Girona, to Trapani, to Segesta, to Santa Venerina

The day started badly.  We set the alarm for 6 so that we could pull our things together and get to the airport on time.  I popped into the shower before anyone else woke up and sang a little tune—the thought that I would be eating lunch in Italy made me giddy.  But then I emerged from the bathroom, and the kids were beastly, and so I quickly turned into Mean Mom.  We took not one but TWO wrong turns getting to the parking place near the airport, and suddenly we were way behind schedule.   My father always insisted on getting to the airport hours before a flight.  Once, when a snowstorm was forecast for the day of my sister Jody’s flight, he wanted to take her there the night before.  I am not quite that bad, but I hate rushing to the airport.  I can get irrationally tense even when I have plenty of time.  So this situation, especially with two small and grumpy children, was not so good for me.   The check-in guy assured us that we’d make the flight, and we all began to breathe a little easier. Then, as we were about to walk across the tarmac to board our plane, we realized that C.C. did not have her rolling suitcase, so Alec ran back and retraced our steps, locating it in the place we had loaded up on snacks and drinks, so as to avoid Ryan Air’s price gouging.

We landed at 11 am, and I had spent an hour the night before researching places for us to eat lunch.  My technique is to look on Chowhound, Trip Advisor, and the Slow Food website, trying to find a trifecta.  Italy is home to many slow food restaurants.  The movement was started in Italy by a man named Carlo Petrini, who wanted to promote local food prepared with care—the antithesis of fast food.  Slow food restaurants are certified by the slow food organization, and have a snail sticker in their window right next to the stickers showing which credit cards they take.

Calvino’s Pizzeria, in Trapani, is not a certified slow food restaurant, but the reviews on both Trip Advisor and Chowhound were so off the charts that I decided we had to head straight there from the airport.  Reading the descriptions of the hot pies slathered with fresh sauce, local olive oil, and mozzarella made my mouth water. 

Trapani is a port city, famous for its salt and sardine industries, which go way, way back.  Excavations have uncovered ancient salt works in Trapani, where the Sicilians of yore boiled seawater from nearby marshes.  It sticks out of the rest of the northwestern part of the island like a tiny finger pointing into the Mediterannean.

We found Calvino’s easily, and a parking spot as well.  From a block away, we could see that the doors were open, and we quickened our steps.  The doors were open, but when we walked in, the place was empty, which seemed odd given what I’d read the night before about the chaotic atmosphere, the rabbit warren of small rooms bursting with diners.  “Hello?” I called out.  I peeked into the kitchen window and saw the back of an Italian grandmother-type retreating into its nether regions.  A young man came out.  “Pizza?” we asked hopefully?  “Si,” he replied.  And then he held up seven fingers.  “Sette?” I asked.  “Sette o’clock? Noche?”  I asked.  “Si, si,” he said.  “Oh, no,” I said.  I am sure that if you snapped a photo of my face at that moment, you could have put it right next to the word “crestfallen” in the dictionary. 

“Where should we eat now?” Alec asked.  The pizza man seemed to understand the question, and told us to go around the corner, to the Osteria la Bettolaccia.  So we walked back out into the bright sunshine.  When I have my heart set on something specific to eat, I have a very hard time recovering.  Fortunately, I had a back up plan.  I needed more than just the pizza guy’s recommendation.  I looked in the book I had taken notes in and saw that the other place I had written down in case something went wrong with Calvino’s was… Osteria la Bertolaccia—the same place!  My spirits lifted immediately.  We walked the two blocks to the restaurant, only to find the door locked.  The sign outside said they opened at noon.  It was 12:40.  I remembered that, when we had been in Barcelona a year ago, many restaurants closed altogether between Christmas and three kings day.  Maybe we would encounter the same thing in Sicily.

Alec walked to the kitchen door and knocked, which seemed like a silly thing to do.  But that’s how desperate we were.  Sure enough, someone answered!  “Chiuso?” he asked.  “Yes, the door is closed but the restaurant is open!” answered our new friend.  He went around and unlocked the door from the inside.  It seemed odd to me, but I was so grateful and happy to find the osteria open that I chose not to question it.

The Osteria la Bertolaccia is slow food certified.  It is a homey little restaurant with beamed ceilings, terracotta floors, and about eight simple tables.  Bad eighties rock plays a little too loudly from the speakers, somewhat incongruously.  We ordered pasta for the kids and shared a plate of caponata, cheeses, olives and sun dried tomatoes.

Couscous is one of the typical dishes of Trapani; because of the promixity of Sicily to Morocco, there are Moorish influences in the uses of spices and nuts, the way fruits and vegetables are deployed in a dish.  In Morocco, the couscous would have been served with meat and potatoes, our server told us, but here in Trapani it is served with fish.  Alec ordered it (see below), while I ordered Busiati alla Norma, another typical Sicilian dish.  Busiata is the type of pasta; it is a long, tight corkscrew, about the width of tagliatelle and looks like it was made by wrapping the tagliatelle around a thin rod, thinner than a straw but thicker than a skewer.  The sauce is made with basil, tomatoes, pecorino, garlic,   The pasta and sauce intermingle with cubes of fried eggplant—not too many, but enough to give the dish some depth and bite.  When the waiter put my plate on the table in front of me, I leaned down and breathed deeply.  The aroma alone was enough to make me feel that I had arrived.  I ate the pasta with a glass of inky nero d’avola.  The waiter brought the kids paper to draw on once we depleted our own stash.  We had Sicilian ricotta cake and strong coffee for dessert.  Our first meal in Sicily, and the Osteria la Bertolacci had thrown down the gauntlet for the rest of our meals.

We had reservations to stay at an agriturismo in Santa Venerina for the next two nights, and we had a four hour drive ahead of us.  We planned one stop, early in the drive, at some ruins in Segesta—supposedly the best preserved temple on an island full of ruins.  It seemed worth the slight detour.  The kids clowned around in the ancient theatre, and ran around the temple counting its columns.  The ruins took longer to see than we had anticipated—at this point we would be getting in at about 8:30.  Although I was certain I had reserved dinner at the agriturismo, when Alec called to tell them what time we would be in, they told us the restaurant was not open for dinner.  So I began searching on the iPad for somewhere to eat in Giarre, which was near Santa Venerina.  I found a place that looked terrific and plugged the address into Dolores.  When we arrived, the sign on the door informed us that the restaurant was closed on Thursdays.  Who ever heard of a restaurant closing on Thursdays?  Sundays, Mondays, these days I can understand.   But Thursday?  I did not have a Plan B this time, but did a bit more research on the fly and came up with another place to try.  At this point, we were all getting tired and, although our lunch had been very filling, the kids needed to eat. 

We drove to the next place, which had all kinds of lights outside, walked up the front steps, and found the door locked.  Again.  Alec started knocking, figuring that it had worked at lunch time.  And sure enough, the door was opened by a young man in a Santa hat.   What’s with all of these restaurants keeping their front doors locked?   The restaurant was loaded with gimmicks—touch screen menus that didn’t quite work embedded in the tables, small paper tablets to plop in hot water that transformed into napkins.  The kids were happy with their mediocre pizza, and we shared a just okay pasta dish and a very good arugula and tomato salad.  It was no Osteria la Bertolacci.

By the time we arrived at the agriturismo Murgo, after driving up and down the wrong Via Zafferana several times and finally knocking on some doors, we were so tired we could hardly see straight.  I gave an exhausted thank you for the down comforters on our bed, shuttered the windows, and we all fell into a deep sleep.