Today was another massive day. Salvatore and family came to the beach house at 10am and were taking us on a day trip to either Siracusa or Taormina. They decided to go to Taormina about 200kms away. After about 2 hours we made a photo stop at a town en route. The weather was perfect and the water looked amazingly blue. We also tried some dried orange peel and sugar made by Alessia’s nonna as a snack.
After a long drive we walked around to find some food. The busy season hasn’t started yet so it was very quiet considering how beautiful this place is! We ordered a bunch of different rolls with eggplant and cheese & ham along with pizza and arancini. We made sure to leave room for some ice cream because that seems to be the thing to do at the beach. There were so many nice flavours to choose from, we ended up picking bacio (chocolate hazelnut ice cream with pieces of hazelnuts through it) and pistachio, the serving was huge but it was really tasty.
After full bellies from the massive gelato we went to Isola Bella. The sun was out so we sat on the pebbles and enjoyed the view before walking closer to the nature reserve park which had a museum. We didn’t enter instead we just chilled and enjoyed the scenery. If only I had my bikini I would have jumped in the water!
After lunch we made our way to a bus stop where we boarded a bus up to Toarmina. This area was up on top of a mountain and is very popular with tourists! We strolled through the town and took in the scenery. The buildings look really nice, it’s how I imagined the Mediterranean would look. There are lots of souvenir shops and fancy hotels around here, this seems like one of the main tourist destinations in all of Sicily.
One of the main attractions in Toarmina is the theatre and Salvatore, Carmella and Alessia have seen this many times so they bought us a ticket each and one for Alessia. We tried to pay but they won’t let us pay for anything! 🙄
The theatre is set up high and against a backdrop of mountains, the volcano and the bright blue sky it looks amazing. It’s really quiet here at the moment and there is repairs and construction work happening but apparently in a couple of months this place will completely full of tourists.
Alessia was telling us she went to a concert in this theatre and while it was dark the volcano erupted during the show and they could see the bright coloured lava from where they were standing, that’s pretty cool, I’ve never seen lava!
We continued walking around, got a nice fresh red orange juice and looked through some more shops. The little side streets are pretty cute and there was one that I could barely fit through!
After some more walking we stumbled upon a wedding that must have been for a police officer or someone official because they were all in very fancy uniforms and had swords! We watched that for a bit, took a few more photos and headed home.
The drive between Catania and Ragusa is pretty long but the country side is nice. Sicily gets 20% of its energy from wind power according to Salvatore and the horizon is dotted with 120m tall generators which I think looks pretty cool!
After a 2.5 hour drive back from Taormina we arrived at Salvatore’s friend’s restaurant in Ragusa called Il Baglio at around 9pm. Salvatore took us to George’s (owner) cellar and we checked out the different wines including an Occhipinti one! The South seem to eat dinner pretty late and it wasn’t until about 10pm that the food started coming out and people were still coming into the restaurant for dinner at that time! They decided on a Sicilian fish antipasto and it was feast! The courses kept coming and the chef also gave us dessert on the house. We left around 12:15am and were exhausted as well as couldn’t move after a wonderful meal 🐷