Hurtling through hard-core Mafia territory -’Sicily’s chief sheriff, Falcone, was blown up just there,’ our driver says, reassuringly - we’re on a dual carriageway where Italians relish ignoring traffic lights, overtaking rules and most other road laws known to man. ‘Up there is where the Godfather was hiding all along,’ he continues, pointing. This isn’t a gangster tour, though; we’re not looking for trouble but for tomatoes - mighty fine tomatoes.
The tiny Sicilian village of Scoglitti is claimed to have the best conditions in the world for growing them. As we drive there Italian tomato expert Paolo Battistel explains: ‘It’s down to hot sun, high salinity in the soil and tradition.’ Although he’s from Verona in the less hairy north, Pizza Express has employed him as a ‘tommelier’ to seek out seasonal varieties for its menu. Think wine sommelier but a doyenne of tom toms instead.
Read more at Metro.co.uk
The town of Chiavari in Liguria is recommended as a good place to stay by reader Joe Palasi. Joe says
Dot and I were there for five weeks in the spring...
Enel has deposited the project design for one of the first off-shore wind farms in the Mediterranean Sea. The request for an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been delivered by Enel to the Ministry of the Environment and the Region of Sicily.
Italy’s first off-shore wind facility will foresee the installation of 115 large generators with a capacity of between 3 and 5 megawatts each in the waters of the Gulf of Gela at least 3 nautical miles off-shore, between the towns of Licata (in the province of Agrigento), Butera and Gela (both in the province of Caltanissetta).
Read more at YourProjectNews.com
If you are also looking to spend Christmas in Sicily, I advise you to think early about booking flights because budget flight prices for between Dec 20th and Jan 5th will be unlikely. Outside of those dates you can still get excellent prices with British Airways from London, UK but during those dates prices are almost triple.
I surfed the various airline sites and price comparison sites a few days
ago and I did find tickets for £170 return including taxes direct between London and Catania direct and booked.
Alitalia at this time also have a sale on and you can fly to Sicily from London, UK for £150 including taxes, provided you do not mind one stop on mainland Italy AND these fares were
Expedia.co.uk Special fares. Let us know of any good prices and deals wih your comments. More info
about flights to Sicily here.
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July 23, 2008 - 10:35 am
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Paul
The Bridge of Sighs, a popular tourist site in Venice, will soon undergo the fate of many Italian tourist sites - scaffolding. The bridge connected the opulent Doge's Palace (Palazzo...
Eni SpA has made “a new, significant” natural gas discovery off the coast of Sicily, the Italian gas and oil company said Tuesday.
The find was made in the Cassiopea 1 field in the Sicilian Strait 22 kilometers (14 miles) off Agrigento. The field is 60-percent owned by Eni and 40-percent by Edison.
Read more at IHT.com
I am not generally a fan of Michelin-starred restaurants.
It’s not that I have a problem with the guide per se, more that satisfying the demands of a guidebook originally designed to tell haute-bourgeoisie French motor-ists where to find Parisian-style fine dining seems to do strange things to chefs, making them complicit in a production-line approach that, however upmarket, has more in common with the box-ticking of Pizza Hut or Starbucks than with good cooking.
Read more at Time Online
The city of Turin (Torino), in northern Italy's Piemonte region, hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics. Coinciding with the summer Olympics n China, Turin is holding a major exhibition spanning...
