I love being on an island.  The detachment of land from land feels liberating, as if floating in the sea lends a certain permissiveness to the inhabitants.  Right now, we are on an island off of another island—we are on the island of Ortigia, which is part of but over the bridge from Syracuse, which is part of the island of Sicily.  So I feel doubly blessed.  Ortigia is also tiny, so you are never far from the sea.

We were grateful for the sun after a few rainy, grey days, and set out to explore our little, ancient island.  The streets are narrow, the buildings centuries old, and white.  It’s very picturesque, but not in a Disney-fied way.  Laundry billows out from the balconies, graffiti mars the ancient walls.

Although we had heard that the morning market does not happen on Sundays, a few intrepid vendors—including one with a mobile delicatessen—had come out, so we bought bread and cheese, local salami, mortadella and olives.  We stopped at a pastry shop on the way back for some sweets and a couple of slices of Sicilian pizza, and decided right then and there to just go home and eat it.  Ortigia is very small, so you are never far from home.  It was a fine picnic.  We dipped our bread in good olive oil, and ate with our hands.  A propos of nothing, Milo at one point stated: “No one exactly knows Jesus’s whole name, except for his parents.”  We’ve been inside a few churches on this trip, and the Jesus iconography is quite prevalent.

There are things you do when you travel with children that you would never do travelling on your own.  Going to see a rinky dink production of The Grinch in Italian is one of them.  We saw a flyer for the show on the counter in one of the shops, and the kids were all over it.  On the way we stopped at Voglia Matta gelateria for our first gelato of the trip.  I had “Sicilian flavor” which tasted of pistachios and almonds.  And nocciola—hazlenut—which is a fallback flavor for me. The show took place in an old church in the archeological park—which was a much farther walk than we anticipated—and it was decidedly low-budget.  It consisted of two actors, one of whom played the Grinch and the other who played Cindy Lou Who.  But despite the language gap, the kids loved it.  Go figure.

In some conversation or other during the day, I referenced the “moon walk,” and the kids asked me, “What’s a moon walk?”  “A dance step Michael Jackson did.” Who’s Michael Jackson?”

Whoa.  We spent the half hour before bed looking at Michael Jackson videos on YouTube.  Our favorite was an old Rockin’ Robin clip.  “Is that their real hair?” asked C.C.