Aperto!

As an antidote to the last post (of a few minutes ago), here are some recent pics showing glorious reasons for being here in Sicilia in February anyway. (First two are Ragusa, an hour west of Siracusa, and the last two are Ortygia.)

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.

Boat City

As noted elsewhere, our routine is to go walkies in the late afternoon to catch the good photo light. The last couple of days, Ortygia's many boats have been catching my eye.

Some in not such good shape.

My name is Gerry, I am a book-a-holic

On the long train journey back to Siracusa from Palermo on Saturday, my VP Finance for the first time used one of the two e-book readers I brought to Italy. (An e-book reader is a book-size electronic device that displays text in very high resolution. See earlier post.)

The next day, after she finished the book – a mystery I had bought at Christmas and loaded on the Bookeen Cybook Gen3 for her – I asked about the experience. “I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “I read a book. It wasn’t irritating.”

That may sound like damning with faint praise but is actually high praise. She had long resisted the notion of e-books. When I first started reading on a first-generation Toshiba Pocket PC six years ago, she tried it briefly and turned up her nose – you had to push the page-turn button every few seconds because the PDA screen could display such a small amount of text.

But the new e-book readers like the Sony (see pic) and Bookeen models I brought to test solve the problems she saw with reading on a PDA - they’re easier on the eyes and you don’t have to turn the page as often.

An e-book reader can be a godsend to book-a-holics like us when travelling (or at least away from home) for a long period. You can’t bring too many paper books with you on a plane or you’ll end up going overweight on your baggage and paying through the nose – especially now with reduced baggage allowances. That said, we brought 15 or so between us. We could order from Amazon or Chapters (Canadian) and have them delivered to Italy, but shipping overseas would drive up the price.

You can buy English-language books here in Siracusa. I picked up a rather worn copy of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino in English translation for €1.50 at a place that was selling second-hand books to raise money for charity. But selection is poor and prices for new books generally high. We saw one travel book in a local shop priced at almost double what we paid on Amazon before leaving.

E-books from sites such as eBooks.com and Books on Board typically cost less than the paper version – I paid $7.95 (U.S.) for the mystery novel – and you can fit hundreds on a reader. But while selection is growing all the time, you can’t get everything published. You can’t borrow e-books from an e-library either, and you can only share the ones you buy with up to two other devices.

One solution: download the text of books that are out of copyright from sites such as The Online Books Page, format them for the reader using free software such as Mobipocket Creator and upload them to the device. Free books. In a future post, I’ll describe the fairly simple e-book creation process.

End of the affair

Oops. My love affair with Italian trains (see previous post) has ended – badly. I will still make the case for public transit in general, but in Sicily, we have discovered, the train is not the way to go for most trips.

To get back to Siracusa, from Palermo where we had been on a mini-vacation while our apartment here was rented out to someone else, we had to take a train from Palermo to Messina – a major city at the northeast corner of the island from which the ferries go to the mainland – and then change for a train that goes along the east coast through Catania and back to Siracusa.

Total travel time, usually: over six hours. Travel time by car or bus: under three hours. Part of the train travel time is the lay-over in Messina, but not much of it.

The trip started badly when the cabin we chose turned out not to have any heat, or very little – it was freezing for most of the three hours to Messina. Maybe there was no heat on the train at all, we don’t know. We arrived in Messina to discover that the train bound for Siracusa, which was coming from Rome across the Straits of Messina on a ferry, was late – an hour and ten minutes late!

Meanwhile, Giorgio, our very kind landlord, had offered to pick us up at the station in his car, at 10:30 when the train was scheduled to arrive. I had to text him to say it would be more like 11:30, on Saturday night.

The public areas of the Messina station were unheated. The temperature outside was probably around 5 degrees Celsius. Ours was not the only train over an hour late, so there were a fair few people shivering while they waited. (The pic shows the VP Finance waiting in another cold train station, the one in Agrigento: note grafitti.) The topper: the washrooms were locked up, apparently being renovated. This is a station with ten platforms, the major ingress point for trains from the mainland, in a city of a few hundred thousand, and there was one set of washrooms, closed for renovation.

