Catania, Noto and Syracuse

The last couple of days have just been a combination of slow easy days around the apartment and exploring a few near-by towns.

I'm losing track of what day it is now (which is nice), but since I last wrote our first stop was Catania - one of the larger cities in the area. An impressive main square with an imposing Duomo - albeit pretty bare on the inside. My greatest sense of achievement came from successfully navigating the traffic which was an adventure until itself.

Catania is famous for its fish market which we wandered around while I regretted by choice of footwear (thongs/flip flips) and Mum went crazy and bought three kilos of Scampy which all had to be thrown out because they stank so badly.

It seems that everywhere in Sicily was flattened at some stage or an other - in the case of Catania it was 1669 when Etna erupted.

The next day we went into Noto which is a beautiful Baroque UNESCO world heritage listed town. A sleepy old town built into a valley which means steep streets with beautiful views.

Noto was flattened by an earthquake in 1693.

The next two days were pretty lazy ones, just sitting around the apartment with the occasional swim. Even made it down the steps to the sea a couple of times which was particularly delightful.

As I mentioned I've got a decent chunk of freelance work on the go at the moment so I spent most of the two days cracking out some code.

Angus and Kirst arrived yesterday evening which was great. Ang and I immediately sat down to watch the North v. Richmond game. I think the less said about football this week the better - all our teams lost.

Today we went into Syracuse, or more specifically Ortigia which is a small island just off Syracuse and is essentially it's 'old town'. We had a bit of a look around, stepped into the Duomo di Siracusa and then headed down to the bustling market to buy large swaths of seafood in preparation for Angus' birthday tomorrow.