I doubt this week’s Guess Where in Italy? photo-quiz will cause those who know Italy too many problems.

Indeed, I am expecting Blog from Italy reader and Enchanting Italy blogger, Nora, to find the answer to this quiz even more quickly than she usually does.  Nora, it has to be said, is very good at identifying the Italian places shown in the images which have been featured in this Guess where in Italy? series.

Can you beat Nora?  Quite frankly, I doubt it.  Still, you can always prove me wrong!

On to the image of somewhere in Italy which I think is well worth visiting, if you have not done so already, that is.

OK, I’ll call this a church, even if this is not wholly accurate, but if I tell what kind of church it is, this will become even easier!

Where is this hilltop church in Italy?

Can you guess where this church is in Italy?

You have until Saturday to guess where this church is in Italy, and what it is known as.

I’ll post a clue on Friday, if nobody has managed to guess correctly by then.

There is no prize for getting the answer right, as this is just for fun, and for you to show the world how well you know Italy.

Answers on a comment please.  Happy guessing!

Watch out for future Guess Where in Italy? photo-quizzes on Blog from Italy, as a small Italian flavour prize may well be on offer.  I’ll reveal more another time.

Where’s the best place in Italy for festivals? There is no doubt in my mind: Sardinia, plain and simple.

I don’t mean to send your to the Costa Smeralda, the Emerald Coast, where rowdy rich politicians hang with their Mafia buddies and a beer costs more than your rental car. You have to go inland.

Yes, the dusty heart of Sardinia is where the action is—and it seems like it’s getting a lot of play lately. The Herald de Paris offers us: Mamuthones: soul of Sardinia, heritage of humanity

Yep, that’s a dummy Mamuthone on the left up there. He guards a shop that offers masks and other traditional things for sale in the heart of Sardinia. Nobody exactly knows what the symbolic overload in stheir costume stand for anymore, but anyone willing to carry 30 kilos of oversize sheep bells on their back is ok with me. They do that and more at festivals, including roping unsuspecting tourists who thought they were going to be only passive viewers of the weirdest parade they’d ever seen.

The festival closest to my heart is L’Ardia di San Costantino. I saw it five years running. I even saw it on television once. You can’t imagine how deeply a religious horse race can resonate with a culture until you’ve witnessed such a thing while you were living with the 2000 or so people of the little village of Sedilo. Well, not until you’ve shared a glass of Vernaccia with every darn one of them. The same glass I mean.

And just today I discovered some coverage of the Ardia a piedi. I have fond memories of a race I and my archaeologist compatriots lost miserably.

If it seems that these festivals are the festivals of a people lost in an ancient culture, I’m reminded that the very first talking cash register I ever heard was in a little vegetable stand in Sedilo. “Vente mille lire per favore!” it would cry out so you could empty your wallet.

That was over 25 years ago, an idea that just didn’t seem to catch on…

I’ve just attended the Kelseyville Pear Festival here in California. It’s really not all that different than an Italian Sagra. I was thinking about that because in a week or so I’ll probably be attending our first sagra of the fall season.

We didn’t have a lot of time to make a scientific study out of the whole deal because we only stayed at the pear festival until slightly after noon, since the temperatures that morning had shot up faster than a CEO’s salary during a recession.

We walked the streets past food booths and tables groaning with hand-made art and other useless things—except for the soap. We bought a bar.

I can tell you that there is a lot more emphasis on food in the Italian sagra.

You see, after smelling them, I couldn’t help but order a tri-tip sandwich. After all, there were all these herbed tri-tips smoking on a grill over real, smoldering oak. You can’t beat that with a stick. So, thinking that I’d mosey on over to where they sold them I was surprised not to see someone slicing the meat for all to see. You know, there should have been a big ol’ bucher block out there on the street and as the guy draws his extraordinarily sharp knife through the meat for your just-ordered sandwich, the juices gush out with such force you feel inclined to jump back as if you’d put your ribs smack in the trajectory of a Nolan Ryan fastball.

But no. The high school lass taking the money went back into a tent where there was a pile of sandwiches made heaven knows when by heaven knows who and left to sit there in their tin foil coffins. She brought me out a shiny, silver one. It was cold.

I don’t know why folks in the US have to do everything ahead of time. I mean, I cooked at a fairly high end restaurant in Napa for a while, and the other cooks would show me how clever they were to have made a whole bunch of things up ahead of time that would have been much tastier if they were made to order. Doesn’t anyone here have a desire to do the absolute best when serving a customer—even if it means they would have to wait a couple more minutes for their food?

Ok, maybe we don’t want slow, good food. And that’s what I like about Italy. They want that. Heck, they demand that.

At an Italian sagra in the Lunigiana the old women cook their hearts out in a big tent or something while the men and kids run with the finished product on a bee-line toward its eventual owner and consumer. It’s a circus of hot food, made to order. If it smells good, it will be.

And it won’t cost much at all. You’ll sit at communal tables and eat it, remarking how good it is to your neighbors who will wonder how an American found their little celebration of spring onions or some such…

And, oh, there will be wine or beer.

But this was a pear festival and it was about 100 degrees so, as you’d expect, they served pear ice cream. Here’s something you won’t hear in Italy (from an Italian at least), “hey, you see that? Pear ice cream! What will they think of next?”

The pear ice cream was good, but it suffered from what gelato doesn’t—too much cream. Fat is a great flavor carrier, so more cream makes sense sometimes. But for fruit, cream clogs the taste buds so that the true, fresh flavor of it doesn’t come through as well. That’s why we go all gaga over gelato. Fresh, ripe fruit and some milk, frozen.