About 15 minutes before the revised train time, we wandered over to the platform. The train was there – we had heard no announcement of its arrival. We climbed on, found our cabin – reserved seats on this train – and shooed the family of squatters (30-something mother, two children under 12, a dog running loose and a cat in a cage.) We had barely settled in when the train pulled away. A good five minutes before the new posted departure time. Ay caramba!

All’s well that ends well. We’re back “home” in our Siracusa apartment, and it’s a gloriously sunny, if cool, day.

On the buses

Back in “the last century,” as we saw the 20th referred to recently, when the VP Finance and I were new whelped as a couple, we travelled all over Europe by train and took public transit everywhere, or walked – or, shudders, hitch-hiked. In more recent years, we have generally rented a car, or on a couple of occasions, leased a new one from a French car maker on one of their special plans for tourists.

This was for a few reasons. Renting cars and buying gas for them in Europe grew cheaper, and the idea of driving in a foreign country – even in England and Ireland where they foolishly drive on the wrong side – less intimidating. Also, of course, driving gives you flexibility and the option to go places where it would be inconvenient or impossible to go on public transit.

At the same time, public transit, a fantastic bargain in the 70s and 80s (of the last century), became more expensive. But that trend seems to have reversed itself here in Sicily. Car rental is relatively expensive (€30 a day is cheap, and it can go as high as €70, with no special deals for a week.) And trains are relatively inexpensive. Yesterday, we took the train from Palermo (where we’re vacationing this week) to Agrigento for the Greek ruins. It’s a two-hour ride and cost us less than €17 each, return. In Canada, a two-hour return trip costs more like $70. So we’ve gone back to our earlier mode of touring by public transit.

It has not been without adventure. To get to Palermo from Catania, the island’s second city, just up the coast from Siracusa where we’re wintering, we had to change trains at a place we’d never heard of in the middle of the island called Caltanissetta. Which we thought a little odd – the two major cities, less than three hours apart by car and it was going to take almost five hours by train with the change? It’s for this reason that most people go by coach.

What the schedule failed to mention was that we actually had to get off the train at another station some way from Caltanissetta, get on a bus and drive on switch-back mountain roads to the station, a suburban stop far from the actual city. The VP Finance was about 5 minutes from going into full car-sick mode, she later told me. The drive was spectacular, though – mountain vistas with towns clinging to peaks, the autostrada built on viaducts tantalizingly visible in the valley below but never used until the last few kilometers.

When we arrived at the station, Caltanissetta Xirbi, the mountain air was decidedly bracing, the waiting room was unheated, there were no servizi (toilets) or shops and the train we thought we would be getting never came (because it was Sunday?) so we had to wait for another, half an hour later. (But it had quite an acceptable toilet – whew!)

So that was the train. Then on Tuesday, after hoofing it around Palermo all morning, walking or standing for four hours straight, we were so foot sore and tired by the time we got back to the apartment that we decided it would be a good idea to learn how to use the local bus system.

One main hub for buses is just around the corner from us, Camporeale, less than ten minutes away. We knew this because our Palermo landlord had given us directions from the train station by bus, which we didn’t use that first night. We ended up buying a carnet of tickets from the little kiosk at the square, enough to last us the week. We caught the 122 bus just as it was leaving and headed downtown for our afternoon event, a visit to the Museo Internazionale dei Marionnette (fascinating but over-priced).

Some bus stops are not well marked, but for the most part, the system is easy enough to figure out and use, and reasonably priced compared to home - €1.20 for 90 minutes of travel. You have to convalidate (time-stamp) your ticket when you get on the first bus by sticking it in a little machine. Some of the machines don’t immediately work – even the locals were having trouble – but other than that, the buses are great.

