Our apartment is on the third floor, up narrow square spiral stairs.
Down below is a kind of cat paradise, the inhabitants observe us.
It’s also a car-park for miniature motors.
For dinner I try the local dish of cous-cous with a piece of fish on top – not actually very exciting. Barbara has seafood with a local type of holow spaghetti, (actually a tight spiral) called Busiate – very nice, the fish sauce flavoured with aniseed.
Next day we take a train ride to the town of Marsala. This is quite a well-kept town with a main street of fashionable clothes shops, quite swish.
We walk out to a museum near the sea, where there is an absolutely fascinating display of the remains of a ship, sunk during a naval battle of 214 BCE. They know the date and the place of the battle, just off the coast here, from contemporary Greek and Roman writings, and the wood of the boat can be carbon-dated to this period.There are nailsAmphora used to transport olive oil, fish sauce, wine – lots of wine jars.
The battle is historically famous because it was the final victory for Rome over the Carthaginians in the “Second Punic War”. The Romans then taxed the Carthaginians so much that a third Punic War was provoked (like the two 20th century World Wars?) this third war was when Hannibal attacked the Italian peninsula with his army with the war elephants, marching from Spain over the alps (in whose tracks I folowed on my bike last year).
There is a second ship from a slightly later period.Outside is a large archeological site with remains of Phoenician, Punic and Roman settlements.There is the remains of a large Roman villa, they know the name of the owner and the tenant that he rented it to! This mosaic shows four types of big cat attacking prey, a lion attacks a horse, a puma and tiger attack antelopes – and …A leopard attacks a reindeer, slightly fanciful even in Roman times I should think.All set among wild flower meadows.We had the place almost to ourselves. This is how I like my tourism (unlike tomorrows trip …)Back indoors there is a famous sexy torso dug up nearby, a Roman copy of a Greek original.This fascinating token of friendship, it’s a pair of clasped hands (both right hands, so different people), with a message of friendship between men of different ethnicities. It indicates that the whole racial tension thing was going on back in those times. The interesting blurb below:Also this rather nice tomb cover, about two feet high, showing two spouses enjoying drink and snacks together.Time for us to share some cake, and drink our own espressos.Before we go in search of the picture gallery mentioned in the guide book – which however seems to have disappeared, as has the town museum, except for the exhibition covering garibaldi’s exploits between 1848 and 1861 to reunite Italy and institute democracy in place of the mixture of aristocracies. The unification worked, the democracy not so much. But his campaign started in Sicily at Marsala, and spread north. His band suffered many defeats but kept going – determined man. There are pictures of most of his “band of one thousand” (actually 1,092).Some were debonair,Some were dodgy,Some were dangerous to knowSome were a tad effeteSome were positively campSome sported medals.They all, famously, wore red shirts.
And that was Marsala – we forgot to taste the famous fortified wine.
