Country: Italy
Region: Sicily
Time of visit: June 2021
My rating: 6/10
Suggested duration: half a day
The day after the amazing excursion on Mount Etna we decided to stay close to the volcano, on the coast, to visit the so-called "three Aci": Aci Castello, Aci Trezza and Acireale. These are the three most famous out of nine villages that all carry the Aci prefix (the other six are Aci Sant’Antonio, Aci Catena, Aci San Filippo, Aci Santa Lucia, Aci Platani and Aci Bonaccorsi).
This particular toponym owes its origin to the myth of Aci and Galatea: the nymph Galatea was in love with Aci, a beautiful young man; the Cyclop Polyphemus as well was in love with the nymph and envious of the young man. One evening Polyphemus saw the two lovers in the moonlight by the sea. Blinded with rage, he threw a large boulder of lava at the poor shepherd, crushing him and leaving him lifeless. Galatea wept all the tears over the body of her loved one; Zeus and the gods took pity and transformed the shepherd's blood into a small river (Akis), which springs from Etna and flows into a small beach near Capo Molini (a fraction of Acireale), where the two lovers used to meet; according to the legend, the big boulder thrown by Polyphemus dismembered the body of Aci in nine parts giving rise to the nine villages with the prefix Aci. Everybody knows that messing with Russia is no good, but messing with Cyclops could be even worse... But obviously Aci was not strong in literature.
The episode was depicted by Giulio Romano in the splendid frescoes of Palazzo Te in Mantua.
It is not only the name of these places that has its roots in legend; the main authors of classical Greek and Latin literature set their stories in these lands, from Hesiod to Euripides to Virgil.
Furthermore, for anyone born and raised in Italy, the name of Aci Trezza evokes particular memories, because one of the main novels of the realist movement is set here: Giovanni Verga's Malavoglia, a fundamental book in Italian school programs, on which generations of students have struggled, forced to study the misfortunes and sufferings of a family of fishermen from Aci Trezza. As for me, at the time of school I found amusing the comments of some classmates who at the end of the book welcomed the death of Padron 'Ntoni with liberating exultation, but underneath "I Malavoglia" is one of those works that have sown in me the passion for the sea and the feeling of attraction and fear for this element; in my imagination Aci Trezza has always been depicted under a gloomy sky lashed by sharp sprays of salt and overwhelmed by impetuous waves, bravely faced by small men bent inside fragile wooden boats; a recurring image in the history of art and cinema from La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti (based on I Malavoglia), to Man from Aran by Flaherty up to the famous Kanagawa Wave by Hokusai, which has settled in my imagination starting from the study of Verga's text.
The visit to the "three Aci" had been warmly and unanimously recommended by almost all the sources I had consulted (friends, travel blogs, social networks), which represented the three Aci as three enchanting and extremely characteristic small villages, each with its own identity.
Besides my literary expectations, the visit to the "Tre Aci" was immediately interpreted for us in a relaxing key; after the excursion on Mount Etna, which had been very tiring from a physical point of view, but also a source of strong emotions, what we wanted to do was basically wander around aimlessly, taste some granita (some of the best are here to be found) and see what the Catania coast had to offer us.
So, coming from Catania, we headed north with the intention of visiting, in order, first Aci Castello, then Aci Trezza and finally Acireale, but during the journey we decided to change the plans and head first towards Aci Trezza in search of Zzu Orazio, a street vendor renowned for his granita.
Aci Trezza
As I said, Aci Trezza has been a small fishing village for centuries. There are no monuments of particular interest and the main attraction of the place should be the glimpses of a traditional fishing village. My impression was that, as unfortunately often happens in Sicily, town planning has not adequately preserved the state of the places; to the tourist who arrives today in Aci Trezza what appears before the eyes are many small concrete buildings that convey the impression that what had been probably no longer exists. There are, indeed, the port and the fishing boats, but I didn't think I saw anything special compared to many other fishing villages around Italy or the world.
What struck me instead, and I must say unexpectedly, is the widespread presence of columnar basalts; a few years ago, while I was separating from my wife, passing through Northern Ireland, I visited the Giant's Causeway and I was very impressed by this type of geological formation that was represented to me as almost unique in the world and the information remained in me erroneous in Ireland this phenomenon had manifested itself with such evidence. A few years after starting a new relationship with a wonderful woman in central Sardinia, I discovered with some amazement that a few minutes from her home, in Guspini, there is a massive formation of columnar basalts (and I realized on the spot that the famous Devil's Tower in Wyoming, star of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is a formation of columnar basalts).
Columnar jointing is a geological structure where sets of intersecting closely spaced fractures, referred to as joints, result in the formation of a regular array of polygonal prisms, or columns; the result is a kind of natural, perfectly regular checkerboard.