Yesterday in Agrigento, though, we had another little public transit mishap involving buses. We took a city bus from the train station to the entrance of the Valle dei Templi, where all the Greek ruins are (see pic above). Except the bus didn’t stop when it got to the entrance. It only stops on request, and we didn’t realize we were there until we were past it. Oh, well, I thought, it’ll stop at the other entrance (there are two) or we’ll ride it around again – no problem. Problem.

The bus went on a 50-minute tour of suburban Agrigento (great beach views), stopped for a few minutes at the far end of its loop and stopped again at the garage, where we had to change buses and wait while the drivers caught up on gossip and talked machinas (cars). Then finally we looped back around to the temples – an hour later. This time, I told the driver we wanted to stop there, and he did.

The whole time on the bus, I was absolutely furious with myself for not thinking of this possibility and using my half-baked Italian in the first place to tell the driver where we wanted to get off. The VP Finance found my mutterings and execrations off-putting and told me basically to accentuate the positive and latch on to the affirmative. Bah! Where’s the fun in that?

In the meantime, what started as a glorious, unexpectedly sunny day, was rapidly turning nasty. We had about ten minutes of partial sun after we got into the park with its fabulous 2,500-year-old ruins, then the clouds rolled in. Within 40 minutes it was pelting cold rain – the temperature dropped all day - and we were sheltering in the park’s cafe and paying for an exorbitant lunch.

All of which is not to say we’re rethinking using public transit. Far from it. It’s a great way to go. Honest.

Hot time in the big city

I suspect most people who know our circumstances think we’re basically on vacation over here in Sicily. But no, I really am working – most of the time. This week, though, we are on vacation, in Palermo, the provincial capital.

Virtual Vagabonds isn’t meant to be a travelogue but let me say this about Palermo. It’s dirty, crowded, decaying. There are way, way too many cars – way too many – and even more scooters and mopeds. And they’re all driven by madmen. Many have a superstition about their horns. They believe that if they’re approaching a blind intersection and they toot a few times, this magically prevents them colliding with oncoming traffic, even if both vehicles are going about a million miles an hour along narrow cobbled streets. Or – and this is much more important to us – tooting absolves them of all responsibility for killing unsuspecting Canadian tourists on foot.

But it’s also a fascinating place, vibrant and full of fabulous things. On Monday, our first full day in the city, we went to see the number one tourist attraction, the Cappella Palatina or Palatine Chapel. It was built for Roger II, the 12th century Norman monarch who ruled over a brief golden age of multi-ethnic harmony, abundance and splendour in Sicily. Every surface in the chapel is covered with beautiful decorations, mostly fabulous gilt mosaic work depicting biblical scenes. The mosaics were done by Greek artisans. The intricately carved wood coffered ceiling was created by Arab craftsmen. Norman artists were responsible for overall design.

Once again, we rented an apartment, which we found on the Internet at a rent-by-owner site called Homelidays, the same site we used to find the apartment we took in Venice for a week in the summer.

Even though I’m on vacation, having access to the Internet was important, so I searched at Homelidays for properties that offered Internet service (not that many). The one we chose did, but I made sure to specifically ask the owner, a guy who is off working in Paris and renting out his home while he’s away, if the Internet service was available. He confirmed that it was. It wasn’t.

When we arrived, the owner’s friend, a young businessman who works in the area and looks after vacation rentals for a few friends, explained that the modem (by which he meant the ADSL modem/wireless router) was broken and in being fixed. The owner’s father was going to bring it over the next day. Didn’t happen.

Instead, Maurizio, the friend/caretaker brought his own cellular modem, which he uses to connect when he goes travelling. To me this is going above and beyond the call of duty, especially since the next day, he was off to Catania on business and probably would have like to have the modem. But it was much appreaciated. The modem, which connected over a TelecomItalia HDSPA network (very fast) actually works well, slower than a land line connection, to be sure, but perfectly acceptable. It even worked for Skype.

