That was our Secondi - swordfish rolls - thin slices of swordfish rolled up with herbs, then cornmeal and fried. The simple sauce is tomato mayonnaise with a little caviar on top. (As we have learned to do, we share meals and take turns ordering the courses - but we have been married so long there are rarely disagreements).
Our antipasto was seafood salad: clams, squid, octopus - the chewy things:
Our Primi was Tuna Roe (bottarga di tonno) pasta. I was not going to leave Sicily without trying this Sicilian classic. Note that the bowl we shared was a serving for one person. Sheesh. Getting fat is not my goal in life, but I just like to taste tasty new things.
I am a caviar guy, but that tasted like fishy, salty breadcrumbs. I would do it again, though, I guess, but I still think that pasta was the worst thing that happened to Italian cuisine.
We do recommend that restaurant Archimede, right down the alley from the Archimedes Museum
The final stay of our trip was a tenuta about 10 miles outside Syracuse. This elegant farm/estate is mainly a lemon orchard, but they grow plenty of blood oranges for their own use. Nice B&B. As I said, you can eat their lemons like oranges.
That's their courtyard:
We drove down to Siracusa each morning. By accident sort-of, we ended up in the Archeological Museum one morning. We poked around a bit, but on travel I need to be outdoors and moving. This Greek has what it takes:
Always interesting to me are the constructions of the Greek decorations, reconstructed from paint fragments (Sicilia was a core component of Magna Graeca, the Greek cultural and commercial empire). Greek colonists flocked to Sicily the way Sicilians flocked to New York:
Fresh-squeezed orange juice stand. You can pick the blood orange juice, or the ordinary. My advice: drink the blood.
Panini? I won't eat that junk anywhere.
OK, more food:
We drove over to see the archeological park, where the Greek and later Roman town center was (Ortigia was the port). At some point, I will have seen enough Greek, Phoenician, and Roman rockpiles, but it does stimulate the imagination.
The Greeks built this theater to hold 5000.
Still in use today:
Greek kings built this altar large enough to sacrifice 250 bulls at one time. Quite a feast. As with ancient Jewish sacrifices, the priests and kings took what they wanted, and the crowds took the rest of the meat. The gods only got smoke.
Off to Ortigia. Since our trip was off-season, we easily parked in town all day. We have mastered, by trial and error, the intricacies and mysteries of Italian parking.
Main fascination to us? The Duomo di Ortigia, first built as a temple to Athena, but since revised by the Normans, Byzantines, etc., with a post-earthquake baroque facade. What is cool is that you can still see the original Doric structure embedded in the history:
Without the earthquakes in the late 1600s, there would be little baroque in Sicily - and all of the pre-Parthenon Greek temples and structures would still be standing. The wedding-cake baroque is fun to see, though.
The Pizza del Duomo is a hopping place. Old American towns had greens, but no piazzas. It's a shame:
More meals we had in Sicily. New tastes, often different from mainland Italian:
- Mixed green and white tagliatelle with a dressing of basil, anchovy (sardine), sun dried tomato, oil, and almond paste
- Gnocchi with cingiale (wild boar) sauce
- Wood-fire grilled meats as secondis: pork, piglet, cinghiale, goat, beef, veal
- Cingiale with pistachio sauce
- Swordfish with parsley/walnut pesto
- Tabouli with mint and zucchini
- Classic Sicilian Pesto on bruschetta and on pasta: basil, anchovy, almond, tomato, etc.
Those are just a few...
Another cafe menu:
Naturally, we hiked out to the tip of Ortigia to insepect Roger de Hauteville's old Norman/Viking fortifications overlooking the harbor. Still looking good, Roger. Crazy Vikings went through the Med, even all the way up the Danube, and I don't blame them:
Something good: A Pistachio Popsicle:
I had a clam sauce for lunch on the harbor. Other than those sweet tiny Med clams, not much different from what I make on Cape Cod:
Ragazzas splashing in the harbor. How come Italians do not, or cannot, swim?
We took dinner one night at our tenuta. After a normal Sicilan antipasto of grilled veggies, cheese, etc, the primi was the usual eggplant pasta:
Then a secondi of grilled baby pig with pork sausage. Always lemon with pig:
For dessert, classic Italian means fruit. In this case, a bowl of blood oranges, picked an hour before. The Italian couple at our adjacent table consumed their entire bowl of them.
Best things about Italian cultural life? The Roman Catholic Church, the music, the history, the food (sort-of), but most of all - the piazzas and the daily passagiata. Civilized. Everything stays open until 9, and everybody comes into downtown to stroll before dinner at 8 with dogs, babies, and elderly great-grandmas. Wonderful sense of community. Rulers and invaders come and go, but who really cares about more than your own town and family?
Basic, most frequent Sicialian food flavorings and ingredients? Pignolis, almond, mint, fennel, eggplant, octopus, fresh ricotta, pistachio, olives, potato, pasta, tabouli, pork, squid, swordfish and tuna. There seems to be only one cheese in all of Sicily, and it is bland and rubbery. Bummer.
Final photo is Mt. Etna steaming, from the Catania airport at 5:30 am. We just dumped the nice, brand-new Peugeot at the (closed) rental place, threw the key in the slot, and hoped for the best. Word to the wise: there's no extra charge nowadays for a pick-up at one airport, and a drop-off at another. We did Palermo to Catania.
