Bellissimo! Bellissima! That’s all we hear when we walk the streets of Italy.  It happens everywhere we go, people stop in their tracks, the women with raptured smiles and all the dudes make that funny kind of kissing sound… That’s the kind of attention a brindle Greyhound gets.  All of this devotion on a dog that is completely indifferent, it’s almost embarrassing.   In fact, we’re beginning to think she’s an introvert.

Our dog has turned heads everywhere we go, it escalated in the South of Italy and in Sicily it went off the fucking Richter scale.

But in Sicily, everything went off the Richter scale, the landscape, for sure, but the driving too.  That started before we even got off the ferry.  Normally the traffic exiting a ferry is pretty methodical, one lane at a time, someone calling a row of cars forward and then the next row until the ferry is cleared.  They don’t do that in Messina, the doors open, the attendant waves his arms and a free for all ensues. We were actually overtaken while still in the hull of the boat.

In fairness, it had been the most confusing ferry crossing I’ve ever done.  The ticketing was confusing, the check in was confusing.  Leaving the check in area to cross through a busy town was really confusing and then being bundled into a ferry that left less than a minute later was baffling.

This came after the calm of Puglia which couldn’t be more relaxed.  We got that seafood meal I spoke about in the last blog and even though a massive thunderstorm ripped through Gallipoli as we sat under a canopy in a tiny alley, eating our octopus and sea urchin meals, it was beyond relaxing. The taste of sea urchin can only be described as like eating a rock pool, its best meal of the trip so far.

We’ve driven too much the past couple of days, well week really. But on our drive from the heel of Italy to the toe, somewhere in the arch, we found a pitch of such blissful peace on the coast.  Back-to-back campsites with their gates closed lined the road to the beach, it must be busy in the summer season but in Spring the whole area was deserted.  Full only of weeds, but the sand stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction and we parked right on the edge of it.

We haven’t been in Sicily very long but it’s something special. The drive into Palermo was bloody terrifying but walking around the streets was a joy.  I ate my weight in Arancini and street food.  And while taking a few snaps of newly married couples in the centre of town some guy handed me a piece of paper saying ‘here look at this’.  By the time I realised I featured on it he’d melted back into the crowd and gone.

Now you’d think that was probably the strangest thing that had happened to me in some time, and it was.  But only until a garbage truck driver deliberately reversed his vehicle in heavy Palermo traffic just to blow kisses at my dog.