October 1, 2010: One Month Down. Two To Go.

Well, we've been here a month. Its hard to believe - time doesn't seem to be going by that fast. But we are taking advantage of every day, so we have certainly done a lot so far.

Today's adventure started out at a nearby camera store. Turns out the automatic focus is broken on our lens, so from here on out we are working in manual mode. Hopefully it won't take too long to get used to, because I for one, do not like blurry photos. And Mike does not like waiting around for me to get the picture right.

With the final camera verdict decided, we walked over to one of the main piazzas to catch the bus that would take us to the top of Monte Pellegrino - one of the mountains from the pictures yesterday. On the way to the piazza, we walked by a huge stage being erected just 10 blocks from our hotel in the middle of a major intersection. In two days the Pope will be coming to Palermo, and its a pretty big deal - enough that they have been diverting traffic away from one of the major streets in town for at least two days in advance.

We rode the bus up to the top of Monte Pellegrino to get some good views of Palermo, but mostly to visit the Santuario di Santa Rosalia (Sanctuary of Saint Rosalia). Santa Rosalia is the patron saint of Palermo and they have a festival for her every year, in addition to a pilgrimage that true believers make once a year by walking up to the sanctuary barefooted. The sanctuary is pretty interesting because it is located in a cave and they have this crazy contraption on the ceiling to collect the supposedly "holy" water that seeps from the cave ceiling. One way to describe it is if you imagine someone gave about 100 people their own piece of triangular sheet metal and told them to work together to create a drainage system on the ceiling but they only had 15 minutes to do it. It works, but its ugly.

Then we tried to figure out instructions from our guidebook to hike up to the top of the mountain for some more views. The instructions were pretty poor - we think we were at the top of the mountain, but it was just us and about 50 cell-phone/radio/cable towers. We walked back into town, enjoying the views on the way down, and then played some cards while we waited for the bus.

Back in Palermo we walked across town to get to another major palazzo where we caught another bus that took us to another hilltop town, Monreale. Here, there is the Monreale Duomo, built in 1174 and known as one of the architectural wonders of the Middle Ages. Remember the amazing Cappella Palatina (Palatine Chapel) that we visited a few days ago that had the crazy ceiling and the mosaics covering the walls? Well the guy who had the Monreale Duomo built was the grandson of the guy that had the Palatine Chapel built, and it seems it was a bit of an unfair competition. This place was nuts! There are more than 2,000 mosaics in this cathedral - more than in the duomo in Venice (St. Marks). Our guidebook says the duomo in Monreale has the second largest mosaic cycle in the world (even though I don't really know what a mosaic cycle is, we should all be impressed with the stats). It was impossible to capture this place on camera, so I took some photos and we enjoyed the grandeur.

From here, we visited the cloisters located behind the duomo. The architecture here has some Islamic influences, and it was a very impressive site. There were 228 pairs of columns, each with their own design, and most of them with some mosaic tiles. Behind the cloisters there was a panoramic view point and some more interesting trees to photograph, and then we played another scavenger hunt with our guidebook. Supposedly there was a steep climb we could take that would give us great views of the duomo and cloisters from above, as well as Palermo. But the information center was closed and all the maps we looked at and people we spoke to were unable to help us locate the path we were supposed to take. So, an epic fail ensued, but we made a quick recovery by getting some gelato and taking an easy bus ride back to the city center.

We went back to our hotel to pack up in anticipation for our departure from Palermo tomorrow, and got to see a small African parade go by the hotel. We went out around 8:30 PM to have dinner and for convenience and tastiness, we went back to the vegetarian restaurant from two nights ago. We had some concerns that we should try one of the other hundred restaurants in Palermo, but when we got there,we saw another couple who had been there the other night as well. Why mess with something that works, right? On the way back to the hotel we checked out the Pope's stage and got some gelato.

Tomorrow we have the whole day in the city to check out a couple more site and then catch a flight to Sardinia around 8 PM.

Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:

Mike - Amaretto e Pistacchio and Stracciatella e Pistacchio

Aviva - Agrumi e ACE (agrumi is sort of like creamy lemon/tangerine, a little like a creamsicle, and ACE is orange, lemon, carrot - the letters stand for the vitamin combination - but this gelato tasted a bit like orange sherbet, which is still good).

To view pictures of our day, click here.