I visited Sicily with my father in 1977, staying in a seaside resort, Giardini-Naxos, near Taormina (of D.H. Lawrence fame). Taormina has an ancient Greek amphitheatre and some very pleasant gardens, both of which are worth visiting if one is staying nearby. I saw something of Catania, but now recall only a large, bustling city. We went on a coach tour of Etna, a rather active volcano. The scenery looked a bit like how one might imagine the Moon or Mars, but with snow, clouds of steam and other gases, and tourists. We also went on a day trip to the Aeolian Islands, north of Palermo, my father to Lipari where he had some pumice business to arrange, and me to Vulcano where I took my first and only natural mud bath. I climbed to the top of the dormant volcano, and saw native sulphur around some of the gaseous vents.
I visited Tuscany in August 1999, flying into Pisa (about which I wrote a poem). The Campo dei Miracoli, with the Leaning Tower, Camposanto, cathedral and baptistery, is wonderful. The Camposanto has stunning medieval murals (which, it almost goes without saying, British bombers made a good and fairly thorough attempt to destroy during the second world war.) The rest of Pisa was much less interesting.
I stayed for a week in the towered city of San Gimignano (which is sumptuously photographed in the film Tea with Mussolini). This little city does fill with tourists, but its medieval streets are unmissable, as is the view over the Tuscan countryside from the top of one of the towers.
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San Gimignano from a distance. I walked along the road from which this photograph was taken. There are some lovely Tuscan countryside walks around San Gimignano. |
The hotel in which I stayed was about a mile from the city. This had the benefits of being more peaceful than hotels in the city centre, away from all the tourists, and the luxury of a swimming pool. This was the view walking through the woods in the morning. |
The central piazza in San Gimignano. |
I found Volterra less interesting, although more obviously Etruscan. (I love the spin given to the Etruscans, who were reputed to have loved life and lived it to the full - carpe diem!). Siena is a much larger city. Certainly the Campo, its 14th century central piazza, around which the Palio (its annual horse race) is run, is worth experiencing (analogous with the open space at Place de Beauborg in central Paris). More significantly, the cathedral is very impressive, with its bands of black and white marble stonework, and fascinating mosaics on the pavement floor of the nave.
I should also like to visit Firenze (Florence), Assisi, and maybe Capri. One day, my spoken Italian will be sufficient to sustain a walking holiday during which I should like to go looking for porcini mushrooms in the woods.
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