We planned to spend 3 days there. The idea was to see a little town in the interior, see the famous mosaics in Villa Romana del Casale, and possibly take side trips to Etna and Taormina.
B&B Armerino that our travel agent booked for us turned out to be a little unusual: a modern apartment on the 4th floor of a residential building. We had our own bath in the hall. The kitchen was locked up; Carla, the owner, a young woman, came every morning to make us breakfast. All this was OK, but obviously lacked any charm, and the place didn't have the Internet.
In general, things didn't work out quite as we expected. First, it turned out the roman villa was closed for restorations, so we saw the mosaics only on postcards and plates in a souvenir shop. They are also on the web. Second, the town itself turned out to be unremarkable. A couple of cute churches...
... not much else to see. Third, we were up in the mountains, and it was cold and rainy. We decided to drop our long-range trips because the fog wouldn't let us see anything, anyway. Instead we headed for Morgantina, just a few kilometers away, to see the ruins of the ancient Greek town.
Morgantina turned out to be quite spectacular.
At first we came to a side entrance, and there was no one there, so, knowing our luck, we thought it was closed -- it was Dec 31st after all. Only sheep and fog:
We entered through a hole in the fence, anyway. Soon the fog lifted and we saw some tourists as we approached the main area. (We walked back to the main gate and paid for admission.)
In Morgantina you can feel what a Greek town could look like.
And the countryside around is pretty. In other words, il luogo รจ molto suggestivo, just as the guide book said.
These are the remains of an oversized kiln:
There are pictures on the web from excavations in Morgantina by Princeton archeologists in the 1960s.
After the excavations we went to Aidone, a small town of 5000 nearby, for lunch and to see the archeological museum. It holds many finds from Morgantina. There was also a lot of plunder at the Morgantina site; in 1984, several magnificent silver objects from there surfaced at the Metropolitan Museum. A sign by the photograph at the Aidone museum states this silver is "pending return from the Metropolitan."
A very pleasant day overall.
Our New Year's Eve was unremarkable. We checked e-mail at a small tabacchi store, bought a bottle of wine and some sweets, and went home. M woke me up at midnight to see the fireworks on TV. We planned to leave for Palermo early the next morning, anyway.
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