Day 89: Sunday 15 June – Pantálica Necropolis, by Ken

This Is The Sight That Greeted Me When I Opened Mabel's Door First Thing
(A camping ground cat had a relaxing night on Jane's lounger)

Sicily has tourist destinations different to those elsewhere with the dead featuring in the creepiest. Having visited the catacombs of the Conventi dei Cappccini in Palermo with its mummified bodies, we decided to spend today at the necropolis near Pantálica, about 40km northwest of Syracusi. The site was first used between the thirteenth and tenth centuries BC by refugees from the coast. After the eighth century BC Pantálica is thought to have been the location of the city of Hybla, colonised by the Greeks. The city’s dead were placed in tombs cut in the cliff faces of the gorge formed by the River Anapo. In all there are several thousand tombs, each of which contained several skeletons suggesting many thousands of people lived and died in the area.

We were on the road in Smarty by 09:45 with Jane driving. She had programmed the satnav app in her iPad with a non-motorway route that was fewer kilometres than the motorway route, but it was going to take a lot longer to reach our destination. Our route took us on the road we had used on Friday north of Noto. After passing through the town of Palazzolo Acreide we travelled on a country road that wound its way into the hills via numerous hairpin bends. There were a lot of motorcyclists and cyclists out for their Sunday rides, the combination of the hills and heat (Smarty’s gauge read 31°) must require a high degree of fitness to ride a bike here, and a lot of water. In the hill town of Sortino we followed the satnav directions through narrow streets on the outskirts of the town that took us to a road ending at the entrance gates to the necropolis site. After problems with Jane’s iPad battery going flat yesterday, today we plugged it in to a TomTom adaptor that has a fast charge socket. That seemed to do the trick, it was adding to the battery’s charge rather than the satnav depleting it.

Sortino

We parked on the road along with a few other cars. We stopped to look a noticeboard with a map of the site and the do’s and don’ts there. It seemed it was OK to bring your kangaroo in to this one. We hadn’t finished perusing the boards when a man came out of a small building nearby and beckoned us down. He wanted to know which country we were from. He didn’t understand my English, but wouldn’t let me write on his clipboard. I reached for a piece of paper on his desk to write New Zealand on that. He wouldn’t let me do that either. I solved the problem in the end by showing the man my New Zealand driving licence. We struggled to understand why the man had behaved in that way, we thought perhaps if your job is solely to record visitor’s country of origin then it’s only a short step before he could be replaced by his clipboard and visitors do his job.

We started walking along a rocky track around a plateau and then down into the river gorge. It was hard going in the heat and we were pleased we had brought our walking poles. It wasn’t long before we came across a few tombs in rock faces and on the other side of the gorge we could see clusters of them in the vertical cliff face. The tombs made an eerie sight, almost three thousand years ago people were living here and carving tombs for their dead family members.

River Anapo Gorge

On The Path Down To The Gorge

Seen By The Path

Tombs In Lower Rock Faces

Tombs

More Tombs

Yet More Tombs

We were hot and sweaty by the time we reached the base of the gorge and the narrow River Anapo. A few people were enjoying themselves in rock pools and lying on rocks in the sun. We had a big decision to make – either we could climb up the gorge on the other side of the river and then retrace the route to get back to Smarty, or return the way we had come. After resting for a while by the river we decided to take the easy option. It was a good call, the climb up took nearly an hour, our legs ached and we were very hot by the time we got back to Smarty.

Pensive Perrott Taking A Breather By The River Anapo

On The Way Back Up

We ate our lunch of bread, cheese and salami in Smarty. I drove back opting to drive east to pick up the E45 motorway at Siracusa and take that back to Avola. As had happened the two previous days, the sky got heavier and darker as the afternoon progressed. It started to rain, light at first but it soon became torrential forcing us to slow to a crawl. The rain didn’t last long and we were soon in sunshine again.

Back at the camping ground we had planned to go to the beach. However, thunder was rumbling around in the distance and we could see forked lightning. We decided to stay put. An Italian man in a camper van opposite showed where his priorities lay by shifting his motorbike under his awning. As it happened, it didn’t rain.

Italian Man Gets His Priorities Right

Our dinner was the remainder of the pasta with a tomato, olive and anchovy sauce.