various cities—seems much better. We will be

staying in hotels for two nights in Agrigento and Catania and one

night in Palermo, since we have to return there to catch our flight

back to San Francisco.

Back in Trapani we too an evening stroll and found a restaurant

that had Wi-Fi so we went back to our apartment, got my tablet, and I

was able to check my email and send a message to Lynette Chaplin, the

woman who owns the apartment we’ll be renting in Siracusa. I found

it difficult locating the street where her apartment is located but

assume that if I ask enough people in Siracusa, eventually we’ll find

out way to her place. But before we go to Siracusa, we have to go to

Agrigento and see the ruins in Agrigento there.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

We are going to Agrigento today. We have to wait for Debora and her

brother to come and get the keys to the apartment. They came at

10:00 AM and drove us to the long distance bus stop which is near the

train station. We had some time to wait so we went into a small café

and had some coffee and cakes. The bus took three hours. It deposited

us in Agrigento, a few blocks from the Hotel Del Viale, where we are

staying. It is on a large, tree-lined street that is full of

restaurants and cafes. We went to an Internet Café and I was finally

able to send corrections to an article I’m publishing.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

We had a wonderful breakfast. The waitress made me a café con latte…a

large pot of coffee and a large pot of hot milk. It was really

delicious. And the restaurant had wonderful pastries and other good

things to eat. It’s good we had a good breakfast because visiting the

famous ruins is exhausting. For one thing, it was hot out and the sun

was shining brightly. In addition, you have to do a great deal of

walking. There are two parts to the ruins: on one side, on the

Eastern Zone, is a famous temple, the Tempio di Ercole (the temple of

Heracles) and other buildings and on the other side, in the Western

Zone, there is the Temple of Jupiter and a fallen Telemone and other

less impressive ruins. Both sides are worth seeing.

To see the temple you must trudge up a seemingly endless sloping

road for perhaps a mile. Maybe more? I was wearing a felt hat that I

soaked with water and that provided a bit of relief. I also had water

in a bottle—like everyone else there. After walking for quite a while

we came to the temple. It is a very famous building, and was used by

UNESCO to make an icon representing the organization.

Two Views of the Temple of Heracles in Agrigento

The temple is quite spectacular and is in excellent condition—except

that it doesn’t have a roof. It is estimated that it was started in

the Sixth Century BC. The second view is the one UNESCO used for its

icon. We trudged for what seemed another mile to reach the Tempio

della Concordia, which became a Christian church in the sixth century

AD.

One of most noteworthy object in the Western Zone is an eight

meter fallen Telamon—in essence, a pile of stones that represent a

human being or a human form used as a pillar. There are other things

of interest in the Western Zone but nothing to compare with the

temples in the Eastern Zone.

Fallen Telamon

From Wikipedia: In Greek mythology, Telamon (Ancient Greek: Τελαμών), son of

the king Aeacus of Aegina, and Endeis and brother of Peleus , accompanied Jason

as one of his Argonauts, and was present at the hunt for the Calydonian Boar.

In the Iliad he was the father of Greek heroes Ajax the Great and Teucer the

Archer by different mothers. Some accounts mention a third son of

his, Trambelus.[1][2] He and Peleus were also close friends with Heracles,

assisting him on his expeditions against the Amazons and against Troy.

While waiting for the bus back to Agrigento, we sat on a bench next to

a couple from the Algarve in Portugal and had a pleasant conversation

with them. We talked with them on the bus until we reached our bus

stop. At the hotel I found out how to enable my tablet to get and

send email, so I caught up with my correspondence. I had to stay in

the lounge to be near enough to the hotel’s Wi-Fi to use my tablet…and

even then, the reception wasn’t that good. The clerk at the hotel was

good enough to call Siracusa and I had the chance to talk to the woman

whose apartment we were renting there and tell her about my cell phone

problems.

Monday, May 14, 2012

In order to get to Siracusa from Agrigento, we had to take a bus to

the Catania airport and then catch a bus to Siracusa. We got off at

the wrong stop to get the bus to Catania but finally managed to get to

the station and get on the bus to Catania. We missed our bus to

Siracusa and had to wait for a few hours for the bus to Siracusa.

When it came, it had problems so we had to wait for the next bus. We

finally made it to Siracusa and to Ortigia, the “old section” of

Siracusa where we had rented an apartment from Lynette Chaplin, a

South African woman who had spent many decades in Italy. There was a

free bus, the Navetta, that goes from the bus station to various stops

in Ortigia.

Ortigia is a maze of little streets and we wandered around a

while before we found our apartment. Lynette was in her apartment

looking for us and hailed us when we entered a small piazza near her

house. Today was a down day for us. We expected to arrive at our

apartment around 3:30 PM and got there at 7:30 PM. The apartment was

very “old fashioned” and not too clean. It had a tiny shower but it

did have hot water and we were well located. I went out to get some

milk and other groceries and got lost coming back. I had to ask a

number of people before I found our apartment. We were near a church

so when I told people the name of the church they were able to tell me

how to get back to the apartment.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

I went to the outdoor market which is on a street five minutes from

our apartment and bought a crusty bread and some vegetables. The

market is really vibrant—full of great food stands and, on various

streets off the main street, stalls with clothes, hardware and all

kinds of other things. We ended up buy six steak knives from one of

the stands. They are made of surgical steel and were in most of the

apartments we rented in Sicily.

