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Even more than they are concerned about the quality of various harvest years, large and small Israeli wineries devote a great deal of time to trying to understand how they can better succeed at exporting their wines. If there is a lesson to be learned by those wineries it is from the wineries on the island of Sicily, for in the past ten years Sicilian wines have become broadly accepted in the United States, the U.K. and even within France. Going a step further, it might be that the best lessons might be learned from Sicily’s family-owned Planeta winery whose high- and low-end wines are selling like proverbial hotcakes, even in our own little country.
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">New golf courses are scheduled to open in Eastern Sicily. Giuseppe and Salvatore Leonardi, owners of Picciolo Golf Club in Castiglione di Sicilia nearby Mount Etna, affirm the necessity of promoting a system for a different type of tourism in Sicily.
One of these golf courses is scheduled to open in Carlentini, between Catania and Siracusa, in 2010. The golf course should raise by the ocean with beautiful breathtaking views. The other golf course is planned in Trappitello nearby Taormina.
Our best hope at SicilyGuide is that these two golf courses will not be delayed as the Verdura Golf & Spa Resort di Sciacca by Rocco Forte Hotels.
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">The villas are set in the Sicilian hills, with spectacular views over the Mediterranean. Your future neighbours could be celebrities such as Peter Gabriel, the Genesis singer, and Massimo Moratti, the owner of the Inter Milan football team.
And then there is the price: a tidy one euro apiece.
The catch is that you have just two years to restore the homes, which were abandoned after an earthquake 40 years ago.
Vittorio Sgarbi, the colourful Mayor of Salemi – just 72km from Palermo – hopes to attract buyers who had “both the aesthetic sensitivity and the economic resources to take part in this adventure”.
More at TimesOnline.com
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">Eyewitness travel guides are packed with color photos and detailed maps and descriptions. Although heavy to carry around, they are great for planning your travels.
Sicily Eyewitness Travel guide is one of the best guidebooks I have come across. More >>
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More than a thousand solar panels are to be set up on land seized from the Mafia in Sicily, officials said Wednesday. ”In place of abandoned villas and farmland we’re providing development,” said the mayor of the town of Campobello di Mazara, Ciro Carava’, stressing that the 1,320 panels would provide valuable cash for Mafia-hit firms after the power it produces is fed into the local system. ”The money will be put into a municipal fund to finance small businesses run by families who have lost relatives to the Mob or been the victims of extortion rackets,” he said. More>>
Sicily’s ancient peoples - the Sicanians, Sicels, Elymians - - are lost to antiquity, but her ancient wine culture thrives, connecting Sicily’s past and present to the future. Beginning about 800 B.C., Sicily’s central location in the Mediterranean Sea landed her in the international mainstream.
Dionysus, God of Wine, shepherded the grape from Greece to Sicily - it is said - conveniently just ahead of Greek settlement of the island, circa 500 B.C. In 300 B.C., Roman historian Varrone documented 50 varieties of grapes planted throughout the island. Arabs arrived in the 800s A.D. and founded the city of Mars el’Allah, (literally "Port of Allah"), modern-day Marsala, made world-famous in the 1700s for its sweet fortified wine and countless chicken recipes.
A pioneer of another sort discovered Sicily during the modern world’s wine boom. In 1972, Anthony J. Terlato, scion of Lake Bluff-based Terlato Wines International was intrigued by a bottle of the Sicilian brand Corvo, he ordered in a Rome ristorante. More >>
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">In an effort to have the same look and feel for the web site, we have moved the blog address to: http://www.sicilyguide.com/blog/rss.xml. Please update this information for your subscription. You can also subscribe directly by using the following link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Sicilyguidecom/blog. Thanks.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">A friend gave me a book, Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, a couple of weeks ago and I have to say that I am really enjoying it…
‘Sicily struck me
then as the most fascinating place I had ever visited. I didn’t change that opinion over the intervening years, no matter where I travelled. I meant to go back. Time and again I made plans. Time and again I was thwarted.’At the age of twenty-six Matthew Fort first visited the island of Sicily. He and his brother arrived in 1973 expecting sun, sea and good food, but they were totally unprepared for the lifelong effect of this most extraordinary of islands. Thirty years later, older and a bit wiser - but no less greedy - Matthew finally returns. Travelling round the island on his scooter, Monica, he samples exquisite antipasti in rundown villages, delicate pastries in towns that clung to the edge of vertical hillsides, and goes fishing for anchovies beneath a star-scattered sky. Once again this enigmatic island casts its spell, and Matthew rediscovers its beauty, the intensity of its flavours, and finds himself digging into the darkness of Sicily’s past as well as
some mysteries of his own.
