Sicilia, Napoli Roma: two months in Italy: the choice to saunter

martedì 15 febbraio 2011

the choice to saunter

Ortigia is such a luscious and interesting and small place. Though from across the bridge and off beyond the station, major major walk away, the 15,000 seat Greek theatre beckons. As do so many other things wave and invite. Around the corner, less than 100 metres away, the Palazzo Bellomo invites us in, to see the regional museum of contemporary and medieval art.

But no, we pitched for a saunter and the sun, going 250 metres to the promontory at mouth of the Porto Grande, to visit the Castello Maniace. Photos of geometrical and architectural form, in the main. See how sunny. We had our wonderings about walking in the footsteps of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, or...

On the way home for siesta, we chose an extraordinary place to eat, owned by he who turned out to be the sculptor with his studio below us here. Wonderful food in imaginative setting.

This photo below shows very elegant and clever modern drainage - these in terracotta but the same unit construction different scale used for example to carry waste to the ground from multilevel building works

and here to enter the restaurant, carved waiter holding embroidered menus

wattle is in bloom

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TOP PHOTO

A seat on the cliff road at Positano just off the Amalfi Drive, south of Naples.

Just out there in the blue, the Sirens lived and tempted Ulysses. Ulysses' men, according to Homer's Odyssey, had their ears filled with wax, rowing furiously, deaf to the lure of the Sirens. Ulysses had lashed himself to the mast to avoid the Sirens' temptation. According to myth, Parthenope, one of the Sirens, fell in love with Ulysses but he ignored here. She came ashore and died of a broken heart near what is now Naples, a city founded as 'Neapolis' by the Greeks — and still Greek, luxurious and epicurean, through Roman imperial times. Parthenope and Neapolitan culture are synonymous.

Also, according to Greek myth, Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of fertility and harvest, was abducted by Pluto and taken to Hades via the entrance to the underworld in the crater of the volcano at Avernus, near Naples. Not knowing of Pluto's action, Demeter charged three of the sirens, including Parthenope, to find her daughter, lighting the sea with the great volcanoes between Vesuvius which broods over Naples to Etna which occupies southeast Sicily. Demeter was angered when the Sirens could not find Persephone, changing them into birds with female faces or in later rendering creature more like mermaids. Demeter eventually came to terms with Pluto for sharing Persephone, each for half a year.(Gosh, how modern!) Persephone, from the Hades of death and sleeping plants, ascended to Demeter, near Naples, with its rich soils, as the bringer of harvests each year.

To travel in Italy from the south to the centre, from Sicily (occupied by Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Germans, French, Spanish and Americans in twists and turns) northwards to Rome, is to follow the heart a special way, through depths of culture and complexity of character very different from the better known worship from abroad of the world of Tuscany and Florence.