Hopping Along the South Coast of Sicily

After a rather boring 9 hour motor (no wind) from Malta we arrived at a very nice marina in Marina di Ragusa on the south coast of Sicily.  This is a popular wintering marina in Sicily.  Many people were coming in for the end of the season and getting their boats ready for winter life.  We arrived just in time for the end of summer celebrations held every year in the town.  There was a huge waterfront festival and great fireworks display - actually a competition between three teams.  The fireworks started at midnight and the celebrations went into the very wee hours.  We had a great view from the deck of Songster to watch the fireworks.  

 

 

 

Marina di Ragusa is the port town for the inland city of Ragusa, about 20 km away.  We took a bus to this town which is made up of an old medieval town and a new modern town.  The old town, Ragusa Ibla, was a rabbit warren of winding streets and stairways going up the hillside.  At one point we got quite lost.  It was enjoyable walking all around looking at the beautiful, is sometimes run down, baroque buildings and churches.

The winding pathways along the hillside dwellings in the old town of Ragusa Ibla

Gargoyles supporting a balcony

Duomo San Giorgio

Marina di Ragusa has some lovely beaches and the usual waterside cafes and gelato bars.  It is a popular tourist spot for Italians.  One evening as we were walking through the town square, we came upon a boot scooting, country line dancing competition.  Various groups in American West outfits entertained a fairly bemused crowd with their line dancing and singing of country western songs.

 

 

 

We stayed at Marina di Ragusa for nearly a week as there was some bad weather predicted.  As it turned out it wasn't so bad where we were but other parts of the Eastern Med experienced a very nasty Medicane (Mediterranean hurricane).  We knew some people who were in the middle of it and thought they were going to lose their boat, others did.  A boat tied up to the wharf in Lefkas was bashed so badly it sunk in a matter of minutes. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_lQ2LBCHWw  We had walked along this stretch of waterfront many times during our winter in Lefkas.

Since leaving Marina di Ragusa we have been doing relatively short hops to marinas along the south coast.  The south coast of Sicily is open and sandy with very few protected places to anchor.  This means we must stay in marinas, which tend to be much more expensive than marinas in Greece or Turkey.  We knew this was going to be the case as we moved west and we just accept these differences as we travel.  Bob is getting much better at manoeuvring Songster, with its long keel, into tight spots so berthing at a marina isn't quite the trauma it used to be (except on the wallet!) 

The definition of a marina is quite different in Italy.  There are some professionally run places like at Marina di Ragusa, but more often a harbour will have multiple pontoons for pleasure boats with each individual pontoon run by a different group or family with varying degrees of facilities and professionalism.  Yet a berth at a pontoon offering only water and electricity, no toilets, showers, laundry or café, will charge as much as a well set out marina providing all these extra facilities.  These ‘pontoon marinas’ really are equivalent in facilities to the town wharfs in Greece and Turkey.  At those town wharfs we would be charged about 10 Euros per night and often they were free.  In Italy a no frills berth on a pontoon costs 4 or 5 times that.  That is as much as we normally would pay for a hotel room when we do land travel.

After leaving Marina di Ragusa we moved on to Licata.  This was a rather run down, poor town with rubbish everywhere - rather sad and depressing. The best kept area was the huge cemetery.   This was a terraced area covering a whole hillside, the size of a small village, filled with ornate and well maintained headstones and mausoleums for whole families.  It was very pretty and interesting to walk amongst the memorials to family, yet just outside the gates were people living in slum conditions.

Town hall in Licata

View of the cemetery and harbour

Next stop was San Leone.  This was a stopping off point to visit the Valley of the Temples, a site of a 5^th Century BC Greek city.  We spent the day tramping around the dusty rocks enjoying the impressive Doric style temples.

Temple of Concordia

The old and the new

Temple of Juno

Temple of Hercules

The rare Agrigento Goat in a pen near the temples - amazing horns!

We did another relatively short hop to Sciacca, a pretty town on the hillside above the waterfront.  To get to the town from the marina we had to walk up over 200 steps.  Once in the piazza we had a fantastic view of the sea and were surrounded by lots of up-market shops and cafes.

Just the right kind of car for Italian streets

Sunset over the harbour at Sciacca

Our final stop in Sicily was Favignana, a pretty island off the northwest cost of the main island.  Favignana was a big tuna fishing area in the mid 19th Century until the locals totally fished out the area.  We went to the tuna museum hoping it would be similar to the great sardine canning museum we saw in southern Portugal ( https://shamballacyc.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-algarve-portugal.html ). Sadly the museum was just the shell of the old facilities and lots of old tins in which the tuna use to be packed. 

The smokestacks and tubs used for processing the tuna

The beach at Favignana with the old tuna processing plant on the left

But there was another archaeological section to the museum which was fantastic. There were displayed bronze naval rams from ancient battle ships. These rams were from a great battle in 10 May 241 BC.  This Battle of the Egadi Islands, which took place a few miles from Favignana, was the decisive battle of the first Punic War between Rome and the Carthaginians. The naval rams were recovered from the ocean floor only a few years ago.  Before this find of 11 rams there were only two in existence and very little known about them.   I was just blown away by these artifacts.  They were decorated in reliefs of Gods or other symbols and in such good condition after 2200 years at the bottom of the ocean.  

