"This isn't at all like Fawlty Towers"

So saith my daughter at the end of the first full day in our B & B in Scopello.

My poor children. I haul them around the world, thinking I have explained to them where we are going and why, only to discover what fears and apprehensions are actually lurking in their heads, fears I could never have anticipated. After all, when I told her that we were staying in B & B's rather than regular hotels, how was I supposed to know that the dominant image that then popped into her head was that of John Cleese barking orders to a hapless Spanish waiter while everything is going to hell?

Let me recap:

We left Birmingham at 8:10 Monday (6/22) morning and arrived in Palermo, Sicily at about 2:30 Tuesday (6/23) afternoon. Which was about...what...6:30 am Tuesday in Bham? 24 hours?

Yeah,, but it was cheap I keep telling you. (The key to the cheapness? A rock-bottom fare from Charlotte to Barcelona that ran for a couple of days back in early March - Airfare Watchdog is your friend. We're talking a total fare that's about half of normal summer US- Europe fares not from major cities.)

So, get to Palermo, rent the car, drive to Scopello.

What is Scopello? It's a village - a tiny village on the northwest coast of Sicily. And when I say tiny - I mean tiny. A baglio - former manor - sits on and overlooks a small square.








The fountain in the square.



The baglio, looking from the courtyard. It is now all shops, a restaurant and gelateria/bar

There are maybe..two..three streets in the village, which now has 45 permanent inhabitants, all engaged, I assume, in the hospitality business. I met the priest coming out of one of the small shops, tried to talk with him (he spoke no English), and then later caught his notice when I was snapping a photo of his discarded Paschal candle (see below). The place seems to be a popular base for people sightseeing in Western Sicily - it was actually fairly noisy at night.

We stayed at the Pensione Tranchina, right off the square, which is not saying much because everything was right off the square. Our room was just that - a room, but with a double bed and a bunk. Michael and took the double, Katie the bottom and Joseph the top bunk. The place was spotless and the hosts, Marisin and Salvatore were wonderful, with fascinating backgrounds - Marisin is of Chinese descent, living in Panama when she met Salvatore, and then coming back to Scopello with him where they have raised a family and built up this lovely pensione. There are photographs on the wall of the area fifty years ago - poverty-stricken, destitute, barren - and of the house that is now the pensione. What a transformation this area and this island has experienced over the past half-century.

We ate a couple of meals there,which were both excellent (one blogged below - here's a photo of the second)



These lengthy Italian dinners are just too much for me, though. Can't do it every night, I confess.

There were small world moments here, as there are every time and every day that I travel, it seems. A couple - a Brit husband and American wife - were from Atlanta. And there was another couple there with a small boy. The husband spoke some English, the wife none, they were from a town outside Venice and their little boy was named Michael. It interested me because they called him "Michael" with an English pronunciation - long "i". I attempted to ask the wife at one point what the Italian for Michael was and she told me, and I said, "But you call him "Michael" - " intending it to be a leading question, since I didn't know enough Italian to make it more than leading, but she just nodded cheerfully, and didn't explain why.

Safe to say, though, that both nights we were there for dinner, Joseph, Michael and Michael spent some very happy hours madly running around the little piazza, racing each other, chasing and being chased by dogs (it fascinated Joseph that the dog just were loose in the village - boy needs to get out more).  I am not sure how they communicated, but they did. The husband told me of his satisfaction with their vacation - that it made him so happy to see his boy play freely and safely, with no Playstation or TV in sight.

Parenthood - a common thread.

The only tense moment came when our pasta course was presented one night and it was the typical Sicilian dish of Pasta con Sardine. They knew that Katie did not like fish and so had alternatives prepared for those courses  for her (chicken one night, pork the next), but the pasta course...well, that was a shock. They saw right away that this might be a problem - for both of my boys and even the Italian Michael as well, so they brought out simpler pastas for the four of them. I was not crazy about Pasta con Sardine, but since I had resolved to eat anything the Sicilians gave me, I ate it and sort of liked it. But the prawns were fantastic and the Italian Michael, even though he'd sent his Pasta con Sardine back, dug into his. (Not mine,  stuck with their pasta. They had meat for the first time in five days, I think, last night.)

So, Scopello - a lovely little village, a good base for excursions, an idyllic place for children to play under the stars, water trickling from the fountain, gelato digesting, parents sitting with glasses of wine talking about what  parents all over the world talk about - their fears, hopes and dreams for their children - the greatest hope of all being that this sense of freedom and security they so joyfully and intuitively are living tonight, under a protective canopy of stars, will last, somehow, in some way, for the rest of their lives.