Sicily

Today we docked at Siracusa in Sicily.  Sicily  sits at the junction of the North African and European plates, so it has a lot of volcanic activity. 

There were excursions into Siracusa itself, but we'd  chosen the excursion to Mt Etna and Catania.  This was an 8 hour excursion so we set off early. It was a long journey by coach  from the port to the city of Catania.  To be honest  I think it would have been better not to have bothered with Catania at all and just concentrated on Etna. The traffic was terrible  and it took ages to get into the centre of town. The city looked scruffy and the main square was overrun by rather suspect looking individuals trying to sell things to you.  We had a look around the cathedral  but it wasn't as impressive as the other cathedrals we've  seen  on this trip. About the only interesting thing was that there seemed to be statues of elephants everywhere. 

We reached Etna around noon.  The highest point the buses can reach is about 6000ft,  you can go further up by cable car, but still not that near the top (Etna is 10000ft). There are craters on the lower slopes though, including  the Silvestri crater, which we were able to walk up to from the parking lot.

We had an excellent  late lunch at the Nicosia winery, before  another long drive back to the ship.  

Today's fascinating fact is that Sicily used to be home to a miniature elephant, called elephas falconeri which went extinct about 250,000 years ago.  Ancient Greeks came to Sicily and found the skulls of these elephants. The skulls had a large hole in the centre where the trunk would have been, and this was the origin of the Greek  myth of the Cyclops.