The Voyage of the Mighty Tenho: in Sicily

We took advantage of the good sailing weather and sailed right past Sardinia and arrived yesterday in Sicily. The pass between Sardinia and Sicily was the hot spot for tuna fishing! Was great to finally get onto land though after seven days of being on the boat. The Palermo port is a gritty busy working part of town...we were debating whether some of the buildings were falling apart from pollution and age or if it was still the carpet bombing of WWII that hadn't been fully repaired. Spent today reprovisioning the boat with more food, doing laundry (nearest self-service laundry was almost a mile away, but better than doing it all by hand...one of my least favorite parts of boat life), and then went to the marionette museum and theater this afternoon/evening, plus the obligatory mom-mandated church visit.

Sicily has quite a marionette tradition and the stories they act out are amazing - what a great way to learn history. We saw one about Orlando (aka Roland, in English), the valiant knight of Charlemagne, his true love Angelica, a pagan princess from Asia, and Agramonte, a Muslim African king. The marionettes were as big as Maggie, and the show included conch horns, drums, player piano accompaniment, lights...and even though it was all in Italian, we had the cliff notes in English and Hugo's Spanish helped keep us up on the plot. We could only imagine what it would have been like to see the entire story acted out over many months, like an old-fashioned version of a TV mini-series, rather than just in one night. Inspired by the marionette theater, the kids made their own, complete with a princess who bashes the dragon on the head with a club, thereby saving the knight pinned underneath.

Tomorrow we head for the volcanic Aeolian Islands, then through the Straits of Messina to the east coast of Sicily.