Cefalu!

When we last checked in, we’d arrived in Cefalu after a pretty disappointing spell in the car. But that at least meant we got into town early enough to unpack at a relaxed pace and grab some pool time before the Miners arrived (they'd spent the day visiting Pat’s family’s ancestral home Termini Immerese, an idyllic little beach town his ancestors found so distasteful they left it for places like west suburban Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska.) In a stark contrast to our last hotelier, the owner of our Cefalu hotel was bursting with enthusiasm to welcome us. We were once again the only Americans around, while the remainder of the guests were Brits with small kids, and one unfortunate Scandinavian family whose teenagers would become the inadvertent victims of our children's screaming and splashing all week. 

After a first day of awkward interactions with the British kids, the Gholson and Miner children made fast friends with them, and each day henceforth they would form giant conglomerations of Child in the pool and yell and scream and make up games and say they type of endearing things kids say when they meet foreigners: “Wait, you don’t have [name of show or candy or brand] where you’re from?” “You pronounce that word wrong!” Etc. Juliet took me aside and, not wanting to be rude to her new friends, asked me quietly why “they talk with an accent, but we talk regular?” Some good personal growth going on! To top it off, James spent much of our daily pool time chatting with a cute English girl named Sadie from “county Somerset.” He sheepishly denied any romantic interest, of course, but was clearly delighted when she left him her email address at the end of our stay.

Carrying Juliet is small British girl

The one drawback to our hotel was that it was set back aways up the mountain; a small price to pay for a place with a pool and space from the madding crowd (see below), but it meant either walking down the mountain 25 minutes on dangerous roads or driving a few minutes through narrow and heavily congested streets to the main parking lot just outside the old quarter. Cefalu was especially packed the first few nights of our stay owning to its major annual festival being on—the Feast of the Most Holy Savior. This is a deeply religious town, and it takes the religious aspect of its celebrations seriously, but it also takes the 'eating well beyond satiation' and 'late-night partying to loud Eurotechno' bits of it seriously, too. 

As we did mostly the same thing each night we were in Cefalu, I’ll just describe the general town vibe once and you’ll get the idea: a Sicilian town in the middle of the throes of its festival is a bit like a crowded Jersey boardwalk on a sweltering summer night, but mixed in with the scantily-clad lovers and nighttime beach goers are extended families, old people, tourists, and lotsa little kids running around (Catholicism means after all, as Joyce says, “here comes everybody.”) Every street is filled to bursting, every musician is out playing, every restaurant fills its square with scents of Sicilian cuisine, every vendor loudly hawks his wares, and spanning every street are arced Mardi Gras-colored light fixtures that make me wonder if, given its own Catholic roots, there isn’t an ancestral relation to Mardi Gras. Note the repeated use of the word “every” in the last sentence, as there’s nothing held back for the festa. It is a sensory overload, a somehow more intensified version of the Sicilian norm (which is already pretty every). 

Southern Italy leads the rest of Europe in the “right-sizing” revolution, less perhaps for environmental reasons than that it’s just poor. Things are small. Streets, parking lots, cars, aisles in shops, appliances, clothes. Naples, a city of several million, is crowded with people, pets, cars, and mopeds. Everywhere you turn, someone is right on top of your body, trying to squeeze by or get around you, or grab something on the shelf you’re perusing. Small towns like Cefalu operate on the same reduced scale, so whereas you might assume, à la America, fewer people means more room to breathe, it’s actually just the same claustrophobia writ small. There's no waste, nothing unnecessarily large. Someone else is pretty much always going to be up in your personal space, whether you're competing with cars and Vespas and dogs and fellow pedestrians just to walk down the narrow streets or trying to contort your body into your chair at a cramped restaurant. Add to this picture several thousand more tourists and revelers in town for the festival, and crank the temps up to almost 100 degrees, and you’ve quite quite the heady stew going.

On the holy day itself—Aug. 6th—we didn’t even bother to try to drive and find parking, instead we tread the dangerous roadway down the mountain. The town was hot and packed, with crowds surging toward the waterfront for the famous 'Ntinna a Mari event. This is one of those local traditions of no consequence that the internet discovered and amplified and now is a “thing,” to the point where even Red Bull is spending millions of dollars draping its logo all over it. Basically, a member of each of Cefalu's fishing families attempts to walk to the end of a greased telephone pole that’s been extended out over the harbor and grab a flag affixed to the end. Most of the contestants slip right off the pole and into the water within seconds and we all get a good laugh (the trick seems to be to really gun it from the get go. As soon as you lose momentum, it’s into the drink for you). The event kicks off with a quaint little marching band-led procession, in which a very old couple sweltering in medieval garb carries the aforementioned flag to the harbor. Nowadays, this little procession is preceded by that stupid Red Bull Mini Cooper with its giant Red Bull can mounted on top. It made its way slowly through town to the pier, which had been bedecked with Red Bull banners and umbrellas. The spectacle was ridiculous. This trifling diversion, initiated only so local fishermen could have a bit of harmless fun at the expense of their buddies, now swarmed by influencers and awkwardly aggrandized by a multinational corporation hoping to get its logo in the background of their pictures. 

