Sicily = Mexico? (Monday 12 October -- Friday October 16th)

Did Sicily break off from Mexico 50 years ago and go full steam across the Atlantic and squeeze through the mouth of the Mediterranean and engage in a blanket memory-embedding marketing campaign to convince us all that it has always been here? Just kidding. Kind of. We stayed in Taormina, saw Mt. Etna, engaged in cooking adventures (we had a kitchen in the apartment we were staying in), were epically lost in Catania (I can still hear a projected Dave Moore in the car: "Goddamnit! Goddamnit! You've got to be fucking kidding me! Can someone please put up a street sign?!!"), had a nice afternoon on the beach, saw some amazing ruins, got a haircut, and wondered if every square inch of architectural wonder in Taormina had been grafted onto a shopping mall (it had). Favorite town: Noto; the entire town had been built out of the same toasted yellow-hued stone (thanks to Google: "Noto’s stone is a variable-light yellow colored Miocenic fossili ferous calcarenite, belonging to Palazzolo formation which is of sedimentary origins from the Iblei series.").  Our last day and a half in Taormina, it rained... poured... like crazy; after the Messina mudslides, we didn't sleep so well.

We spent our last Sicilian evening in Palermo because we were feeling a yen for the insanity and beauty of an Italian city. Palermo was supposed to be more insane than Naples, but we found it to be reminiscent of New York-Brooklyn (with the addition of lots of pretty boys on scooters [one of whom was hauling ass down one of the streets with a baby in one arm (obviously, baby car seats, etc. are an invention to get Americans to spend more money... the Italian version of a car seat is sandwiching a child inbetween mother and father careening down a gothic street at top speed)]). Amy had a good afternoon photographing all of this happening while I played bodyguard. There was a lot of Richard Scary half-the-house revealed scenarios where we got a real appreciation for the layers of history, architecturally, that are layered on top of one another in a living breathing millenia old city like thick paint. For dinner, we went to Osteria di Vesperi where we got the tasting menu (house-made bread including squid ink bread [think Jane's Oceanoff-winning prosquiderol], raw fish platter, ravioli, pasta rings with barbequed octopus, lamb, tuna, cheese plate, dessert [as well as several amuse bouche... everything was covered in bottarga]); it was really good but way too much food. Amy's quote: "I feel like I swallowed a basketball." We got up at 6AM on Saturday and embarked on an eleven-and-a-half hour train ride to Rome with the intention of rewriting NYT's 36 Hours in Rome.