And the music. If there’s music, you’ll be interested to know that, according to my unscientific survey, you’re slightly more likely to hear jazz in Italy than in the US. They’re nuts over it. Gritty blues tunes? The US gets a big nod there. Country-Western Fiddle with humongous tattooed dudes singing songs glorifying life in a trailer park rife with mind altering substances and lost loves? Safe to say that’s a US thing, too.

Here’s another thing you won’t see at an Italian sagra: a “20 ounce, triple espresso”. No, Italians haven’t slid into that “big gulp” swamp yet. You want 20 ounces of espresso you order about 30 of ‘em, one at a time, so they’re all at the right temperature.

I gotta go pack. You carry on now.

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Don’t know how to find one of these Sagra deals? Look for the Sagra Posters.

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Best place to have an espresso? Naples. Hands down. Why there’s even a blog from Naples I’ve recently discovered that sounds mighty good and is loaded with information about Naples and food with the name: The Espresso Break

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And finally, did you know you can read Wandering Italy Blog on your Kindle?

Once again, reader Nora of Enchanting Italy put her web-searching skills to good use and manage to successfully identify the church shown in this week’s ‘Guess Where in Italy?’ post.  The church shown is San Giorgio Cathedral (Duomo) which can be found in Ragusa Ibla, Sicily.

Well done Nora, once again.

Please keep reading for some more information on the San Giorgio Cathedral and the area of Sicily in which it is to be found.

What is very strange about Sicily and its inhabitants is that they do not seem to be able to understand just how attractive to tourists their island is.  An example of this odd Sicilian attitude is given.

The Gothic-Catalan San Giorgio Cathedral

The San Giorgio Cathedral is in a Gothic-Catalan style and was constructed in the late eighteenth century, although additions, such as the dome, continued to be made in the 19th century.

Ragusa Ibla, incidentally, is the lower, and older area of Ragusa.  The upper and lower sections of Ragusa are separated by a the Valle dei Ponti ravine.  Ragusa is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I have been told by someone who has visited Ragusa Ibla and seen this church, that it and the rest of the Baroque town in which it is to be found is sadly in a state of splendid dilapidation.    A condition which is, alas, all too common in Sicily, whose inhabitants seem incapable of appreciating the jewels on their doorsteps.

San Giorgio Duomo, Ragusa Ibla, Sicily, Italy

Disinterest and Apathy

Indeed, a student of mine who is doing a master in tourism at the business school where I teach English, said that she had been involved in a project designed to encourage the locals in the Ragusa area to make more of their tourist attractions.  The project, from what I learnt, never really got off the ground.  Initial enthusiasm for attracting more tourism to this area soon transformed into disinterest and apathy.

It is the apathy of Sicilians which seems to be their worst enemy.  Well, either apathy or simply laziness.  Sicilians do have a reputation for moaning about a lack of work and virtually zero investment in Sicily.  However lots of money has been thrown at Sicily over the years, but few seem to know exactly where all the billions have ended up.  The siphoning off of funds by a certain criminal organisation is widely suspected, and highly probable too.

There is Money in Sicily

Contrary to popular belief, there are Sicilians with money, but many seem highly reluctant to invest some of their wealth in the construction of better facilities for tourists.  Very sad,  income from tourism would probably mean that Sicily could become virtually self-sufficient, almost to the point of being able to declare independence from the rest of Italy!

One way in which Sicily’s population could be taught to appreciate just what they have got may be to send a few of them to some of England’s more depressed areas, including a few former English towns which used to host mines and steelworks.  After seeing such grim places, perhaps Sicilians would be able to understand just why tourists find their run-down island so magical.

Sicilians Don’t Want Tourists

Quite a number of more enterprising Sicilians have headed towards the north of Italy to set up businesses, but not all have, and the sheer beauty of Italy’s most mischievous island does attract tourists.  Indeed, my own brother and his family holidayed in Taormina, so even if Sicily does not seem to want tourists, tourists do want Sicily!

Further reading:

First and foremost, don’t forget to visit Italy’s lover Nora’s Enchanting Italy blog.

Then come back here and look at these links:

Travelplan – Ragusa Guide Italy – A Special Day travel itinerary.

Wikipedia – in English – Ragusa, Italy

A list of blogs by people who know Sicily – ItalyTutto – Top Blogs on Italy

Ok, here’s what to do with all those summer cherry tomatoes you don’t know what to do with (because you’ve used them for pasta with cherry tomatoes and basil too many times).

So you’re boiling some pasta water for your lunch pasta. Throw some of those cherry tomatoes in first. Get them out pronto and peel them. Put them in a bowl. Cover them with vodka into which you’ve drizzled just enough Tabasco to titillate your tongue. Let them sit a while—maybe until just before dinner. I’ve also added celery seeds, but they didn’t add much to the whole deal.

Then go to Hallstatt, Austria and pick up some of the pinkish looking salt they produce in the ancient mines there. You can visit the mines, but you might not get home for dinner.

(Every once in a while they find someone from hundreds or thousands of years ago burried in the salt, preserved. Don’t let this deter you. The color pink is from minerals. Tell yourself that convincingly.)

Before serving, I popped my marinating tomatoes in the freezer. It was a hot evening. I thought the vodka would help antifreeze them. But no. That’s why we had to serve them with metal toothpicks (really corn-on-the-cob holders, so non-Italian, eh?).

Anyway, you grab a tomato, pop it in the salt, and eat. Couldn’t be simpler. Icy cold, refreshing, safely sterilized by alcohol, and yummy. And no, no headache afterwards, even when you (OK, I) drink the, um, “juice”.

And, oh, I used orange tomatoes because they go with the color scheme of the site.