Inside the port of Aci Trezza there is a small cove where the wooden boats of the fishermen are moored in front of a basalt paving and, while jumping from a hex to another like playing hopscotch, it is possible to observe the artisans who handcraft the boats in a small shipyard.
However, the most famous image of Aci Trezza is its skyline; wherever you are in Aci Trezza, looking towards the sea, the majestic stacks emerge which, according to legend, are what remains of the ballistic fury of Polyphemus.
Apart from this, it doesn't seem to me that there is much else to see in Aci Trezza: Zzu Orazio in his itinerant activity had managed to avoid us; the fish market, unlike that of Catania, is held at night, so after a couple of hours spent idly around the small town we decided to head, on foot, to Aci Castello. Aci Trezza is basically the continuation of Aci Castello and admiring the stacks of Aci Trezza it is clearly visible, apparently 10 minutes away, the castle that gives its name to Aci Castello. Somewhere I remembered having read that there is no way to walk from Aci Trezza to Aci Castello, but I seemed to remember that this problem had been solved with the construction of a pedestrian street.
Unfortunately I was wrong and after about ten minutes along the coast, we found the road interrupted by the cliff. The only way to continue would have been an unpleasant walk along the state road and so we decided to go back to the car and postpone the visit to Aci Castello in the evening, to head immediately towards Acireale.
Acireale
Acireale is completely different from Aci Trezza and is more similar to the many villages of the Val di Noto where Baroque architecture is dominant (in Acireale there is also a significant presence of Art Nouveau architecture). As in Aci Trezza, our visit to Acireale was dedicated to casual and idle wandering; the most important place, at least on the basis of our visit, was certainly the Piazza del Duomo, with the beautiful Baroque facade of the main church of the city and the recent concentric circle paving of the square.
But what struck us most in Acireale, with all due respect to the architectural beauties, was the food. During our trip to Sicily, my partner was forced to make numerous work stops to participate in more or less sudden meetings; while we were in Acireale, the umpteenth call to a meeting rained down on our heads, so, also considering that our attempt to intercept Zzu Orazio in Aci Trezza had failed, leaving us without our periodic granita, we decided to stop at Caffè Cipriani to allow my partner to connect to the meeting and quell the first symptoms of granita slush withdrawal; Caffè Cipriani turned out to be the best granita ever in our entire visit to the east coast of Sicily; Cipriani's granita is not only exquisite, creamy and moreover cheap; to these qualities is added the variety of tastes that we have not found anywhere else. Honorable mention for the prickly pear granita: delicious! Consuming the granita sitting in front of the facade of the Basilica Collegiata di San Sebastiano completes a perfect picture.
But Acireale had just begun to delight our palates.
While we were dozing our granita, the hungry little stomachs of my children began to awaken from their numbness, reminding everyone that it was now lunchtime. So I started looking for somewhere nearby that would satisfy everyone (contrary to my habits, I hadn't left for Sicily with a military planning of restaurants and pubs) but the undertaking proved difficult, because it is not easy to put two demanding adults eager for typical Sicilian cuisine in agreement with three teenagers who grew up on pizza and sushi. As each proposal was rejected, one after the other, I began to get nervous, until the choice fell on an apparently low-key street food venue 10 minutes away.
Capisci friggitoria (a word pun between the Italian "capisci" which means "you need to understand" and the Sicilian "ca pisci", which means "here fish") is perhaps the place where we ate the best sicilian cuisine on our trip. We took three arancini: grouper, cuttlefish ink, anchovies and fennel; all freshly prepared and fried flawlessly, the last two in particular were an explosion of flavors (God! I miss that anchovies and fennel arancino so much!). Fresh raw squid. Superb peppery mussels. Spaghetti with shrimp and pistachio, a tribute to Sicily. Raw tuna with sea asparagus, a sublime combination, with tasty and crunchy glasswort.
My enthusiasm about this place comes not only from the fact that we ate top quality food, worthy of the best restaurant, at the cheapest prices imaginable. What we have experienced at Capisci's is the famous Sicilian hospitality at its best; the owner made us feel at ease as soon as we sat down, satisfying our every need with a smile that first of all conveyed the happiness of doing his job well and offering the best to his guest; while we were eating, having heard that we needed beach towels, he took his scooter and went in search of an open shop that would sell them; on his return he embarked on a hilarious discussion in Sicilian dialect with his partner to choose the best beach to recommend; on leaving the venue, we had to insist to prevent the owner to accompany us to the beach. In summary, at Capisci's we had superlative food and an heartwarming welcome; everything else is superfluous.
We spent the rest of the day on the beach, giving up visiting Aci Castello too (so this post should more correctly be titled "the two Aci").
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