Eating in Erice: Option 1 or Option 2?

Eventually, everyone got tired of the standard pasta and sausage the conscripted restaurants were serving and went off menu to explore a bit more.

Granted, once we got through the list of restaurants serving the conference, we started to find more interesting choices: "arancini"–aka 'oranges', fried balls of risotto with delicious ragú center, pizza (eggplant/aubergine was a Sicilian favorite), and meatballs.

Regardless, one night we went to a wine bar for dinner. Here, we had a delicious antipasto with cheese, salami, procuitto, olives, & some sort of sweet garnish. I followed this with some great gnocchi (which I've never been able to pronounce). We tried a local pastry for dessert: a sort of round pastry crust filed with ricotta cheese or cream. My impression of Sicilian cuisine (at this point) was that it is heavy on sugar, carbs, and pistachios and light on vegetables.

Most of the restaurants we went to served a house wine in an unmarked glass decanter. It is served by the liter or half liter and comes in 'red' or 'white', unless you're specifically looking for something. The red we had at the wine bar reminded me of strawberry lip gloss.

The inner courtyard of the converted monastery which hosted us. 

Foot Traffic

Inside Erice, our home base was the Ettore Majorana Foundation & Center for Scientific Culture. The center is named after an outstanding Italian physicist who was born in Sicily in 1906. It hosts many, many scientific meetings across many different disciplines every year. It seems to be one of the two main sources of incoming money for the city–the other being tourism (for the view).

Tourism is here

The center uses several converted monasteries to host meeting participants–I stayed in the San Franciscan building; ironic, I know, what with me being from San Francisco and having just come back from a visit home. Room 21. OF COURSE. (The number stalks me.) The room, though refurbished, contained bare walls, a stony and sandy floor with a few decorated tiles, high ceilings, twin beds, and a tall, shuttered window that opened onto the stairs leading to the floor above. The double doors entering the room were also shuttered, giving a kind of french door feel. There was a bidet in the bathroom (every bathroom had one in Italy), and the soap they gave us (olive oil based) was impossible to open. I wonder if it was more of a philosophical tool: We seek the means to cleanse ourselves, but no matter the force we apply to the method we think will get us there (this being the screw top cap), we are foiled. If this is the case, then f#^k you philosophy, I stabbed it in the side of the plastic bottle with my tweezers and got soap out that way.


The night we arrived, I was peer-pressured into trying Limoncello (it is STRONG and leaves a lemon drop after taste in your mouth), resulting in the hilarity that normally accompanies my alcohol-face, and marsala wine–both sweet and dry–this resulted in less severe alcohol-face, but it is also definitely something you drink sparingly.

The courtyard at Ettore is beautiful. There is an inner garden inside the open courtyard plan of the building. Many of the buildings in historic Erice follow this style. The streets themselves feel narrow and fully enclosed in stone, like a maze made of identical stone streets at every turn (or this is how it feels at first), but inside the front doors, buildings open up into private courtyards with gardens or plants–you've walked into personal space carved out of the crowded surroundings. As it turned out, this architectural structure was echoed in several of the other cities I visited on this trip.

This isn't to say the streets themselves feel unpleasant in Erice–They're mostly very clean and the windows and balconies have interesting ornamentation, ornate railings, and sometimes plant growth along the walls. The walls are largely smooth and bare, without ornament besides what seems to be several species of lichen giving the town a characteristic rosy brown hue. Several dogs have the run of Erice–they stake out one or two streets where they have dominion and flop down on a doorstep.

Some dogs might be street dogs, but not all of them.

Largely the only traffic that passes these canine observers is foot traffic, but once in a while a little garbage cart or an absurdly full-size car will try to make its way through the narrow streets. They really must have a special reason for trying to navigate Erice any other way than by foot.

Beautiful door

Pasted on the wall–fake old?

A private inner courtyard

Outside a restaurant

A typical street in the city.

