Chiuso!

Much about travelling in southern Europe in the off-season is wonderful. The weather in this neck of the woods has with few execptions been great – it’s heading for a sunny 60° F today - and accommodation prices are always lower in the winter. That makes what we’re doing both worthwhile and feasible.

But not everything is hunky-dory. We have run into one snag: Chiuso! It means closed in Italian and far too many attractions in Sicily are chiuso, often per restauro – for restoration – or just because it’s the off season.

We ran into this first right here in Ortygia, the island enclave of Siracusa where we’re living. La Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo houses one of the premiere art collections on the island in an impressively forbidding 14th century palace about ten minutes away by foot. Chiuso.

The VP Finance and I, both art junkies, saved it for our second week here and wandered over in great anticipation one drizzly afternoon. Closed up tighter than a drum, no hours shown on the door. This was not our first experience with European galleries and museums being shut down when we visited (alas, far from it) so we expected the worst.

It was confirmed by a sign in the window of a gift shop on the other side of the street (Italian only). When we went into the tourist office later to enquire, the bored young woman behind the counter said brightly, “Chiuso!” – as if talking to six-year-olds (which of course we are in Italian).

Since then, “chiuso,” said with a happy upward inflection, has been our running joke. In Palermo, more than one of the churches we wanted to visit was chiuso. So was the city’s major art gallery – reputedly even better than Palazzo Bellomo (chiuso).

This week we hit the nadir of chiuso. We had been saving up the supposedly superb Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi here in Siracusa for a rainy Sunday. But this week, la nostra cara amica Shelley, an aficionada of classical antiquity, was visiting from Canada.

Shelley went off on her own one day to do the archaeological park (which we had already visited) and, as rain was threatening, also the nearby museum. She came back with a black cloud over her head. The museum, naturally, was chiuso! Per restauro.

So that’s the two major attractions in the city closed down. The third? Probably Il Castello Maniace, the 13th century castle at the southern end of Ortygia. Though a construction site for much of the time we’ve been here, it is apparently open on a limited basis – just never when we’re there.

It occurred to me we could perhaps avoid disappointment by consulting Web sites for the attractions we wanted to visit, which would warn us of closures. Good idea, but no.

The English-language Web page for the archaeological museum in Siracusa, at the site of the government department responsible for this stuff, mentions in small print, under Notes, and in Italian, that the reopening, scheduled for November 2008, was delayed. Google translates the explanation as, "for issues related to the work of regeneration." This would be exciting, worth the wait, if it were a museum with Egyptian mummies, but everything in this museum is stone.

One possible explanation for the epidemic of restauro in Ortygia: our landlord Giorgio told us that in early April – right after we leave – the city is hosting the G-8 (G-otto in Italian – I thought he was talking about the 14th century Florentine painter) conference on the environment.

I don’t want to think it, but I’m guessing that when the big wigs are here, everything will suddenly be aperto.