2014 Trip to Italy and Malta

Journal Pages
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Getting There

Sardinia

Sicily

Malta

To Mainland

Naples

Castiglion Fiorentino

San Severino Marche

 Final Days

To Mainland Italy

October 10

The ferry back to Sicily was also pleasant except for another annoying American film comedy. We had booked a room at the Hotel Villa Ada in Pozzallo. We were very pleased with our room as it was quite large and very comfortable. It was also on the Piazza in the center of town and a very nice restaurant was only a few hundred meters away. We had a very enjoyable meal. Both of us had a lemon chicken, and we enjoyed chatting with the manager who was a very gregarious man. I even managed to tell him (in Italian) the joke about the Italian toast cin cin and how it is received in Japan.

October 11

Saturday morning we drove to Messina and caught the noon ferry to Villa San Giovanni. I think we made the same mistake this year that we did last year when trying to catch the ferry. We went to the wrong terminal but everything worked out okay.  We caught the ferry we had intended and got back to the Italian mainland without incident. We drove for little while and then got off the autostrada to look for lunch. We ended up in a small town called Palmi where we found a pizzeria. We had a pleasant meal and were surprised to find that the manager once lived in America and is a US citizen.

       Messina and Villa San Giovanni from the ferry

We've had some incidents with Mel’s credit card. It seems that the stations that have a free-standing payment machine can't process the card, so being able to fill up has been challenging. I was able to fill the car at a station that used the little Wi-Fi card readers.

    A hilltop village seen along the autostrada

We spent the night in a very nice B and B in Lamezia Terme. There really isn't much to do in that town, but it was a good stopping point to break up the drive to Napoli. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant and it was very good - even the house wine. There was a table of five Americans and on their way out we learned that they were from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Then when we left the restaurant there was another American couple from Reston, Virginia. That was the most Americans we have encountered on this trip. The Italians tend to eat a lot later than Americans, so the restaurant didn’t begin to fill up until about 9:00. We were just finishing our meal when the restaurant got busy – they waiter came along and cleared our table, a hint they wanted the table free. We’ve never encountered this in Italy before.

We had an email from our Italian language partner in San Severino Marche – he knew we were planning to go to Genova at the tail end of our trip. He warned us about the flooding in that town. Hokey Smoke! There had been 17” of rain in 24 hours – the town was a mess. The rain water had flowed down the hills, sweeping cars along the way in to the piazza at the bottom of the hill. We watched the news on TV and were amazed that there weren’t more fatalities (apparently only one). There must have been 100 cars jumbled together like toys in the piazza. The news reports showed crews shoveling up mud into large trash containers. The whole city was covered. We decided to wait for a few days to see how long it would take to clean out the mess before we decided if we were going to change our reservations.

October 12

We had a pleasant breakfast at the B and B, then headed to Napoli. About two hours into our drive we stopped for coffee and Mel discovered that she had failed to give the innkeeper the keys to the room. She called the innkeeper, who didn’t seem all that concerned about it, but she felt terrible about causing such an inconvenience.