The problem of Breakfast had become troubling. The excursions seemed to be meeting earlier and earlier in the morning and we were going to bed later and later. The need for sleep and the need for food were butting heads and sleep was winning. Disney offers a special breakfast room service in addition to its regular 24 hour room service. The 24-hour room service seems to have been bulked up for this cruise as the offerings are more substantial and meal-like, probably in deference to those returning from their excursion past their assigned dining time, something that can happen easily in places like Rome, where 10.5-11 hour excursions can turn into 12 hours or more if traffic is bad enough. The breakfast service remains stubborn in the Continental breakfast vein and longing for proteins while we gnaw on breads and cereals didn’t seem to be the best idea before a day of walking. We decided we would eat at the Topsiders buffet before wandering out into the world.
The wakeup call is a delicate negotiation with Lisa and I taking opposing but equally valid sides: Lisa wants to give us enough time to get up, get ready and have a leisurely breakfast while I want to get as much sleep as humanly possible. Lisa’s side might seem to be the most sensible, but once you’ve experienced how long the days are here and how short the nights seem to be, you’ll be swayed more heavily by my side. We both usually agree to a time somewhere in between enough and too little. Much like real-world negotiations, what both parties do is another thing entirely. Lisa had somehow “accidentally” scheduled the wakeup call for earlier than we had agreed, though not by much, but every millisecond counts.
Lisa took an inordinate amount of time to get ready, but somehow I was the one at the receiving end of the countdown clock chronicling how much time we would have to eat at Topsiders if I got out of the shower at that very second. With 20 minutes to spare, we made our way up to the buffet.
Despite our need for protein, we decided that lugging a pound of bacon in our stomachs up the hills of Sicily was not the best idea, so we ate the meat sparingly and loaded up on carbs. We were in and out of the dining room in under 10 minutes, so all the rushing was wholly unnecessary despite Lisa’s reluctance to admit it. Still, we agreed, if we were going to eat light anyway, we might as well go Continental, especially considering how lackluster the offerings at Topsiders had been.
We were seated in Rockin’ Bar D. You can always tell the popularity of the excursion by the venue they lined you up in, and the sizeable Rockin’ Bar D was on the large side of medium. It was bursting at the seams, though, so one can only imagine what even more popular excursion had muscled it out of the larger theater forcing so many people to mill around without seats.
We made our way down to the buses and were on our way. Our tour guide today was a cute, sharply-featured, raven-haired Sicilian who spoke perfect English in a midwest accent, which was entirely off-putting since her flawless Italian was spoken with an entirely different accent. Somehow she was maintaining two entirely separate accents.
The highways of Sicily are stunningly beautiful. When they don’t have panoramic vistas to offer you, they are lined with lush greenery, with even the divider overflowing with flora. When they do have panoramic vistas to offer you…WOW. Sicily has to be one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen, and this was just from looking out the bus window. The countryside was surrounded by mountains, and the valleys were hilly and green, dotted like quiltwork with farms that were built impossibly into the slopes, as if the farmers suffer from some form of depth perception that causes them to ignore the undulating landscape and plant anyway. The whole effect is breathtaking and I must have filled up half my memory card before I got off the bus.
Pieces of Sicily’s history still stand, part of the countryside, untouched by modern development. Sicily was apparently conquered once every 15 minutes. I’m sure native Sicilians and some of their more fervent expatriates would take offense to this, but judging from the extremely long list of conquerors that our tour guide rattled off, Sicilians can’t defend themselves for shit. The remains of what little defense they had still line the countryside, though, and one of the more prominently visible ones were the defense towers against Pirates. Built on long stretches of land jutting out into the sea, these towers formed a network through which news of the impending Pirate attacks would spread by the lighting of fires, each tower signaling the next closest to light theirs, and so on, until the entire island was warned in under four hours from the first sighting of their ships. Of course, since this is Sicily we’re talking about, all this really did was lessen the raping and pillaging the pirates were capable of, it was only until the Spanish came along and conquered them, then chased the pirates off with their armada, that Sicily was free of that particular scourge. It’s interesting to note that once Sicily got its act together and started taking care of themselves, they immediately formed the Mafia which has had a stranglehold on the more innocent citizenry ever since.
