Vespas, litter and fatalism

We've just spent a week and a bit staying at a mate's in Sicily. He has the good fortune to live in a top-floor seafront flat with the standard spectacular view this usually comes with. You know - the calm blue of the Med, the city's rooftops receding into a misty grey amalgam, the active volcano smoking ominously over the entire thing.

Yep. Active volcano. One of the most active in the world, in fact. Etna's been sort-of-erupting pretty much continuously since 2014, and we were unable to make our planned visit to the top because it was too dangerous. This is the view from our mate's bedroom window, looking away from the sea:

Yeah that stuff coming out of the top, looks a lot like smoke? That's smoke.

To say it looms large over his city of residence, Catania, would be something of an understatement. Sicily may be the largest island in the Med but I'm not sure I'd feel safe in Palermo, a bloody long way away at the other end of the island, still less living at the foot of it. Essentially, much of the island is made up of half-million-year-old or younger lava from previous eruptions, yet Sicilians in their wisdom have decided that the best place for the airport and the second-largest city on the island is right next to it.

It's not only recently this has happened, either. Sicily, the home of Archimedes, is blessed with both Greek and Roman ruins in abundance, and they were hardly placed as far as possible from the volcano either. Indeed we were told by our local friend, who knows a bit about the volcanic nature of the island because he's at work there building a tunnel through its geology, that when an eruption and earthquake completely levelled Catania in 1669, the good citizens decided that they wouldn't make the same mistakes again. You might think this meant they'd build further away but instead they decided to lay out Catania's main street in such a way that the lava could better flow down it from the volcano and into the sea. It's the fecundity of the volcanic soil, apparently. Makes the grapes (and of course the lemons) so good that it's worth the risk. One evening, invited to a barbecue hosted by an American cheerfully living much, much closer to the caldera than our friend, I asked a Sicilian about it. "We're fatalists," he told me with a shrug.

This view can surely go some way at least toward explaining the lunatic nature of Sicilian driving. I thought I was used to Italian traffic from visits to Rome, but this is another level altogether. Like Rome, the morning chorus is the near-constant beep of car horns, and like Rome mopeds dart in and out of the traffic like their owners have no desire to live to see if Etna goes up tomorrow or not. But they've seen the Romans' driving and raised them all-in. If you stop at a turning, or even a roundabout, waiting for any kind of gap to appear to pull out, three tenths of a second later you're greeted by furious beeping from behind, demanding to know why you're holding them up. Sicilian form is simply to pull out without stopping and assume everybody will give way. The use of mobile phones while driving is so ubiquitous that it looks compulsory rather than prohibited (I saw several police officers doing this), as is the complete disregard for the obligation to wear crash helmets on the mopeds. They'll also pile on as many people as they can fit on any two-wheeler; I saw a father and three kids pull up on one scooter in Toarmina, two of them carrying shopping bags.

We saw the direct aftermath of three crashes in less than a fortnight. One a helmet-less scooter rider floored by who knows what - she looked OK, thankfully. One your standard two-cars-can't-occupy-the-same-space pile up, and one where a police car had crashed into a parked car(!) Those little Vespas, though - though many of them are understandably bashed up, the older (or older styled ones) in good nick got my heart beating a little faster every time I saw them, and not just because I usually had to leap out of the way. I've come back to Viana really wanting one, though I have no licence and am certainly too clumsy to be trusted with such a thing.

Sicily itself is a visually arresting place. As well as the Roman and Greek amphitheatres and temples which have survived the passage of time, the theft of their fabric for buildings elsewhere and the bloody volcano, there are some spectacular sights to be seen. One of the most famous is the Turkish steps. Crossing these chalk cliffs means risking huge falling white lumps and negotiating the narrow, undulating terraces from which the formation gets its name to get to a sparsely populated beach on the other side. We arrived early enough to make our way past the sign warning people that the route  to the access point across the bottom was closed and entry prohibited before the security guards arrived. (Take that, 'The Man'!) This sign was typically Sicilian - at the same time as prohibiting entry, it advised people to wear 'not slippery shoes' - if the sign could have shrugged, it would have. Those same guards then shepherded the hundreds coming and going across a safer route to the cliffs through waist-deep seawater. Those who ignored them got the same shrug as I imagined from the sign. 'Your own call, mate.'

