The markets of Sicily are brimming with the fish from the nearby seas, seasonal fruits and vegetables from orchards and fields just kilometers away, and spices from around the globe. Choruses from fish and meat vendors fill your ears; your eyes are inspired by colorful canopies shading a rainbow of purple eggplant, green zucchini, and canary-yellow melons; and your nose inhales the scents of cow and sheep cheeses seasoned with saffron, black pepper and olives. While you walk through the markets you can feast on a bounty of hand-held dishes that will challenge your palate: arancine (rice balls jammed with beef ragu and caciocavallo cheese), panelle (fried chickpea fritters), pane ca meusa (a bun stuffed with spleen and lung), stighiola (grilled, marinated sheep or goat entrails wrapped around green onions and fresh parsley), cazzilli (fried potato croquettes with mint), pastella (fried vegetables, sardines, and more), cannoli filled with sweet sheep’s milk ricotta, and brioche bursting with your favorite flavor of gelato.
From Palermo to Catania, from Trapani to Siracusa, Sicily not only offers travelers 3000 years of human history and sweeping landscapes but also a variety of tantalizing aromas, flavors and textures that will inspire your taste buds and lift your spirit.
Grazie Mille to Allison Scola, founder and curator of Experience Sicily for this appetizing post.
Napoli, full of complexities and contradictions, defies classification and doesn’t enjoy the bucket list reputation of so many Italian cities. Often treated as a pass-through en route to the Amalfi Coast, Naples is seldom explored and its many beguiling layers are overlooked by most travelers. If you do have the time to visit, you won’t be indifferent: you’ll either love it or feel just the opposite. There is no “in between.” You’re either drawn to its paradox of love, loss, sex, religion, superstition, birth and death or you may want to run away from it. For me, I love it. I felt its magnetism immediately — the good, the bad, and even the “brutti” … the ugly.
Besides being officially recognized by the EU as the home of pizza (pizza having been recently designated by UNESCO as a cultural treasure), Naples has a rich history and many spectacular Baroque churches. Not always as spiffy as other cities, it offers a veritable feast for the urban photographer. It’s sacred and profane. It’s both Old World and kitsch; camp and hip; seductive and bewildering. It’s chaotic and random; gritty, edgy and operatic. And somehow also pious, and even at times … serene. Napoli throbs with life, exuberance and color.
Everybody falls in love with Italy. For some, it happens on the streets of Florence or Rome, or on the sun-soaked Amalfi coast, or perhaps over pizza in a small trattoria or on a misty morning in Venice. Once you’re smitten, it then happens over and over and if you haven’t yet discovered the beautiful region of Apulia, Italy’s “heel,” you must, for you will fall ever more deeply in love.
For decades, Puglia has been a popular summer destination for northern Italians and, still thankfully, it remains a place unmistakably by Italians and for Italians. Without the flashy jewelry, La Bella Puglia nonchalantly showcases her unique cultural identity and spectacular coastline bathed by the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. Home to the Boot’s most ancient olive groves and the Baroque jewel of a city, Lecce, (deserving of a separate slideshow that’s coming soon!), Puglia basks in Italy’s southern light and is a land of extremes. Deep sapphire waters offset intensely white towns; miles of olive trees cover the horizon, sprinkled with compact villages. With the heat and sun comes the region’s propensity for languid living . . . time seems to pass more slowly, giving one the opportunity to appreciate every detail and richness of la dolce vita.
[Towns featured here include: Alberobello, Locorotondo, Martina Franca, Ostuni, Gallipoli, Ortranto and Polignano a Mare.]
Copyright - Postcards from the Boot.