Transitioning Away from Rome: Operation Sicily

With my conference over and the sites the family wanted to see seen, we started the next phase of the trip: Operation Sicily.

The ferry we needed to take our rental car on turned out to be full, so we needed to spend Saturday night still on the sunny peninsula before catching the ferry across the Strait of Messina the next morning.

We had rented a car from the aptly named Sicily By Car, but in the town from which we rented it, there was no car ferry. We rented the car from the company in the city of Reggio Calabria, a few short kilometers away from Sicily in the very toe of the boot that comprises the visual aid of Italy. My colleague lives in Calabria in the summers, and we had planned to stay with him and he offered to show us around Syracuse and Agrigento, two sites that were on our list anyway.

Alas, it was not to be, as he landed in Milan on the day we left Rome for LA.

Many ferries take people from Reggio Calabria to Messina, on Sicily, but none of the companies take cars. The car ferry was a few miles north up the coast of Calabria, in the ferry-port town of Villa San Giovanni.

But we'd missed our opportunity, and had to scramble to find an AirBnB in Calabria. Corrie found a quaint 3-bedroom place near the beach and near the ferry imbarcadero in V. San Giovanni, and we set out from Rome for the furthest southern point to which the train traveled.

Our train was an express, as it were, and made it's first stop in Naples, about 140 miles south of Rome.

Then it made more than a handful of stops down to the terminus, Centrale Stazione Reggio Calabria.

In the food car

We made it to the station and lugged all of our stuff to a nearby restaurant. In the eating area we found a young mother, baby, stroller, and a large pile of crap, and picked the opposing corner to throw our crap in. Once situated, I ran back across the square to wait for a taxi, in the hopes that they would take me to my spot and not rip me off.

It all seemed okay, but there was no running meter in the as-such labeled TAXI, but he charged me 25€. A spot of anxiety crept in as I realized that I was so sure how to get back to the train station. We'd driven for maybe ten minutes on the Autostrade, their freeway. I got deeply accented instructions, and it all worked out.

The Car: we rented a mid decade dark blue Peugeot station wagon, the 308 Diesel 6-speed manual. It pretty much looked just like this promotional photo I snatched from the web, only ours was a darker shade of blue:

I grew to love the car. I even checked the prices and availability of similar cars here in the US. Stick-shift Diesel station wagons are far less popular stateside (who'da guessed?), and that drives the prices into the $50k range. BUMMER.

We made our AirBnB (a whole post will be appearing about the stress of not having working service on our phones as we tried to let our hosts know we were in town), walked to find dinner, learned they weren't open yet, went to the beach across the street from the restaurant, and played in the Ionian Sea comprising the Strait of Messina in the fading sunlight:

That dinner was one of the best on the trip. Walking home, I tried to capture the lights of Messina in Sicily and show the proximity of the Mediterranean's largest island to our coastal zone:

That's Sicily back there!

 We had tickets for the 10 am ferry, and head you had to be at least an hour early, but closer to two is better. We made it to what looked like a completely deserted lining up spot just before 8:50. Some chicks gave us a boarding pass and told me to just follow the lane. I said, Chill, and took off. The lane looped right, and left, and then under a freeway bridge, and I thought, Damn, we're gonna be first on this MFer. I saw some other cars speeding away and hitting a hairpin up in front of us and heading back our direction.

It looked like they were getting waved into the open maw of a great ship. Oh shit, I thought, and hit it, whipping the car down and around the hairpin, thrusting my boarding pass at the guy. He scanned it and sent us on board. At least we could have a coffee and a croissant as we waited to leave the Boot.

The maw behind me shut with a thunderous clank, followed by serious beep-beep-beeps as we headed upstairs. "Let's find some caffeine," I remember saying as we joined the other people on the upper, social decks.

But we were moving. We hadn't been early to the 10 am ferry. We'd been the last cars to get on the 8 am ferry, and left just before 9.

Official First Boat Ride for Cassius

That ferry ride is not even a half an hour, and we were headed south from Messina towards Syracuse before our original ferry was even supposed to have left.

Here's a map. Places that are on here that are of interest to the Operation Sicily narrative that follows are Messina, Syracuse, Agrigento, and Palermo. (Catania is a huge city, and the name you follow most of the time leaving Messina.)