Sicily, Walking from the Centre to the Sea. Day One: Enna to Gangi

Dr Lynne Viti gives us an insight into her recent walking holiday to Sicily with ATG.  Lynne teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, near Boston, Massachusetts. This blog is just one of a series of articles written by Lynne about her trip, all of which can be found on her own blog site.  You can also find her on Twitter @LynneViti. 

Our first morning in Sicily is dry and sunny, a good day for walking. We gather in the breakfast room at the Grand Hotel of Sicily at 7:15, and find that we are a bit early. The hotel workers hasten to accommodate us, and we survey the generous offerings: rolls, bread, croissants, yogurts, eggs, muesli, butter, jam, peanut butter, honey, Nutella, and of course, the most necessary item—coffee. We’ve slept well, but our jet lag persists. After breakfast, we return to our room, quickly pack up our bags and leave them outside our room for Martina to take to the van. We meet our tour leader Stephen in front of the hotel. We’re right in the town square, and we wander around a bit as we wait for the other trekkers.

Enna is seated in the very center of Sicily—Cicero called it Mediterranea maxime. We notice wildflowers and weeds growing out of chinks in the walls below the hotel, and look over to the Duomo only steps away from the parking area in front of the hotel. The very tall doors are closed. I walk up the steps and peer at the inscription over the door. By now all eleven in our walking group have congregated. We climb into the van, and Stephen takes us on a spin through Enna and to the Castello di Lombaria. He parks and we walk around the Castle. In the distance, we can make out Mount Etna, though clouds blur our view. I imagine smoke pouring out of it, but all I can discern is haze on haze. It’s my first volcano.

We return to the van, drive to our nearby embarkation point, and leave it behind for Martina to fetch while we make our way towards Gangi, a distance of about 21 kilometers—though I am still mentally converting kms into miles. The rough road from Enna is an ancient one, running alongside fields and pastures. We begin with a steep incline, and suddenly more than half of our small group has made it up the hill. My heart is pounding and I am sure I will never catch up with them, never mind complete the five-day walk to Cefalu. I stop to take some deep breaths, remembering what my yoga teacher says about belly breathing. A fellow walker stops just behind me on the path. It’s Charles, who says dryly, “We all went up the hill like goats, didn’t we?” I try to laugh and take in deep breaths at the same time. I start on, breathing deeply as I go. Lesson number one: pace myself.

It’s late spring in Sicily, and wildflowers are everywhere. Bright red poppies grow in the fields, next to rocks, in the tiniest spaces in stone walls or stone walks. Thistle, dandelion-like stuff, and rugosa line the drove roads. The group bunches up when the road is more or less level, and spreads out in a line when the road is steep. From time to time we stop at the intersection of our road with another, and sometimes we take the one less traveled, a grass path that takes us by small farmhouses and little vegetable gardens with artichokes, an olive tree or two, tomatoes. We navigate barbed wire fences and gates fashioned of more bared wire and crude poles made from tree branches, tied shut with an old piece of rope. Just when I think I cannot take another step, Stephen points to the macadam road in the near distance and tells us that Martina is waiting there with lunch. We walk on for another fifteen or twenty minutes, the white ATG van a welcome beacon.

We picnic near a small roadside shrine in honor of Pio of Pietrelcina, canonized in 2002. Revered for his piety and wisdom, for much of his life, Padre Pio bore the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, and as if to prove this, a photograph of his face and hands showing the colorized red stigmata sits on a small stand next to the statue on its pedestal. Flowers in planters surround the base. And soon, some of us enter the little shrine, balancing our plates of insalata di frutti, rocket and shrimp, and ripe tomatoes with olives as we settle onto the wooden benches. Others prefer to sit on a stone wall adjacent to the shrine, soaking up sun and drinking Sicilian wine. Martina has chosen two for today, there’s melone and dolci. A few of us take turns crossing the road one by one and availing ourselves of the plein air loo. (I notice that we two lone Americans on this trek are adopting Briticisms) I’m ready for a nap after my four ounces of wine, but we have at least three more miles through the village of Gangi, said to be the most charming in Sicily.

