Just in time for the sunset we arrived to one of the most beautiful places we had yet been in Sicily- Taormina. We drove a rocky road to get to the top of the town, and the sun had just started setting behind Etna in a distance. On the other side was the calm, smoky blue Ionian Sea.
We had spent a day getting familiar with the surroundings on Etna and were totally ready for our day out on the volcano. We drove to the start of the most famous ski slopes on Etna (they have to redo the lifts every 5 years after being destroyed by lava) and wanted to hike as high as we could get. Unfortunately the paths to the main craters were closed due to an eruption the week before, and so no one was able to get that far up. The thick fog made everything look so surreal as we checked out some lower cones and craters. Even with a poor visibility, the color scale of the volcanic rock was intense; every shade of red, yellow, purple and black.
We got a car from the airport and tried to get pass the downtown of Palermo, which really wasn’t that fun at all. The street safety there is really bad, we could see crosses set for young people who had passed away on that road (disturbingly with photos on them!), let's just say that we were glad to get pass that part. Once out of the city, the drive was really scenic, we could see small villages up on the mountainsides and plenty of plantations along the way. Somewhere quite in the middle of Sicily, we drove up to this small hilltop village called Enna.
For our annual autumn getaway we headed to an island best known for its volcanoes, great cuisine and Mafioso (well, maybe little less for that these days but yet an exciting thought…). So we got on an early morning flight from Paris to Palermo, and we were on our way!