We had a nice breakfast of the fresh bread, cereal and milk, and

tea and then went exploring. We wandered all over Ortigia and saw all

the important sights there. There are lots of tourists in Ortigia

because it is a beautiful area of the city, with wonderful stores,

cafes and many ornate Baroque buildings.

The Duomo in Siracusa

The Baroque and elegant Duomo in Siracusa is one of the most famous

buildings in a city that is full of splendid buildings. It is the

main feature of the Piazza del Duomo, a large car-free area, that is

full of coffee shops and restaurants.

We made our way back to the market where we bought a large round

of cheese, a melon and other things. At the cheese shop we had a

conversation with one of the clerks. The store had large platters

with slices of bread and cheese on them. After we tasted the cheese

we liked it so much we bought some. Our farmers markets in California

have the same ambience as the Ortigia market. Wandering through the

markets like the one in Ortigia, you go into a kind of trance and feel

like you’re in some variation of the Garden of Paradise.

We took the Navetta to the central station in Siracusa and

decided to look around the “new” part of town. A man on the Navetta

told about a wonderful supermarket that we passed on our walk through

the “new” sections of Siracusa. There wasn’t much to see—cafes,

restaurants, small shops, one after another. We walked back to the

Supermarket and stocked up on food…enough to last us for the remainder

of our stay in Siracusa/Ortigia.

Our television set was supposed to get the BBC but we couldn’t

figure out how to get it. Lynette asked a neighbor to come and he

found it and told me how to get it, so we watched some news, after

more than two weeks without much information about what was happening

in the United States and the world. After all the chasing around

we’ve done, we were really tired and a bit run down. Lynette said

she’d like to have us over for a drink some night, but I assumed that

wouldn’t come off. And I was right.

Tuesday, May 17, 2012

We went to Noto today—yet another of the marvelous places to visit in

Sicily.

It is, in essence, a two-street town. After we got off the bus, we

walked up the Viale Marconi which leads into the Piazza Municipio

which becomes Corso Vittorio Emanuele. All the important buildings

are located on this street or in streets off it between it and the

other main street, Via Cavour. There were lots of other tourists,

but not so many that you found their presence oppressive. We were in

Sicily a few weeks before the summer, when Sicily is overrun with

foreign tourists.

Sculptures Underneath a Balcony in Noto

The horses in the picture are found in a beautiful Baroque building

with half a dozen balconies, each of which has sculptures beneath

them. It is on a street off Corso Vittorio Emanuele and there were

hundreds of tourists taking photographs.

We had ice creams at a local café and watched the world pass by.

Thursday, May 17, 2014

Yesterday we went to the archaeological museum and to some ancient

ruins near the museum. I’ve been to so many archaeological museums

that I was a bit bored. And the ruins weren’t that much—not after

we’d been to Agrigento. There was a huge cave that we went to…it was

nice and cool in the cave…then we looked at a Roman theater that was

going to host some kind of show and was full of technicians doing this

and that.

We are getting set for our trip to Catania tomorrow. It is only

90 minutes away but it will also take some time to get to the hotel

from the bus station. Catania isn’t supposed to be very nice. We

will go there and see for ourselves. You can’t always trust tourist

guidebooks.

Friday, May 18, 2012

We said goodbye to Lynette, took the Navetta to the main bus station

and a bus to Catania. Then we took a bus to the center of the city

and in short order arrived at the Hotel Domus. It is on the second

floor of a large building and is very clean and well located. We had

a large room with very high ceilings. And, best of all, my tablet

worked and I could use it in our room. Like many of the hotels in

Italy, the lighting was rather weak at night, but that wasn’t that

important. It also had a modern bathroom and excellent shower.

Catania, I thought, may not have the architecture of cities like

Siracusa, but Catania is a pleasant city. Our hotel was on the main

street, Via Etna…a street with department stores and other stores and

the usual collection of coffee shops and restaurants. We had come to

Catania so we could take a train around Mount Etna. We found out that

it left from a station that’s about a fifteen minute walk from the

hotel. You just continue up Via Etna until you come to the station.

We explored Catania for a while…wandering here and there, seeing some

of the sights of interest. Our vacation was passing quickly.

Somehow, though some of the days seem to last forever, the weeks had

flown by and we only had two more nights in Sicily.

Saturday, May 19 2012

We had an excellent breakfast. One of the clerks went to the bakery

around eight in the morning and came back with a huge bag full of

fresh pastries. I had a large cappuccino and bread, salami and

cheese. Then we packed up and went to the small train station and

caught the train to see Mount Etna. You circle around it and don’t

get very high up it. The train stops in a small mountain time and you

get a couple of hours there to wander around. We found some nice gift

shops and got some things for friends. You on get occasional fleeting

glimpses of the mountain

Mount Etna

as the train winds around the area. It finally deposited us in an

area where we could take the train back to Catania.