I pull myself to my feet. Okay, as Padre Pio says, “Pregate, speranza, e non ti preoccupare.”—“Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” I try not to worry that I won’t make it through 13 miles of walking today.

Today is the Feast of Spirito Santo in Gangi, and preparations are well underway for the event, which begins that evening. A traveling carnival has set up its rides and stalls across from the Chiesa de Sancto Spiritu. We peek into the church, then wind our way up and through the city. The hills are killing my calves. My husband’s feet are starting to complain. Neither of us says this aloud—a simple look exchanged between us conveys our state of mind.

The last leg of the trip is downhill, a rest for my taxed cardiovascular system, but no break for my spouse, whose wide boots and narrow feet have made a bad marriage. The road we walk out of the city passes by several homes with loudly barking dogs, some of which race up and down along the fence, warning us to scram. The houses become farther and farther apart, and we see chicken and roosters, and the occasional goat penned in with yet more barbed wire. Quieter, more phlegmatic dogs sit quietly in rough driveways. We round the bend and there is the descent—a dry road encrusted with large rocks, and cracks large enough to get a boot stuck in. Stephen points to a tiny spot at the foot of the mountain, far into the distance. “See that L-shaped building? The villa where you’re staying tonight is just beyond that,” he tells us. I can’t see anything but fields and sheep.

The descent is easy for some walkers, but we lag behind, as I want to keep my husband company and try to distract him as he painfully maneuvers down the hillside. We notice small shrines where driveways meet this road, little boxes with glass doors and the Virgin Mary inside. A farmer escorts his large flock of sheep across the road, from pasture to pen. Two dogs marshal the sheep. We stop to watch the action, and to rest our feet. A few paces later, a white dog begins to accompany us.

“Hello!” I say, then I realize the dog likely knows only Italian, so I try my limited stock of phrases from Signora Clement’s lessons years ago.

Giorno! Andiamo, I say, andiamo! The white dog sticks with us, down the hill, onto the paved road, and on up the road to the Villa Raino sign. He lies down next to a truck in the carpark. We are so far behind that when we half-stagger up the walk, everyone else in our group is sitting at small tables on the terrace.

“We’ve ordered beers!” they say. “Shall we ask for two more?”

Never a beer drinker, it occurs to me that a beer is exactly what I want. Plus a hot bath. Plus two Advils. Plus a nap.

Two out of four isn’t bad. We drink our beers, my husband limps off to tend to his feet, and we take turns showering in a slender contraption that looks like a tube (or the Orgasmatron in Woody Ellen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper). We don our dinner clothes (the trip organizers from Oxford, U.K, called for “smart/casual” so we’re not sure if we are over or underdressed). There is an unusual tamarind infused aperitif concocted by the padrone, the Villa’s owner, and then prosecco to celebrate surviving our first walking day, albeit with a few bumps, grass burns, and sore toes. Stephen outlines plans for the next day: We will walk to Gangi and then drive to Sperlinga to tour the troglodyte cave dwellings.

We move on to dinner inside the Villa’s dining room. Martina describes the primo, the secondo and the wines, and we refuel and imbibe. And we get loud. Very loud. I wonder if we are driving the Villa’s French guests away.

The food is fresh and local, the mama who does all the cooking knows her stuff, and by ten o’clock, our bellies are full of pasta and chicken, and we fall into bed dreaming of wild fennel taller than we are, red poppies, and rocks– an endless array of large, pointed rocks underfoot as we scale the steep Sicilian hills.

If you are interested in travelling to Sicily, ATG have both escorted tours and independent routes.

Escorted Sicily Walking Holidays
Sicily – From the Centre to the Sea
Best of Western Sicily
Best of Eastern Sicily
The Aeolian Isles

Independent Sicily Walking Holidays (Footloose)
Sicily from the Centre to the Sea