We passed by gorgeous scene after gorgeous scene on our way to the Trapani region that contained both Erice and Segesta. If I get any of my facts wrong here, above or below, it’s because I was more fascinated by the scenery than what I was supposed to be seeing (which was fascinating, don’t get me wrong, but you have to see this place to believe it). Our first stop was Segesta, an ancient city preserved by its isolation, something that it wouldn’t seem to have considering its history. More on that later. The city of Segesta was founded by the Elimi, someone you probably (definitely) have never heard of, but someone you might be familiar with if you’re at all familiar with ancient Roman texts. In the Aeneid, Aeneas and the other sons of the recently destroyed Troy are wandering across the Mediterranean in search of a place to found the new Troy. Their journey, of course, is fraught with peril and at one point Aeneas’ father, who was so frail that Aeneas carried him on his back out of the fallen city, dies. The father was a hero and so he must be given a massive funeral in keeping with his legacy, something that couldn’t be done at sea. Aeneas and the Trojans land a little south of Segesta in Sicily where preparations for the funeral are done, something that takes enough time that the women of Troy realize that Sicily is somewhat of a paradise, perfect for their needs. They also realize that it is decidedly not the new Troy, and they hatch a scheme to force their husbands to stay: they burn the ships. The men realize they’ve been crossed and run down to the shore to extinguish the flames, but several of the ships are destroyed. Some are forced to stay behind as a result and these are the Elimi, who are the founders of Segesta. That’s the legend, anyway.
We made our way up the hills to Segesta’s little base camp, a small parking lot with some restrooms and a souvenir shop. Outside the visitors’ gates was a sole merchant who I briefly considered patronizing for the entrepreneurial spirit that brought him all the way out here to the middle of Sicilian nowhere, but then I realized I didn’t need any jewelry I could get at the mall. Despite the fact that we had already gone quite a ways uphill in the bus, everything in Segesta was quite a ways more uphill, so everyone decided to take a bathroom break beforehand, the guide included. The guide handed the #5 Mickey paddle over to Lisa, who hoisted it proudly, until I got jealous and took it from her.
There was another bus, a shuttle bus, because they have to make money somehow, that we all piled onto. Somehow this bus managed to have less air conditioning than a bus with no air conditioning, but the ride was only a few minutes long, so we complained as much as time allowed. The temple at Segesta was nestled in isolation in the beautiful landscape as we ascended. It would be our next stop. First we were headed to the hillside town of Segesta to see what life was like in ancient times.
The bus let us off directly in front of the Agora, the central marketplace in any Greek or Roman town. I had read about these countless times in my four years of Ancient Greek (don’t be impressed, straight C’s, and that was probably just because I’m so handsome) but this was my first time ever seeing one in person. My first reaction: those are some small shops. My brain had not yet shed the world Walmart has created, where even Mom and Pop shops have to stock thirty different kids of everything in order to survive. What did these merchants need with any more space than this? They had this incredible view as well as several luxuries, the most impressive of which was the plumbing. While the foundations are all that remain of the building here, leaving you to imagine what they appeared like in their un-crumbled states, the plumbing was perfectly preserved. The craggy remains of the shops stood in sharp contrast with the perfectly beveled troughs that carried running water through the shops, giving you an idea of how amazing the rest of the place must have looked if they took such care to make something hidden so beautiful.
We walked up some more steps past the Agora on our way to the remains of a temple. I took a hundred more photos of the insanely beautiful countryside. I don’t think I’ve impressed upon you enough how breathtaking it is. Perhaps the photographs capture just a tenth of the beauty I experienced, and if they do you’re a better person for seeing it. It is as if the landscape is a blanket thrown hastily aside one morning a billion years ago and the Sicilian people have grown their civilization on god’s unmade bed, daring the rippling slopes to stand in their way. I’d love to tell you about the temple, but the truth is I was staring out over Sicily instead of listening.
We made our way past the temple and into the theater. The pathway, along with other places here in Segesta, contained these little marble rectangles with “Restauri” and a year alongside them. This indicated the year they were restored. Some places are more perfectly preserved than others but some needed a little work before the public could visit.
The theater (which I labeled the amphitheater in all the pictures, forgetting that to be an amphitheater like the Colosseum, it’s got to be totally enclosed, instead of open to the countryside like this one. I’m going to beat a dead horse here, but I’m fairly sure that at least half the people were here for the view instead of the show. The view from here included the highway we had just been on, and if the Sicilians built it intending for it to be a thing of beauty, it worked. Never have I looked at a highway and said “That enhances the view”, but it did. Back to the theater: the theater was the Elimian version of a Greek theater, with small things just so slightly off. The dead giveaway was the VIP section, the only seats with backs in the whole theater. They were at the very top instead of right up front as they would be in a Greek theater. The acoustics here were pitch perfect and they needed to be for everyone to coordinate their pictures. We took our time wandering up and down the steep stairs, staring into places clearly cordoned off from our view, and just standing on the edge of the cliffs, contemplating jumping just to be part of Sicily forever. It was time to make our way back to the bus before we got a chance to make our decision.
The bus made its way back down the hill, offering us another view of our next destination: the Temple at Segesta. The sites are counted as two separate attractions and thus require two separate admissions, which our tour guide handed out as the descending bus threw her up and down the aisle.