Then on Tuesday, Maurizio’s pregnant wife, Andrea, an Argentinian language teacher whom we had met the first night we arrived, went out and bought a new modem so we would not be without Internet. She called me on my mobile while we were out sightseeing to arrange dropping it off and, when I explained that we wouldn’t be back for awhile, she agreed to let herself into the apartment and leave the modem along with instructions for connecting and setting it up. Which she did.

It took a little more effort than it should have to get it set up but that was mostly my stupidity. Now we’re live on the Net, wirelessly, both of us.

All of the backing-and-forthing on this, incidentally, was conducted in English, almost fluent in Maurizio’s case, not quite so good in his wife’s case, but infinitely better than our Italian.

The broken modem debacle is one of the few blips we’ve encountered in a decade of renting apartments and cottages over the Internet. It turned out well in the end, and showed how kind people doing this (renting to travellers via the Internet) can be. We hardly ever travel any other way. I'm sure there are jerks that rent properties to foreign travellers, somewhere, but we haven’t met any yet.

Ortygia the not so beautiful

We’ve been here over four weeks now, we’ve settled into routines. One of them is going for a walk around 3:30 or 4:00, a welcome interruption to the work day, when the light is often good for photography.

For the first few weeks, we were gobstruck by the beautiful – pretty – aspects of Ortygia, the medieval island enclave of Siracusa where we’re living. And it is very pretty in many ways – the sea, the baroque architecture, the boats, the light. And I’ve taken lots of postcard photos.

But Ortygia is no heaven. For one thing, it’s a city under construction. Generations of Ortygians abandoned the place for the “new” city on the mainland, across 100-meter-long bridges. The old buildings mouldered.

More recently, enterprising folk and the city itself have been renovating historic structures, in part to help foster the tourist industry. But slowly. We are constantly wandering by buildings that are absoltuely gorgeous but abandoned and in terrible need of work, and others that are wrapped in scaffolding, undergoing a much-needed make-over.

Ortygia has also unfortunately been touched by the modern, especially along the sea wall and near the bridges. We are absolutely mystified by a current construction project over near the marina. It appears to be a totally unnecessary blight. Giant, unidentifiable concrete block structures are blotting out the water view from a lovely little park under the shadow of the sea wall.

It stinks of the corruption that we understand from all we read is rampant in Italy. We must ask our landlord, Giorgio, about this project to find out what it’s all about. Why would you destroy this lovely part of the city, as they are surely doing?

And then there is the breakwater and raised promenade on the other side of the downtown – on what we call the wild side, the Ionian Sea. It too smacks of a municipal project sullied by corruption. The elegant-looking park benches on the promenade, for example, are made of steel – which has rusted badly. If you sat on them you’d end up with brown stains on your clothes. What idiot thought of that idea? Or let it pass.

The VP finance, given the chance, would also rail against the grafitti (which I rather like) – no conincidence perhaps that it’s an Italian word – which is everywhere, especially on the new modern structures.

Anyway, to view some of the less picturesque side of Ortygia, see my latest post at Flickr.

Broke, then baroque

On Saturday, the VP Finance and I road a bus to Noto, a hill town about 35 km from Siracusa. The attraction: fabulous baroque architecture – palaces, churches, squares, all built by renowned architects of the day as part of reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1693 that flattened most towns in southeastern Sicily.

It’s the kind of side trip that perfectly exemplifies the way we want to travel. That is, live and work in one reasonably interesting place (Siracusa) long enough to get past the purely touristic experience, but take little jaunts, like this one to Noto, for the day or overnight, to sight see. (Next week we head to Palermo, three hours away by train, for a full week.)

As a prototype for future excursions, the trip to Noto was generally a success. The VP Finance sometimes gets car sick, especially in motor coaches, but she was fine, even though there were some switch-back roads. We took the bus because the train dumps you 25 minutes from the historic centre, whereas the bus puts you down exactly where you want to start sight seeing.

