Blanca & Ian's Travels

Sicily

Trip Report - 2009

Doin' the Ruins
(With a slice of Roma thrown in)

Roma, Taormina, Siracusa, Modica, Menfi, Palermo

Menfi

Baglio San Vincenzo - Contrada San Vincenzo Menfi (AG), Sicilia Italia

http://www.bagliosanvincenzo.it/

Accommodations:  Rm Don Neli.  150€  Very large & nice double-twinned (pushed together to make a double).  Satellite TV via SKY, Jacuzzi shower stall, good-sized shared, breakfast room, restaurant, large lounge area with beverages available

Located rurally 5 kms from Menfi

The Negatives:   Just a teeny bit rough around the edges but trying very hard.

Day 13 Thursday June 4

We were well rested after our ‘holiday’ & it was a beautiful day for a drive.  We set out early with the commuters from Modica & beyond heading for the industrial zone in west Ragusa .  The hwy slowed to a crawl as a line of impatient cars followed a slow truck for 1/2 the 20 kms to Ragusa .  I was impatient too.  And yes, I passed when I shouldn’t have – like everybody else.  Safely but . . . Then the major southerly hwy turned west towards Comiso & most of the traffic died off.  All we had to do was stay on this hwy all across the bottom of Sicily until Menfi with a jog out for the Agrigento temple site.  Easy, right?  Well, this road is never straight for more than 1 km at a time the whole way to Menfi.  If you could capture it all in detail on Google Earth, you would see that it looks like an EKG.  Not that I minded, but I did have a passenger who did offer mildly obscene suggestions for the Sicilian road engineers who designed this road.

We careened around some incredible twisties with 2 somewhat narrow lanes & edged with rock walls toward Comiso & then slowly dogged through center of this busy small town as everybody made their way to work.  The road straightened just a bit & we bypassed Vittoria & I took the opportunity to replenish the fuel.  47€ in diesel so far.  Did I mention that the scenery is quite stunning on this drive?  Mountains are always hovering in the distance.  After Vittoria , it was a straight run – on the map anyway – to Gela .    I would rate Gela as one of the armpits of Sicily .  The hwy runs through a northern part of the town with multiple stop lights & lots of limited congestion.  Trucks, buses & Sicilian soccer moms all compete for road space but you just have to plug along through it.  Certainly not a pretty place.  You bypass Licata to the north and Palme di Montechiaro to the south.  Then on approach to Agrigento you go through a hideous touristy area with hotels & eateries lining the hwy.  When that’s over & with a temple in sight on a hill to the northeast, you get to a rotary.  Yeah, that's right . . . with a temple in sight . . . wow . . .

Your GPS might tell you to take the 2nd exit in this rotary but you really want the 3rd.  You see, there are 2 entrances to the temple area.  One real & the other one real too but you aren’t supposed to enter at the ‘other’ real one.  Confused?  Let me explain . . .  We exited at the 1st road & headed up the hill with the temple to our left on the brow of the hill we were climbing.  The road twirls around as it goes up & you get to a bend to the right but to the left:  a ticket office & a parking lot with a hand-lettered sign.  I missed this & headed down the hill where a museum (or something) is on the right.  Sensing that I blew it & despite the GPS chirping about some nonsense, I turned around & went back.  Sure enough, it appeared to be an entrance & I drove into the parking lot, paid my 2€ & parked with numerous others in a bumpy field intermingled with olive trees.  The parking lot had a trailer toilet & charged 0.50€ to use it btw.  We bought entrance tickets in the ticket office which you insert in the turnstile & it date stamps it & you are in the temple park.  All is well, right?  Actually no, but you won’t know it for a while.  Read on . . .

We walked up the hill to the temple - the furthest one east – know as the Temple of Juno (Hera)  Lacinia.  Wow.  Pretty spectacular setting.  After taking 200 – 300 photos (it’s our 1st Agrigento temple right?) we set off down the stone Via Sacra for more.

Agrigento is an ancient Greek community founded around 580 BC.  It has been invaded by just about everyone.  The partial list:  Carthaginians, Romans, renegade Romans & slaves, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Spanish, Hapsburgs, French & the home-grown Mafia.