There was no bus to get to the Temple at Segesta, only steps. A lot of steps. So many steps that I realized that whatever reason the tour guide was going to give us as to why the temple is incomplete was wrong, it was clearly that they ran out of material after building so many damn steps. The tour description said that moderate activity was required of those attending, but if you’re not in your prime, like me (honestly, although I am clearly not prime anything, I didn’t have too much trouble getting up top, it was mostly the insane heat that was bothing me) you might want to reconsider taking this tour. Find out if the other tours offer the same views, though, because if they don’t, this one is certanly worth dying for. Lisa actually did die on the way up, but was miraculously resurrected before she could collapse, much to her regret. She was continually dying and being reborn, like an exhausted and reluctant Phoenix, so much so that every new step was a new reason to give up on the whole idea of walking ever again. I ignored her protest and prodded her forward, knowing the reward was greater than the temporary (or, judging by the amount of steps, near-infinite) pain.
The Temple at Segesta was worth the hike. It is the only standing temple in all of Sicily in its semi-finished state, mainly due to its Athenian origins. The temple builder was most likely Athenian as the temple shares a lot more in common with those found still standing in Athens than it does with the ruined temples found elsewhere in Sicily. The most important Athenian feature, the one that’s kept it standing, is the construction of the columns. Most Sicilian temples used four drums from top to bottom as support, but here they use anywhere between 9 and 12, meaning a lot more to bear the load. The temple and its lack of completion told the story of Segesta and the Elimians. Segesta was constantly threatened by usurpation by other, larger cities, most notably Selinunte to the south. Selinunte was thriving and expanding at a startling rate and was encroaching on the land of the Elimians. This sparked a long and storied rivalry that saw the much smaller Segesta allying itself through cunning with larger states in opposition to Selinunte, each dealing with it (and its even larger sister city, Siricusa) with varying degrees of success. Despite the track record of Segesta against Selinunte, the Elimians were such ingenious diplomats that they were never without protection for too long. The Temple at Segesta represents one of their crowning achievements in diplomacy. The Elimians sought the protection of Rome and did so by appealing to their common ancestry: they were both the sons of Troy, it’s just that the Elimians got left behind. To prove their bond, they built the temple, its architecture a demonstration that they were cut of the same cloth, but only as much as they needed to. It was, after all, pretty far up on the hill (maybe the steps were all part of the plan) and it looked pretty convincing from below, so the Romans agreed to lend them a hand before they ever got around to finishing, adding such important elements as the marble, the completion of the columns with fluting and removal of the upper and lower supports, and, most noticeably, the roof.
When we were done exploring the Temple at Segesta, we made our way back down the buses. The steps hadn’t seemed all that steep, to me at least, going up, but going back down you didn’t so much step from one to the other as fall briefly and recover. I gave my condolences to Lisa, who would’ve cursed at me if she had the breath. We loaded onto the bus after another bathroom break and headed to our final destination: Erice.
We booked this tour as we did most of our excursions, as a balance between the nerdy archeological sites that appealed more to me and the rich cultural sites that appealed more to Lisa (truth be told, both appealed to me equally, so I win!). Erice was the cultural side of the equation, though since it was a fairly perfectly preserved medieval Italian town built on top of an ancient Roman one, I won on that front, too.
Erice, like Segesta, was built atop a hill. This one was a lot higher, though, more of a mountain, and so we took cable cars up to the top. Our cable car mates included a family whose daughter had just spent 6 months in the Walt Disney World college program and her stories of everything she’d see walking backwards on the exit ramp of Peter Pan were enough to make your think that every tourist is a complete and utter jerk. There were a lot of funny stories, but I don’t want to incriminate her with the details we shouldn’t have been told, so you’ll have to find your own castmember to befriend to find the seedy underbelly of WDW. The view from the cablecar was stunning, with the city of Trapani giving way to the Mediterranean Sea with two islands in the hazy distance.
There was, of course, more walking once we got to the top. Erice has very recently been improved with more modern roads (the old ones were so treacherous that a school atop Erice had to be moved below to Trapani because the commute was so arduous) and the cablecars we had just stepped out of. The bus would meet us in the parking lot we were making our way through toward the gate of Erice.
Erice was a walled medieval city and its only entrance is through the gate to the main throroughfare. The gate was built in the 15th century while the walls were built in the 13th (I assume there was some sort of hole prior to the building of the gate). They weren’t kidding about the medieval part, as the roads were clearly not built with any sort of modern transportation in mind. The main street was not our first stop, though, and we hung a sharp left to the main church of Erice.
The church is stoic and imposing on its outside and grand and breathtaking on the inside. Its location at the front of the city was not in keeping with most medieval towns, which had them at the back, but this was done for the age old reason of location, location, location. Erice had been the site of a pagan goddess of love and her temple was located in the back of Erice. It was a site of pilgrimage for pagans and thus a prime target for demolishing by the Catholic Church. After the temple was razed, the pagans continued to come to worship at the ruins, so instead of building a church there, where they might just continue worshiping their old god as they did now, they built a new, better church at the entrance, visible to all immediately as they entered, as a way of luring the tourists from their intended destination. It was the International Drive of Medieval times.
