Acireale

We started today at 9:30 am with a walking tour of Acireale. It was periodically sprinkling as we walked.

We walked down by the Cathedral again (photos yesterday) and saw it was prepared for a wedding. The groom was standing by the door with a bouquet of flowers waiting for the bride to arrive. The tour guide joked that this would be the last time the bride could make the groom wait for her. Amazingly, our guide asked if we could go in to see the cathedral while he waited and he said we could. As we left, it started pouring and we sheltered in the Basilica next door for a few minutes while it passed.

There are lots of succulents growing here, as it is a dry climate.

The flowers above the green beans on the left are zucchini flowers.

We passed by the Acireale’s Puppet Museum. They had some posters about the puppets outside.

The Acireale Carnival is before Ash Wednesday. There are paper-mâché masks and floats. The museum of the Carnival has prototypes of floats that were submitted.

Later on we passed this wedding in the Basilica San Sebastiano and I got a photo from the back. We passed three weddings on a Thursday morning in early June. The guide said weddings happen every day of the week except Sunday.

We had an included lunch at Frumento. It was a buffet, with lots of tasty choices.

After lunch, we had a little bit of free time to get back to the hotel and to prepare for our optional tour to Taormina. The bus drive there was a little over an hour.

Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria

The Roman theater (an expanded and re-engineered Greek theater) is a highlight of Taormina. The theater faces Mt. Etna, but it was hard to see today with the cloudy weather.

We had some free time, so had some pistachio gelato and walked down to the public gardens.

Then we met at the restaurant for a cooking class on how to make arancini (deep fried stuffed rice balls).

After making them, they deep fried them and we had them as one of the appetizers at our meal. They were great in dealing with shellfish allergies, even though shrimp was an option to put in your arancini, making a fresh pot of oil to make sure nothing with shellfish had been fried in it.

We arrived back at the hotel around 9:30 pm, making this a long day. We start at 8 am tomorrow.