At the train station, while we were waiting to go back to

Catania, there was a family: an elderly man, his wife, their daughter

and their grand-daughter. She was the only one who could speak

English so we had a nice conversation with her and she translated for

her family. I spoke Italian to her mother and parents. We decided to

walk back to our hotel from the train station and had a pleasant half

hour walk. Our walk also gave us an opportunity to see other sections

of the city and get a better idea of what life was like in Catania.

I may add a section to my journal on “Travel as Voluntary

Suffering.” There are many pleasures to travel, but there are also

things that are not so pleasant—the long haul plane ride, missed

buses, getting lost in maze like cities, and all kinds of other

indignities to which the tourist must submit. Just a thought.

Sunday, May 20, 2012 Last Day in Sicily

We took a bus to Palermo and it was just a short walk from the bus

stop to our hotel, a two star hotel on the seventh floor of a

building. Our room was small but hotel was clean and we had our own

bathroom. We took a walk and went to dinner at a small restaurant not

far from the Stazione Centrale. Our pasta dish was Pasta Carbonata.

We waited for about twenty minutes for it to come out. When the

waiter brought it out, it little piles of pasta, we were surprised at

how good it was. Phyllis had roast chicken and I had veal for our

main courses, and then we had a salad with red peppers. It was a

great meal. We went back to the hotel and packed for our return flight

to San Francisco.

Monday, May 21, 2012.

We got up at 4:00 AM, had breakfast at a little café near the station,

and boarded are early bus for the airport. My last taste of Sicily

was a delicious cappuccino and some Danish pastry. Our flight to Rome

was uneventful, but our flight to Chicago was delayed for more than an

hour. We were supposed to leave Rome at 11:15 AM but boarded our

plane at 1:05 PM. We had a three hour wait scheduled in Chicago so we

didn’t worry about missing our plane to Chicago. Our flight from

Chicago had to make a landing in San Jose (so we were told) because

the heavy winds meant the plane was running low on fuel. One way or

another we finally got to the International Airport in San Francisco,

caught an Airporter bus to Mill Valley and got home tired but happy.

Lino block Artists as young man Decoder Man Secret Agent Playboy

Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of Broadcast and ElectronicCommunication Arts at San Francisco State University, where he taught between1965 and 2003. He graduated in 1954 from the University of Massachusetts inAmherst, Massachusetts, where he majored in literature and minored inphilosophy and art. He received a Master’s Degree in journalism (but alsostudied at the Writers Workshop) from the University of Iowa in 1956. He waselected to the University of Iowa School of Journalism and MassCommunication’s “Hall of Fame” in 2009. He received a Ph.D. in AmericanStudies from the University of Minnesota in 1965. He wrote his dissertationon the comic strip Li’l Abner.

In 1963 he had a Fulbright to Italy and lectured at the University ofMilan. In 1983-84 he was visiting professor at the Annenberg School forCommunication at the University of Southern California. He has also taught atHeinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany, the Hong Kong PolytechnicUniversity in Hong Kong, Jinan University in Guangzhou and Tsinghua Universityin Beijing, China. Over the years has lectured in thirty countries such asEngland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Peru, France, Germany, Finland, Italy,Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Russia and Ukraine. He lectured on media andsemiotics in Argentina in August/September 2012 as a Fulbright SeniorSpecialist.

He has published more than one hundred articles in publications such asThe Journal of Communication, Society, Rolling Stone, Semiotica, the San Francisco Chronicle and theLos Angeles Times and more than sixty books on media, popular culture, humor, andtourism. Among his books are: Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire; Pop Culture;Understanding American Icons; Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics; The GoldenTriangle: an Ethno-Semiotic Tour of Present-Day India; What Objects Mean; Media and Society; Media andCommunication Research Methods; Making Sense of Media; Bloom’s Morning; Ads, Fads and ConsumerCulture; and Shop ‘Til You Drop. His work on media has focused on the impact of mediaand popular culture on individuals and on American consumer culture. He hasalso written a number of academic murder mysteries such as Postmortem for aPostmodernist, The Mass Comm Murders: Five Media Theorists Self-Destruct, and Durkheim is Dead:Sherlock Holmes is Introduced to Sociological Theory. His books have been translated intoeight languages and fourteen of his books have been translated into Chinese.

Dr. Berger is married and has two children and four grandchildren. Helives in Mill Valley, California and enjoys foreign travel, lecturing onAmerican culture, and dining in ethnic restaurants. He can be reached at:arthurasaberger@gmail.com.

Travel and Tourism Books by Arthur Asa BergerDeconstructing Travel. 2004. AltaMira Press.Ocean Travel and Cruising. 2004. Haworth Vietnam Tourism. 2005. Haworth Thailand Tourism. 2007. Haworth The Golden Triangle: An Ethno-Semiotic Tour of Present-Day India. 2008. TransactionTourism in Japan: An Ethno-Semiotic Analysis. 2010 Channel View PublicationsBali Tourism. (in press, 2013). Routledge