A 2000+ year old naval ram

A relief of Nike on the naval ram

The naval ram attached to a reconstructed Roman battleship

Then on our last day at Favignana a boat with lots of divers came into the port.  There was great excitement and back slapping and then an object in a net was lifted onshore by a crane.  It looked like another bronze ram.  It is amazing that the discoveries from over 2000 years ago are still continuing.  I found an article about the recovery of the rams on the internet which may be of interest to anyone wanting more information.  I find it all quite fascinating. http://www.sebastianotusa.it/testi/Royal-Tusa_Egadi_battle%20Curr_WArch.pdf

 

Marvellous Malta

Malta was a fascinating and unexpected gem.  I had assumed it would look like the other Mediterranean islands we have been to.  But Malta has quite an exotic North African look to it, except instead of the square minarets jutting above the skyline, there are the rounded domes and spires of hundreds of churches.  It is a comfortable modern Western European city where everything is clean and efficient, and everyone speaks English.  So it is at once very different and very familiar. 

Valletta from the Grand Harbour

Churches everywhere

We had quite a welcome into Valletta.  As we entered the Grand Harbour and were sailing along the city walls the Saluting Battery fired a canon over our bow just as we passed by.  Unknown to us they fire a canon every day at midday and 4pm from the Saluting Battery.  We just happened to be going exactly underneath this at 4pm on Wednesday when we arrived.  After recovering from a near heart failure, we felt quite important to be welcomed so officially!

The Saluting Battery overlooking Grand Harbour and Fort St Angelo

Taken from Songster - gunsmoke in the air just after being 'saluted'

We spent a week in Malta with Songster tucked up comfortably at the Creek Marina in the suburb of Ta’Xbiex.  The whole country made up of three islands; Malta, Comino and Gozo is only half the size of the single Greek Island of Corfu.  Yet the land is steeped in history from the ancient megalithic Scorba Temples from 5000 BC to the heyday of the Knights of St John in the middle ages to the heroic resilience in World War II.  We went to museums, churches and exhibits from all these eras and revelled in the fascinating history.

We went to St John’s Co-Cathedral and numerous other churches from the 16^th and 17^th Centuries built on the pirated and pilfered riches amassed by the Knights of St John, or today known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.  The Baroque artwork and marble inlaid of the floor and altars were spectacular.

Ornate painted and gilted ceiling in St John's Co-Cathedral

Beheading of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio

Marble Maltese cross

Inlaid marble column

Marble inlaid tombstones

 

One day we took a hop on hop off bus to the interior of the island visiting the Medieval city of Mdina, the old capital of the island.  Unlike Valletta which is one of the first cities to be laid out in a grid pattern, Mdina is a typical Medieval city of rabbit warren streets and old buildings nearly touching across the narrow passageways.

The hilltop walled city of Mdina

Winding narrow streets

The Baroque ceiling of St Paul's Cathedral, Mdina

We crawled around underground tunnels and air raid shelters.  We went to several WWII museums and the Lascaris War Rooms where the WWII defence of the island and the invasion of Sicily were co-ordinated.  We had watched the WWII flag waver, The Malta Story, the night before and fully expected to bump into Alec Guinness in the hallways.  By the by, Malta has a thriving film industry today.  Films such as Popeye, Game of Thrones, Gladiator, Assassins’ Creed, The Da Vinci Code, and Troy were all filmed here.

Crawling through the underground tunnels

The birthing room - imagine going through labour here with bombs falling outside

Operations map

On our last day in Malta we took a long bus ride to Birgu and Fort Rinella on the south side of the Grand Harbour.  Fort Rinella is run by some wonderful historical re-enactors which bring to life British Military history of the Victorian age.

The now abandoned Fort Racasoli with Fort Rinella behind

Sword demonstration

19th Century Victorian rations

Armstrong 100 ton gun - the nuclear bomb of its day.  Fortunately never fired in anger.

We also checked out the Inquisitors’ Palace, the Knight’s version of the Abu Ghraib prison.  The museum presents a fairly sanitized rendition of the Roman Inquisition period which practiced intolerance and torture at the Palace from 1574 to 1798 when Napoleon ousted the Knights from Malta.

Ceiling painting

Not a bad career move to be an Inquisitor

Sadly, despite the modernity and friendliness of Malta, pockets of intolerance amongst the powerful still exist today (as it does in far too many countries).  The assassination last year of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist and anti-corruption campaigner, is a cause célèbre on the streets of Malta.  In front of the law courts is a moving memorial of flowers, candles and tributes to her and her work.  Her anti-corruption investigations were becoming a bit too hot for the powers that be and in October 2017 she was killed by a car bomb near her home.  Some of the quotes at her memorial are quite inspiring.

Daphne Memorial

 

 

There is so much to learn from Malta’s history, old and new, all is relevant to today.