Fall 2019 Day 33

Back to Catania, to a city we didn’t even recognized!  Our friends left for Rome and then home, while we stayed in Catania, where our Sicilian adventure began. We took the bus from the airport where we dropped off our rental car and it let us off right in front of our B&B. It’s not an Airbnb this time, just a B&B and it’s lovely. It’s on one of the nicest streets in Catania and we can’t even recognize this as the city we were at before. When we were here before, we spent our time by the Greek Theater. And while that was amazing, it’s not in as nice of a part of town. So our impression of Catania before was, beautiful ruins, gritty, not so pretty city. But, staying where we are now, by the Villa Bellini and Bellini Park is like a whole new world!!  Catania is lovely!  It has life and beautiful shops and lovely people and is a place I’d gladly come back to!  I don’t know if I would have said that before. On our way into town we had a perfect view of Mt Etna today and we even have a pretty good view of it from our balcony!  There is something so amazing about looking out your window and seeing a huge volcano that is still very much active and has smoke coming out of the top still!!!  I’m pretty sure we would be fine! LOL. I’m still fighting a cold so when we got into our place we napped. It was an early morning so it was necessary. We woke up, showered and explored this cool city. We are our first Arancini, a Sicilian specialty. A friend rice ball with cheese and tomato sauce in it. It was amazing. I can’t believe it took us this long to have one!  But, I have a feeling we will have more tomorrow. 😜 Then we went and walked around Bellini Park. Bellini is a famous Italian Opera Composer who is from Catania. It was a gorgeous park, we will have a lot more picture of it tomorrow in the light when it can really be appreciated!  Then we went to a restaurant that I found online. When I’m researching, I look for strange things sometimes and sometimes it really pays off!  For some reason, I looked up real Naples style pizza in Sicily. That’s where pizza came from and it’s virtually impossible to find the real deal outside of Naples. Well, in this article, I read about this place in Catania that has what this writes said was the best outside of Naples. I remembered that search today and looked it up. It happened to be right around the corner from our place. So, we went there!  They had burgers and fries and all sorts of yummy stuff. We tried a few things but then we got the pizza.  I can honestly say it was one of the very best pizzas I’ve ever had!  It was so good, we almost forgot to take a picture until there was only one piece left. So sorry for the lame picture of it. But, believe us, it was amazing!!!!  Then we got some gelato and a cannoli from the place that’s supposed to be the best in town!  It was!!!!  Another great day!!  Tomorrow Is our last day in Italy and really our last day of the trip because Sunday we head to Paris in the afternoon and we booked a hotel at the airport since it’s not worth going anywhere for less than half a day. So tomorrow is our last day of enjoyment and no travel 😔. We are ready to come home though. But we will make sure we enjoy the heck out of tomorrow!!!  Hope you enjoyed the day as much as we did and we will have a final flurry of fun for you tomorrow!!  Thanks for reading!!