Day 5 - Wednesday October 29, 2025 - Erice and Trapani

 

Today we visited Erice and Trapani..  Pronounced (Er’ e cha).  We head to the westerly most area of Sicily.   We’re told Erice is a medieval walled city and when we travel to Trapani we’ll visit the salt pans.  I’m thinking it will be very similar to Salt Lake City, time will tell.

Breakfast was, again at 7 am and we boarded our bus at 8:30 am for the 1 1/2 drive.  

I have to stop and reflect on our hotel and the neighborhood we are staying in, here in Palermo.  We’re in the historic downtown area and the closest I can come to compare it with a city in the US would be Bourbon Street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras.  Vibrant, loud, people singing on corners for change.  Within a block of our hotel, and visible from our balcony two men were singing opera last night, of course in Italian.   

We went out for a light supper and ate outside last night.  All the restaurants have tables in the street and people, multitudes of people, walking past.   If you like people watching, it’s great.  It’s exciting and invigorating to see the energy of the city.  

Back to today and visiting the town of Erice.  It’s on the summit of Mount Erice, at 2500 ft elevation.  As you might expect it was a military stronghold for the Carthaginian’s and Romans.  It has a natural vantage point which offers control over the Strait of Sicily and the western coastline.

It’s a walled city with walls surrounding the entire town.  The town dates back to the 5th century BC.  Everywhere you walk is either up or down and steep and did I forget the word, cobblestones!  

Wayne and I let the group go but we did walk, slowly up to the castle at the very top of the town for the amazing views.  The walk down was steep and slow but was definitely worth it.

The steep streets of Erice

They had these whimsical statutes in town but I don’t get the Lobster connection since there aren’t any here

Views from the top of Erice

It was truly beautiful up there

Views from the top

The only cart and horse I saw today

Another of their whimsical statutes in town

A long walk deserved a pastry and a coffee.  A local pastry, the inside was ricotta cheese and the outside all covered in pistachios. 

Wayne’s was all chocolate and heated

Just trying to show the steepness of the street and that he found another bench

Back on the bus at noon we headed to Trapani for an amazing lunch and then a tour of the salt pans and salt museum.  Using lochs, water is flooded into holding pans.  Over the course of the hot dry summer months, the water evaporates and leaves the salt.  

Working windmills that ground the salt

Flooded pans of salt waiting for wind and evaporation to harvest the salt

Harvested salt

Depending on the salt, it can have a pink tinge.  The camera may not have picked up the pink too well.

More salt pans 

The working windmill and museum as well as our lunch restaurant 

Another salt pan

A lump of salt to grind

Of course it’s all mechanized now but years back, salt was manually dug and put in baskets on your back. When loaded, they weighed 60 lbs.  This was done for 10 hours each day.  

Lunch was a great selection of appetizers, cured olives, tomato salad, bruschetta, cheese, eggplant tapenade.  The ‘main’ course was pasta with a light red sauce and pine nuts and separately big plates of Couscous with calamari in it. Even Wayne ate the couscous .  He hated it in Morocco but said this was much better.  There was a thin tomato sauce to put on it which made it very tasty.  It was probably the best calamari I have ever eaten and couscous is like eating dry kasha, cooked, but no gravy.  It needed their sauce.

The restaurant for lunch

Everything here is ricotta cheese.  Dessert was warm dough stuffed with ricotta and small chocolate chips 

Back on the bus for the 2 hour drive to the hotel. Tomorrow we leave Palermo after a tour of a church on the UNESCO world heritage list and then on to Agrigento in the south central part of Sicily famous for the Valley of the Temples.  By that’s for another day.

Dinner tonight, around 7 pm .  Excellent steamed seafood Boy I’ve missed good seafood.  Mussels, clams, shrimp, scallops.

Wayne and his calamari.