Artisanal painting

One of my preferred ways to explore a new area is with early morning runs. I'm not a fan of long distance running in general (especially without a dog), but something about exploring areas with old buildings and long histories makes it easier to get up in the morning and lace on my running shoes. On my first morning run, I tried to stay inside the streets of historic Erice (there isn't any room up here for any other, more modern sectors of the town to surround it, leaving the old town isolated and lacking the modern expansions we generally see with other european towns. In those cases, a central city often expands outwards until it swallows several other nearby towns–this helps explain why there are so many churches within one town or city in Europe).
I immediately struggled to pick out landmarks that would prevent me from getting lost. The best I could do at one point was to identify a street by the smell of doughnuts.

The morning sun was gorgeous over the walls and by the mountain next to the bay. I still hadn't quite figured out where to best see this incredible view. It was only the next day that I found my way to the flat outcropping that afforded the best view from ground level. The best view overall was by far that from the coffee break room above our lecture theater; it looks like an oil painting (pictures in the previous post).

Erice: Too bad the view was shit.

This October, our lab took a trip to a workshop on "Genomic Imprinting, Epigenetics, and Physiological Functions" in Erice, Sicily. This gave me a sneaky way visit Sicily by taking advantage of covered airfare. It's bunches of fun to be the only non-EU traveler in your group when there's limited layover between your connecting flights with separate airlines.

Of course, I set myself up to do this in the most difficult way possible–by pre-loading my jet lag with a week trip back home to California. Go me! This of course landed me a sore throat that made me feel like a bullfrog most of the time and like someone was carving me a Chilean necktie when I swallowed. Sicily itself turned out spectacularly, but one of the lessons I learned (and looking back can apply here) was the phrase our friend Francesco gave us: "In Sicily....maaaybe." Maybe the pharmacy would be open.... maybe it wouldn't. Most of the time it wasn't. Especially when we were on a cliff 750 feet above sea level and still right next to the coast line.

View from the furthest edge of the cliff on which Erice is perched

It turns out this coastline of Sicily (we flew into Palermo and drove to Erice) is characterized by a lot of abrupt cliffs– they appear very suddenly compared to the rest of the landscape, making you wonder what sort of geological magic brought them into being. As you're climbing the clifftop on which the historic city of Erice is perched, weaving back and forth on tight turns, you simultaneously get a sense of how high these mountains are and of the surrounding landscape.

The view of Trapani as we climbed to Erice

The air was hazy, which made long distances difficult to pick out, instead fading them into the sky as if there was no true horizon. This was particularly prominent when you looked out to sea. In once instance, while at the conference, we trekked out to one edge of the cliff (I could run around the cliff edge and the historic city center in about 10-15 minutes) to watch the sunset. The water ran into the sky as if there were no horizon, and the clouds in the distance cut across the sun very like the rings of Saturn, giving me the impression that we were on some alien vivi-sphere, encased in blue but absent of any boundaries or landscape beyond what we could see.

A panorama of the unfortunate view we had EVERY COFFEE BREAK.

Morning run around Erice, view over the wall

A view of the coast through an alley

Castles

Matt and me, wondering why we ever got into science.

Another view of the castles at sunset. We're looking the wrong way to see the sunset though...

It's hard to capture sunsets on your phone.

A ring around the sun, like Saturn

Inland, Sicily looks brown like California, with dry orchards and many, many olive orchards perched on rocky mountainsides. These orchards often have deteriorating rock shanties with low, small doors–sheds perhaps? They have no road leading to them, suggesting they serve people who tend the orchards on foot.

Vineyards on the way to Erice 

It seems Sicilians spend a lot of time on their doorstep, watching the world go by and smoking. It's so central to the culture, even the stray dogs do it:

These dogs were hanging about the streets most of the time. It's a small city center, so you run into them a lot.

Even in this isolated city center on top of a mountain, there were a lot of dogs around Sicily. Some of them are strays, some are not. It's hard to tell at times. I suppose we must have more programs to pick up stray dogs in the UK and the US? I could tell people really loved their dogs, but they must have focused on their dogs particularly, rather than dogs in general.

Next up: The history city of Erice (which is small and whose economy seems to run mostly on hosting science conferences and tourism!)