The aforementioned inside was amazing as compared to the relatively unspectacular outside: everyone gasped as they entered. The vaulted ceilings had intricate carvings, the pillars descending from it framing beautifully the elaborately sculpture behind the ornate altar. We paused here, staring at the beauty from all sides, as the tour guide related the pagan-ridding history of the church. There was a reliquary off to the side of the church that we wandered into, walking on the tombs of priests as we toured.
We made our way outside the church and through some side-streets to the main street of Erice. The sidestreets held more clues to the age of Erice than the still heavily utilized main street, and our guide stopped to show us the entryway of the previous building that the current building was built on top of, something common not only in Erice but throughout Europe. They were recycling long before it was fashionable.
The main street of Erice is very much a main street, bustling with humanity in its narrow corridor. The streets were cramped, but vehicles still ascended and descended, and anyone on the street had to put their backs to the wall to avoid being run over. During our visit, the beautiful postwoman was making her rounds, handing mail out her window to one of the 200 permanent residents of the town.
In the middle of the main street was Pasticceria Maria, a pastry shop where we would sample the famous almond cookies of the region. The electricity had gone out, a daily occurrence in the hastily wired town of Erice, so we were escorted into the courtyard where our host, Maria, brought us plates of different almond cookies to enjoy. We enjoyed them so much that we bought a sampler to return to the ship with before returning to the courtyard where Lisa enjoyed a Limon Granita. The lemon was bitter, so it was good that I didn’t get one, but she enjoyed it thoroughly.
We had some time to explore Erice on our own upon reaching the main square. The more touristy shops were given a free pass as they were crammed into the small spaces of impossibly old buildings. We wandered into what amounted to a grocery store, where we were given free samples of olives and Marsala wine as well as some other tasty treats. Lisa fell in love with the place and we only reluctantly left when it became apparent that we would need electricity if we were going to make do.
Our bus picked us up and we descended a quarter of the way down the mountain to Belvedere San Nicola Turismo Rurale. I’m sure some of those words are in the wrong order, but I have no idea which ones. We sat down for lunch with our cablecar mates as well as a couple that was set to hike Vesuvius the next day, something that we thought insane considering how hot our day in Sicily had been. The meal was very good, with antipasto served alonside the house wine, followed by some pasta and stuffed veal, finishing with a ricotta cheesecake, all of this while overlooking Trapani and the Mediterranean, as well as a pool that we all considered jumping into at one point or another.
The bus descended down Erice whose modern roads were built in the style of the Amalfi Coast, so that every corner held a mystery as to what would be speeding toward you. We ignored the likelihood of our deaths, though, as the descent offered the most amazing views of a trip filled with amazing views, ones that, if they were all we paid for, we still wouldn’t have paid enough. The rolling countryside and the mountains were now joined by the Mediterranean Sea, and the beauty was almost painful, especially since we knew now we were leaving it all.
Our return to the ship was made infinitely more interesting by a trip through the city of Palermo. There were sites to see, but I couldn’t tell you about them, because infinitely more interesting to me and most everyone on the bus was the intricate ballet of Italian driving. There were plenty of cars on the road, but the stars of the show were most certainly the Vespas and other scooters, who would wind their way through traffic as if everyone else on the road was inconveniencing them, just one more obstacle to deal with on the way to where they were going. Stoplights made for the best show, for while the larger vehicles waited patiently in their lanes, the Vespas poured in from all sides, all inching forward, a constant supply of newcomers feeding the giant pack at the front. The green light meant we were now all following a parade of Vespas, like some strange funeral procession for a Hell’s Angel.
The least enjoyable part of any excursion here is the line for the boat. The port authorities are inevitably large and labyrinthine in an effort to impress the travelers to their port, but since we’re all more concerned with collapsing back in our cabins, the effect that yet another grand staircase had on us was probably not what they intended.
We returned to our rooms. Some enterprising DISboarder had placed a new Medhead magnet on our door and we proudly displayed. Thanks, whoever you are! We both took turns showering, by far the best showers of our lives.
We had dinner with Andy and Laura who had braved Palermo on their own and came back with sunburns to prove it. The sun bore down hard the entire time we were in Palermo, but at least we had bus breaks in order to give our skin a rest. Andy and Laura’s only respite was in the catacombs, where they stood beside corpses with leathery skin and a row of dead children that made them long for the skin cancer that awaited them above ground.
We returned to our room where Laurel, our room steward, had turned down the sheets nicely and left us an elephant towel animal. I dutifully took pictures of it before collapsing, cursing the call I would get from Mickey the following morning.
Naples was next, with a trip to Sorrento and Pompeii awaiting us.