Scoping out the contest

Beating the heat with lemon granitas

We watched the 'Ntinna a Mari for awhile, but the gap between contestants lengthened as the competition stretched on, with many mentions of Red Bull and the like. No one had really gotten very close to the flag. We beat the heat with some lemon granitas (basically upmarket Icees, yum) and a few cold beers, then shopped around town a bit. The kids of course were driven as if by magnets to the tchotchke bodegas, which all sell the same crap. James bought a knock-off Palermo FC jersey, Juliet got a ring. Continuing uphill, we visited the remarkable Duomo di Cefalu, part of the collection of Norman-era UNESCO World Heritage sites of northern Sicily. I'm just pleased as punch my kids enjoyed medieval churches as much as I do, and they did really well in here. The Cathedral's draw is its remarkable, mid-12th Century mosaics, featuring Christ Pantocrator (Christ as ruler of the universe); a highly interesting factoid is that the biblical passage in Christ's hand ("I am the light of the world...") is written in Greek. That the later Palermo Cathedral features a similar motif, but the language is in Latin, testifies to the more diverse, Eastern and African-oriented character of Sicily at the outset of the Norman conquest, and to how its culture shifted to a more Western-orientation under Frankish authority. Admittedly, this last bit was lost on Juliet. Stepping outside, it's hard not to imagine you're in the Holy Land. Built initially to serve the dual purpose of church and fortress, the Cathedral's blond stone seems to glow in the late afternoon sunlight. Surrounded by palm trees and backed by the naked stone of La Rocca, Cefalu's towering headland, the church (and here I will indulge in Gen Z verbiage I otherwise find noxious) gives strong crusader vibes. The effect is completed by being hot as hell.

Zoom in for some Greek

Duomo-in'

I was keen to hang around for the procession of the statue of the Most Holy Savior through town, though in characteristic Sicilian style it wasn't slated to take place until after 8 PM. Most of the kids were tuckered out by then; Pat volunteered to take Juliet back with Luke and Caitlin, and Erica, James, Paige, and I stuck it out. I wasn't disappointed (I can't speak for the others). We managed to snag a spot along the route in the main square. The procession was composed mainly of old folks in various getups that indicated to which sodality or religious fraternity they belonged. Then there were the local politicians and other dignitaries, a couple of groups of guys wearing what looked like 18th Century military uniforms, then the clergy. After them came the statue of Jesus as the Most Holy Savior (striking a Touchdown Jesus-type pose), carried by a horde of sweaty gentlemen struggling under its weight. Last were a crowd of parishioners, who smiled and waved at friends in the "regular people watching regular people" manner of the Southside Irish Parade. Eventually, the crowd surged into the street and melded with the parade second-line style, following the statue as it made it's way through town. We didn't follow it far, but broke off and headed back uphill to our hotel. What a day!

Most Holy Savior statue

Nighttime Revelers

As this entry is getting long, I'll just summarize the rest of our stay quickly: pool time, beach time, restaurants. Of these, the beach is of real note (though the food was damn tasty). Like San Vito, Cefalu has clear water and fine sand. We were concerned that the beaches would be super packed before we left, and we weren't wrong. Thankfully, the private lido system kind of keeps the crowd in check. No one competes for beach space of spreads out their blankets to agglomerate more room than they need when you're given two beds and and umbrella. Nice and orderly. Our lido, Lido Gold Beach, also had a little bar-restaurant on site, meaning we could take beers and sandwiches back to our chair between dips in the ocean. On Friday, we each paid 10 euro for 50 minutes worth of play on the inflatable obstacle course anchored in the deeper water off the beach. As I am no longer a spring chicken, I predictably hurt my shoulder and pulled a few muscles climbing around and jumping off the thing, but we all had a blast. Worth every penny.

Beach pics!

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Sunday morning was to come very early. Like, 2 AM early, as we needed to get to Palermo airport by 4:15 AM for our 6:10 flight to Rome. But sleep never came, as it turned out, as Erica and I spent what little of the night there was trying to rebook our newly cancelled flight from Rome to Chicago. But that's a tale for a subsequent entry...

Until then!