That beach was an example of a free one - many of them are not. Called Lidos by the locals, they're private and you have to pay to get in. Your fee gets you a clean beach and use of a sunbed and parasol for the day, access to a bar and restaurant complex, beach volleyball courts etc. Supposedly, many of these Lidos are run by the Mafia as money laundering operations. I have no idea if there's any truth in this - it's something we were told by a local - but they're certainly cleaner and better-maintained than the public beaches.

Looking towards Catania. I think! Can't remember where I took this.

The state of the public beaches betrays the one aspect of Sicily I really didn't like. The city of Catania, with its collection of Art Nouveau and Rennaissance style buildings, could be one of the most beautiful in Europe, if not for two things which blight the whole island; the rubbish and the graffiti. They're both everywhere. Everywhere. It becomes almost impossible to appreciate the architecture of the place if every single surface is covered with tags, and there's litter discarded absolutely all over the place. It lines the main roads between towns, worse at any stopping or parking point, piling up in those mounds you get in Britain when the dustmen are on strike. It blows around the streets of the towns, collecting in corners and clogging gutters. It's difficult to overstate how bad it is. The locals seem to ignore it but it felt like a crying shame to me because it's such a blight on a place we enjoyed hugely.

But on the positive stuff again, Italian cuisine is my number one (sorry, Spain). The food pretty much everywhere is cheap and exactly what I like, so I've come back as rotund as a Weeble, my stomach stretched like one of Viana's drum skins. They of course know how to make Carbonara, one of my absolute favourites, properly - that is to say, without mushrooms. NO MUSHROOMS - take note everybody in the world who wrongly puts them in there and doesn't bother mentioning it on the menu.

I digress. Too much pasta, too much pizza, breakfasts of high-quality ice cream or granita, both of which are adored by the Sicilians and sold everywhere, have taken their toll. Back to Viana to get back onto the padel court and be run ragged by younger, better footballers again...

Burning pain

It’s a deeply troubling feeling to wake up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. That’s what happened in the early hours of this morning, though, in our house. The unmistakable smell of burning filled the house, and for a few moments we wondered if our home was on fire.

It turned out, though, that it was Galicia itself which is burning. The whole village, dark as it was, was wreathed in a smoky haze. Two minutes outside and our hair and clothes stank of smoke. There are already forest fires all over the area - the city of Vigo in particular being aflame in spectacular and horrifying manner, but the one we passed through this morning is the closest yet to our home. 

We had to get up at 5am anyway, to make the journey to Valladolid. It’s just as well we did, because the first part of the drive we were greeted by these scenes, and not more than half an hour after we passed, the road had to be closed as the flames reached the very edge of the road itself.

These images give an idea of what we drove through this morning, and it's got much worse since. As I type, we’re all too aware that the fire is growing, and getting ever closer to our home village. Already it threatens a smaller pueblo a short distance away, and we’re feeling anxious, though we ourselves are not there. 

One really troubling thing about these fires is that they’re so widely agreed to have been set, at least in some cases, deliberately. Of course the two-year drought that Galicia is currently suffering has a lot to do with it, but the region’s government has openly stated that their ‘principal hypothesis’ is that the fires are man-made, the starting sites chosen carefully. The reasons for this are so clouded in gossip and speculation that it’s difficult to see clearly what the truth may be, but certainly a similar case in Italy resulted in the arrest of six firefighters recently. It was so widely believed to be the case anyway, before any such comment was made official, that this is one of those things that’s become fact in the retelling, whether it’s correct or not. I’ve certainly heard it said by plenty of people in the last few months anyway.

The map of where the fires are in Galicia right now shows the scale of the task facing a firefighting force depleted, according to members of that same force, by cuts and stretched by the widespread nature of the problem. There simply aren’t enough men, aren’t enough fire trucks, aren’t enough helicopters and isn’t enough water to fight them effectively. (We’ve just heard, for example, that the effort to combat ‘our’ fire has been opened to anybody who feels able to give them a hand. Can you imagine that in Britain?)

Galicia, usually so green and beautiful, is becoming a charred ruin of its former self. There is, after months without a drop of it, rain forecast for tonight and the next few days. It’s come too late to help many people already. We can only hope it comes soon enough to help Viana.