I'll let the pictures tell the story . . .

Concordia from a distance

Cactus

After that, you exit through a turnstile & reach the main entrance.  Yes, this is the real one, not the unreal one that I used.  More on this later.  Crossing the busy road there is a parking lot, a café, misc vendors & free washrooms.  Then you enter through another turnstile that needs to validate your ticket for the lower part of the site.  Here you find the jumble of stones that was the Temple of Zeus Olimpico .  One of the largest temple is antiquity, razed & rebuilt & now a big pile of plundered stones.

Then it is on to the actual city where numerous foundations cover a field.  The remnants of the Temple of Castor & Pollux finish your temple photo opportunities.  Note:  modern Agrigento in the background.

There are other things to see on the site – churches & museums & such – but we had some more miles to cover.  We returned to the busy main gate & walked across the road to the entrance to the hill to walk back to our car.  We inserted our tickets in the turnstile & they were now dead.  It would appear that the Italian Archeological Dept want you to start in the middle & do both loops, finishing in the middle.  You can only validate the tickets twice – once for each half of the site.  Hmm.  I appealed to the hopelessly bored gate keeper about my car & she easily relented & let us through.  But why do they let you buy tickets & enter at an unreal gate when they ‘officially’ won't let you go back through?  Answer:  unknown.  So we trudged up the Via Sacra – it’s a long way up when the sun is beating down – exited & retrieved our car from the now-obviously ‘unofficial’ parking lot.

As a historical aside, Sextus Pompey (son of Julius Caesar rival Pompey the Great) sometimes used Agrigento as a pirate base during his spat with Augustus around 40BC.

On the road again (kudos to Canned Heat here – this tune always pops in my mind whenever I strike out on a new road) . . . we set off for our coming digs in Menfi.  Good roads with lots of geological & geographical eye candy.  What a beautiful drive.  The traffic was pretty light & the car’s passing ability was tested on numerous occasions to the terror of my passenger.  Of course, at the same time, Benzs & Alfa 149s seemed to enjoy leaving me in their dust regularly.  The only 4 lane sections on this road were in the tunnels.  Are you supposed to pass in the dark?  Very strange why they haven’t put some slow vehicle lanes on some of the hills.  Since the traffic was light, it was a non-issue for us but I can imagine that there are nice slow trucks with a substantial entourage on occasion.  

We stopped at a gas station/eatery around Montallegro for food but it was a pretty pitiful late lunch.  The views spiced up dramatically south of Ribera.  If you look north around here you can see pretty Caltabelloto perched on its mountain.  That was a town I researched as a possible destination but services were limited.  The hwy sliced easily – albeit slowly with a bit more traffic - through a northern suburb of Sciacca & we were on our home stretch.  

At this point, I was following GPS co-ordinates 37°36'47.85"N / 13° 0'13.97"E.  

The Baglio San Vincenzo is rural & doesn’t have a proper street address so I had pegged it on Google Earth at home & written down the co-ords.  We cut off the highway & wound up on a nice 2 lane road (that had a slow vehicle lane???) for several kms letting HER be our guide.  This road was signed with an end in Palermo fwiw.  The vistas here were the usual stunning btw.  The GPS told me to turn right around a bend & lo & behold there was a sign for Baglio San Vincenzo pointing the way.  We followed the GPS & the signs on a series of 1 lane paved roads that wound through farmland on a plateau studded with olive trees & vineyards with a windmill farm to the north on a brow of the hill.  After 4 or 5 kms we pulled into the driveway.

After settling in (please don’t damage the crusty 16C stairs with your bags!) we wandered the grounds & had espresso & cappuccino in the great room beside reception that has sitting areas & a pool table for guests.

