Day 3: Return to the mountain

Part of a series on my journalism faculty-led program through Italy and Greece.

Today we travelled to a few mountain (relatively) towns in Sicily. Ignoring some of the tourist-y stuff, it really reminded me of Esino Lario. The streets, buildings, and elevation gain were all pretty similar.

I got to do a bit of hiking (and just get out of the tourist trap!) when we climbed up a few hundred steps to the top of a peak where there was a monastary (I think, OpenStreetMap wasn't very clear). The view was beautiful, and the hike was totally worth it. We were only two minutes late meeting up with the group - mostly because we saw a lemon tree and were trying to figure out how to grab one even though the tree was three feet above us (we never did in the end).

We had lunch at a, um, interesting restaurant. I'll leave it at that. The food was great, I love trying out all the different types of pizza here. The crust seemed a lot thicker than the pizzas I had in Rome though.

We walked through a few more towns, and even though our van driver was acting as our tour guide, I had fun trying to read the Italian Wikipedia articles for churches and monuments we saw. Spoiler alert: I just looked at the pictures, I didn't understand 95% of the words.

Oh, and the bar in Godfather 2, and the church they got married? We visited both of those. There was a small statue honoring Francis Ford Coppola, which I submitted to OpenStreetMap.

At the end of the day, we went back to Catania and had dinner at an Irish Pub. Coincidentally, England was playing in the World Cup at that time - it was a nail biter to watch until the very end.

Tomorrow we will be going out into Catania and getting interviews and gathering other source material to use in our video assignments.