The Travelling Buncebury's

Covering 15 May to 20 May 2019   a particularly good flowery roundabout in central Sicily To me, one of the most surprising things about Sicily is the number of world class archaeological sites even though I now know a bit more about their varied and warlike past.   I always have trouble though visualising much of what is in front of me when what’s there is a litter of masonry.   However, there is enough at the sites of whole cities here where only a few structures stand to be mightily bird hunters checking out a tree for thrushes impressed.   After views of a few hill towns which tend to become indistinguishable after a remarkably short time we did head into the centre of the island to visit the Villa Romana del Casale, noted, and rightly so for the remarkably preserved mosaic flooring.    The superstructure on the buildings is modern and meant to be seen as such.   The result is impressive and it looks like one of those small reconstructions often seen at such si

covering 7 May to 9 May 2019 Syracuse from the old town There’s a good motorway standard road system here in Sicily which is mainly near the coast and a good dual-carriageway one too so it is possible to get from and to some places quite quickly.   The normal inland standard road system is however often poor with too many potholes and like many old road networks covers the country in a meandering manner.   So on some days we seemed to drive quite a distance but on others we covered hardly more than a handful of parasangs before we were at our day’s destination. Quite a number of filling stations here have a member of staff to handle the pump for you and we nearly got caught at one.   There are different prices for self fill and attended fill and before we’d noticed the difference had pulled up at the wrong pump.   It was Heather who noticed, fortunately because it was thirty cents a litre more expensive !   That’s an extra twenty euros on a tank of fuel and we’ve

Covering 3 May to 7 May 2019 the Greek Theatre in Taormina what grass ? Unsurprisingly there was conflicting advice on the internet about ferries from the mainland across the Straits of Messina to Sicily.   So we had a jolly little tour through the back streets of Messina, with just the one opportunity to back out of a side road to avoid a low bridge.   This was backing into a main road (no tootling of horns by the locals) and we turned up at the large ferry port to find it deserted.   We found someone who told us that we needed the next port up the coast to get to Sicily and fortunately it was only a short way.   Heather was convinced we weren’t going to get to Sicily that day or possibly even the next but the fair winds of fortune blew for us again.   We pulled into the ferry terminal and got a ticket for the next ferry which was only forty five minutes away.   The straits are narrower than I expected and the boat took only twenty minutes or so to make the

covering  27 April to 2 May 2019 near Praia a Mare on the Tyrrhenian coast a bit of a jumble in Maratea looks good but the water was freezing Our route hasn’t been quite as much of a zig zag as it might seem and we were now on the west coast near a place called Maratea (not to be confused with Matera from the last blog) which sounded interesting.   Described as like a southern Amalfi coast, we were expecting great things and while it was very scenic as we went further south, this stretch was nothing too special.   For some reason I was convinced that Maratea was on the coast and we caught a train with our bikes one Sunday morning to go and see it.   It wasn’t on the coast and the station wasn’t in Maratea either.   We cycled to it and it ended being about 5 kilometres all uphill to get there.   Very lively on a Sunday morning with cafes open and people milling about and then we realised that this was the precursor to church attendance.   After a good look roun