Dinner was served at 8 pm.  3 courses with an appetizer, pasta with shrimp & small breaded pork or veal roulades on a skewer stuffed with egg & cheese etc (25€ pp) plus we downed a bottle of Lanzara’s ’05 Cabernet for 16€.  You are a relative captive for dinner since Menfi appears to have slim food options & it is a ways away.  But this was not a problem for us because the food was very good.  The waitress was a bouncy English-speaking girl & she had a pleasant Sicilian helper.  There was only one other couple + child at dinner when we arrived & another couple wandered in a little later.  We met the other sister/owner (one checked us in) after dinner.  Her daughter was getting married in the chapel on the coming Saturday & she inquired if we would be around to see the service at 11 am.   To me. she seemed to be encouraging us to stay for the ceremony but my wife thinks she wanted to make sure that we would leave before the festivities because they had a gaggle of guests coming.  I like to think that I am right because she was so friendly.  After dinner we sat on our veranda & watched the twinkling lights in the distance.

Day 14 Friday June 5

After yesterday’s long drive (3 ½ - hours with about 3 hrs at Agrigento ) but I knew that we needed to have a ‘softer’ day.  The ruins of Selinunte were nearby & calling to me so we decided to drive over to view them & then go to the beach at Port Palo for lunch.  It was only ½ hr pleasant drive to Selinunte.  From the Baglio, you have to drive the one lane paved farm lanes to Menfi to get back on E45.  Then after 10 kms or so you exit south to Selinunte which is another 6 kms or so right on the coast.  Just follow the signs to a parking area & the entrance center just after the rotary.  This is a large site divided into 3 parts.  One part – with the most intact temple – is on a hill about ¾ km to the rear of the entrance building.  The acropolis sits on the next hill further west & closer to the sea about 2 kms away.  Due to the distance, they let you drive into a secondary parking area beside the walls of the acropolis.  We saw some people that walked it & felt very sorry for them in the sun.  The third area we didn’t go to is found via a path that leads down the hill to the west.

The acropolis is a warren of foundations with a couple of temples thrown in - all enclosed in an outer bastion.  They had a pretty nice view.  One temple has some columns held up by scaffolding for some unsightly reason & the other is just a rock pile now.  The house foundations stretching over the hill are choked with scrub plants but with there are some paths for the adventurous.  Very different feel then from the ruins at Agrigento .  Somehow more real but far more decrepit.

Destroyed by Hannibal in 409 BC, rebuilt & finally destroyed for good in 250 BC

Then it was off in search of Porto Palo.  We drove inland & picked up the rural route that winds (literally) up & down & around through farmland.  After we cut off towards Port Palo, we went right & drove into PP proper & its Saracen tower on our first attempt.  It sits on a bluff & we eyeballed a beach below to the east that looked promising.  We drove back out & took the left fork this time & soon we were coming down the bluff to the beach service road (“Of course, MORE CURVES!!!!” – from my wife).  

One restaurant – Ristorante da Vittorio - had the biggest signs & we gave it a whirl.  It was right at the end of the laneway so it’s hard to miss.  The food was very good & about 12€ for a pasta primi.  I had spaghetti with mussels & my wife had the prawns.  Both dishes were fresh & quite good.  We walked on the beach to stick our toes in the cold Mediterranean (I actually didn’t but she did).  Only about 4 sunbathers on the whole beach.  This restaurant has been proclaimed the 'best ever' by another Fodorite when she dined there in 2004.

Then it was back through shuttered Menfi (lunchtime) & on to the Baglio for siesta & some reading. 

After coffee, the reception’s ‘sister’ asked us if we wanted a tour of their winemaking facility.  The professor’s daughter (yeah, it was starting to confuse us too) took us for an impromptu tour along with assorted other guests that had rolled in that afternoon including 4 Dutch couples.  Lanzara is a very modern winemaker with a capacity of 1 million bottles.  Dinner was a copy of the night before with different dishes (‘pig’) & a different wine - ’06 Lanzara Terre dell”Istrice – their Nero d’Avola/Cabernet blend.  It was all very good once again.  One of the Dutch women abruptly got bored with their resident ‘loudmouth’ & pounced on us for conversation.  She was actually nice & told us that they were on a 4 day trek of Sicily .  They drove to Genoa (9 hrs) & took the ferry to Palermo (20 hrs) so they could tour with their own car.

Later during coffee, we were introduced to the professor who was in residence since the family had started to roll in for the wedding.  They were all very pleasant & made us quite welcome & he was very happy that I was enjoying his wines.

Clunk.  Another good day under our belt.