379 Memories of Italia/Sicilia - Part 1

Memories of Italia/Sicilia
(As remembered 5/6/2005)

May 2, 2002, our first day in Italia started very dramatic, the hotel had to call the emergency team to deliver my wife (Mona) to a nearby hospital, which turned out to be, Hospital Misericordia, Europe’s oldest hospital (600 years old); Leonardo de Vinci apparently studied anatomy in this place, so I was told. As far as I could tell, nothing much has changed since. My wife was unable to stop shaking for most of the day. The doctors established no cause after several blood tests and X-rays, I guess it was fatigue and dehydration. I let her drink a lot of water, whenever the nurse was not looking. The nurse kicked me out from one door only to have me reappear through another door; she finally gave up on me. We landed in Roma, and instead of resting the night there, we pushed on, by train, to Firence; the trip from California was too long. I should have known better! The hospital did not charge us a single Euro, all they took from us, was our passport numbers. They even gave us the test results and X-ray to keep. What a country!

What a difference a day makes. The next day my wife was well enough to do some major shopping, the way she was spending those Euros clearly established that she had regained her full strength. After a few more days in Firence we took the Ferry for Palermo, Sicilia. I was initially attracted to Sicilia, because the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said the following about the place, "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything."  I wanted to find out what Goethe really meant by it.

The morning of May 5th we arrived at Palermo, where we initially planned to stay for nine days, but the hotel we were staying at was not a warm place to be; Wolfgang von Goethe would have agreed with us. The next day we purchased a train booklet good for 3000 km, and took the train to Cefalù, this place was everything Goethe was probably talking about; we loved it. In fact, we loved Cefalù so much that we returned the next day again, and had a great time. This day we started to look for a hotel, and found a nice, clean place across the train station, “Hotel Mediterranean”, we reserved our room for the next six days. It became our home base from which we visited a different place everyday. The hotel was run by an old lady, I called her the “General”, but the staff were all very friendly, even the General came around after a few days and smiled whenever we came home, or sat for breakfast at the hotel.

On May 12th, the weather was anything but pleasant, it rained already early morning. I had long-standing visions of visiting a marina called “Porto Rosa”, which was close to the town of Barcellona, which had a train stop for local trains. As my wife and I walked away from the hotel with our umbrellas, she said, what are we walking in the rain for? This would be a good day to take the train and see this famous Porto Rosa of yours. I could only agree with her, we turned around and headed straight for the train station by our hotel. We took “due biglietti per Barcellona, andàta e ritòrno”, stamped our tickets and within minutes the train arrived, and we were off. Several hours later we arrived in Barcelona, our stop, and discovered that one, it was still raining, actually worse that in Cefalù, two, no bus or taxi was in sight to go to town, which we could see in the distance, and three, there appeared to be no train going back to Cefalù, because it was Sunday. We looked at each other, and acknowledged that we got ourselves into a real fix. My wife blamed herself for coming up with this stupid idea, I disagreed with her, and it was my entire fault for wanting to see Porto Rosa. I asked several people, who appeared to be working for the Railroad, and each confirmed what I understood from reading the timetable, that no train was returning to Cefalù today. The time was 11 o’clock in the morning, the weather was terrible (high winds with rain), our moods were even worse.

[b]Continued in Part 2 - Memories of Italia/Sicilia, which is nearby.[/b]