The day was supposed to be warm and sunny in Siracusa. Noto was only partly sunny and decidedly cooler, presumably because of the altitude. We arrived at about noon and the place was lively. The kids had just got of school (we think it’s half-day Saturdays here.) Teenagers were lounging on the steps of the gorgeous 18th century Duomo, taking in the sun and goofing off. Pensioners were sitting on the benches in the squares.

But by the time we came out of the Duomo – lovely in its way but disappointingly un-gaudy – Noto seemed deserted. This was a little after one. Sicilian lunch hour (three hours actually) has a way of emptying streets. We had the place pretty much to ourselves.

Lunch at Al Buco, recommended in Frommer’s Sicily was disappointing – veal from an elderly calf, oleaginous roast potatoes, uninspired salad. In fairness, we probably ordered the wrong things – meat instead of fish, potatoes instead of pasta. The rest of the day, we happily clambered up and down the hilly streets and ambled back and forth along the main drag, Corso Vittorio Emanuele, snapping pictures of the stunning buildings.

When we were ready to leave, we discovered that buses back to Siracusa were nowhere near as frequent as we had imagined. We had to wait over an hour and a half. Part of the time we spent on a bench in the pretty little Giardini Publicci, watching the kids play and munching beer nuts bought from a peddlar in the park.

More pictures here.

A modest proposal

Newspaper owners need to wake up and smell the pancetta. For six or 12 months before the big economic toilet flush, industry news was full of doom and gloom about declining readership and advertising, all the fault of the big bad Internet. Now that we’re in recession, is it likely to get better? Don't think so.

The response from newspaper publishers: much hand wringing, little creativity. So I’m offering, gratis, a suggestion. Are you listening, press barons?

Adopt an e-reader such as Sony’s Reader Digital Book, Amazon’s Kindle or Bookeen’s Cybook (shown here), or even have one custom built, and start publishing electronically. Oh, I know, the newspapers are all publishing electronically on the Web, but who wants to read an entire newspaper on a computer?

E-readers are book-size devices that use a radical new screen technology that behaves more like paper than LCDs or CRTs. The screen doesn’t emit light (so is easier on the eyes) and is significantly higher resolution than LCDs (so easier to read). And the devices are portable – you can take them to the john.

Why should newspapers do this?

The selfish reason: if they play their cards right, it might help them save their dwindling subscription readership – and the advertising it attracts. The less selfish reason: it would be a boon for the environment.

The print newspaper industry takes a terrible toll on the environment – starting with the very dirty pulp and paper industry, then the transportation of raw materials, the mammoth energy-sucking printing presses that produce newspapers, and finally, the transportation of finished product. All of that comes at a big cost to the newspapers, both economical and environmental.

With an e-reader edition, newspapers could eliminate all of it, sending the complete contents of the paper to subscribers over the Internet, either directly to an e-reader (the Amazon Kindle can connect over Wi-Fi) or to a connected computer for later transfer to an e-reader over a USB cable or Bluetooth connection.

E-readers retail today for between $300 and $400. If newspapers started buying them by the tens or hundreds of thousands to distribute first to environmentally-minded premium subscribers and later to all subscribers, I’ll bet the unit price would drop below $100.

So, let’s see: $100 times the number of subscribers, versus the cost of producing and delivering print editions day in, day out, forever and ever. And what a great premium to attract new subscribers. The e-reader can also be used to read e-books.

Why am I writing about this here, now? Because one of the big frustrations living virtually in Italy is having to read The Globe & Mail online on a laptop screen. It’s cumbersome – all that clicking on links and waiting for pages to display – and hard on the eyes. Especially for me – my laptop has a 13-inch screen.

I’ll leave it for another post to talk about my glorious failed attempts to suck the Globe off the Web and put it on an e-reader in readable format. Much frustration.