I am not quite sure, but it is according to this article from The Age, an Australian newspaper.
The idea of drinking a Sicilian wine a decade or even a few years ago, wouldn’t have crossed most Australians’ minds let alone palates. But times are certainly changing - and rapidly.
Part of that transformation has been the growing interest in preserving and promoting indigenous Sicilian varieties that are as exhilarating as their names, such as nero d’Avola, carricante, grecanico and frappato.
Plus, producers from the mainland, especially Tuscany, now realise Sicily’s great potential. Many are buying up sites - land prices are relatively inexpensive - and planting vineyards to capitalize on the next wave of wine trends.
Read more at The Age
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">Michelle Di Bartolo told her mother at the tender age of 14 she wasn’t going to school any more, she was going to be a writer
”We fought back and forth with her saying she wasn’t going and me insisting she did. Eventually she went back to school,” says Di Bartolo’s mother, Rosita.
Eighteen years later, Di Bartolo has realized her dream, with her first book, The Sicilian Kitchen due out next month.
Read more at News.com.au
BooksBooksAn ancient Greek ship recently raised off the coast of southern Sicily, Italy, is the biggest and best maintained vessel of its kind ever found, archaeologists say.
At a length of nearly 70 feet (21 meters) and a width of 21 feet (6.5 meters), the 2,500-year-old craft is the largest recovered ship built in a manner first depicted in Homer’s Iliad, which is believed to date back several centuries earlier.
Read more at the National Geograhic
News TravelNews TravelSad news for the Sicilian tourism industry. This year, tourism is down 25% compared to the same months of last year. The minor islands are suffering the most from this slowdown.
What’s wrong with the Sicilian tourism industry? I have 10 reasons and you can add more (if you like it).
1- Prices are too high. The value (quality/price) of a vacation in Sicily is not comparable to the one of another tourist destination in the Mediterranean Sea. Why a tourist should spend more for less?
2- The euro is too strong. There is little that can be done about it, but Greece and Spain have the euro and they are not down 25% in tourist arrivals.
3- The Italian economy is not growing. So, Italians stay at home and do not travel.
4- Infrastructures (roads, hotels) are old and/or completely absent in some areas.
5- There is no fresh water in some areas (i.e. Agrigento).
6- Service is not stellar (to put it mildly). Tourists come one season and run away the following one.
7- Sicily’s weather has become too hot in the last few summers and arsonists do not help to cool it down… Is it cooler in Spain or Greece? I doubt it.
8- The 2007 marketing plan of the Sicilian Region was not strategically executed. It is not uncommon that lots of resources are not wisely spent.
9- Sicily still lacks a serious tourism development plan.
10- Sicily is left to improvisation and does not rely on a serious marketing strategy.
I strongly hope to be wrong. I was in Sicily only for one week this summer and people who live there might have a better idea…
TravelTravel
For generations, Americans have been dependable consumers of Italian wines. From the straw-covered bottles of Chianti to the super reds of Tuscany, Italian wines have been on restaurant lists and wine shop shelves for as long as most of us can remember.
But the wines of Sicily have been missing. Indeed, for years that Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy’s mainland has been best known by Americans not for its wine, but for its mafia and its still-active volcano, Mount Etna.
Read more at the Sun-Sentinel.com
Food & Wine TravelFood & Wine Travel
It may take a mindshift to think of magnificent Greek ruins in Italy but the Greeks were everywhere a long time before the Romans made something of themselves, and the ancient cities of Akragas and Selinunte on the southern coast of Sicily are equally as dramatic and fascinating as Rome’s Parthenon.
Sicily is like that - surprising and contradictory.
Read more at NZHerald.co.nz
TravelTravel