Acireale - Catania Travel Mount Etna Volcano - Corleone Sicily<< >> Here are some of the places we visited on our trip: Acireale Catania Travel Mount Etna Volcano Sicily Corleone. Time of our visit was spring and it was a fantastic travel trip. For my 60th birthday, my husband, myself and our son and daughter in law went for a five-day visit to Sicily. The reason it was Sicily is because I am nuts about the Godfather films and have always wanted to visit Sicily. I had a very clear idea of how it would be and apart from Corleone I was not let down. Just for the record, I wasn’t let down by Corleone because I knew it had not been used in the films. On this page I will just give my review of Catania and Mount Etna. We chose to stay in Catania because most of the places we wanted to visit were over that side of the island that is the side facing Italy. It was a good choice. Catania is a large busy town with plenty of choices for places to stay and eat and it was easy to get to Mount Etna and Acireale from there. Why you travel to Sicily determines where you stay and the time of year you go. As we knew where we wanted to visit and we would be doing quite a bit of driving we chose Catania and springtime.
We stayed in a modest hotel that looked as though it had belonged to a wealthy family at one time, built around a courtyard and huge windows with old wooden shutters. It was perfect, sorry I can’t remember its name but I am sure there are numerous small hotels in the town that fit this description. The things about the place that we really loved was the huge choice of good eating places at reasonable prices and Saturday night when the people took over the main streets just walking up and down in families, not getting drunk, just chatting and eating ice cream. This was our kind of town. Although many people do not think of Catania as a travel destination, just somewhere to stay for a visit to Etna, it is a very old town and there are some fine buildings and squares and a few Roman ruins. As far as my husband was concerned it was well up on his ‘top towns’ because the first night there we were able to have cannolli for desert. When we asked for them a waiter was dispatched to the pastry shop at the end of the road to get them. Top marks to the restaurant. Although Etna isn’t mentioned once in the ‘Godfather’ films we wanted to go there. It is Sicily’s most famous natural attraction and many people travel there. It dominates the eastern area around Catania and at 3,323 meters it is the tallest active volcano in Europe. ’Active’ is certainly the way to describe Etna, there are constant eruptions, barely a year goes by without one, some just small but often larger and more destructive. Of course lava is rich in minerals and so the area around is very fertile.
These are both quite expensive and you have to walk the last little bit. Sometimes the cable car and jeep rides are cancelled due to sulphur eruptions. The smell is quite pervasive but it is only to be expected. You can do quite a bit of walking around from the visitor centre and see craters that have been gouged out, some of them are very large, be careful if you stand on the edge as it is usually very windy. You don’t have to care one little bit about the ‘Godfather’ films to enjoy a visit to Sicily. I do not say this very often but I would love to go again, in fact I plan to as soon as we have a few spare days. Most flights are inexpensive and it is only a short hop. Why not plan your perfect travel visit to Catania! << |
