Hell Heat

 Happily, the weather has broken here a bit. In fact, it has even rained three times this week, which is apparently the first rain that Terrasini had received since a sprinkling on 9 May. We're at the stage now where the high is in the low 80s, although the temperature difference between high and low is astonishingly small (often as little as seven degrees). When we arrived in middle August we suffered through a series of 98 degree days, with a heat index routinely around 110. That alone doesn't begin to explain how routinely miserable it was, mainly because the sun, in a cloudless sky, was simply unrelenting. Just brutal. 

There's just something about this picture, which I snapped one night on the lungomare when we first started taking our evening passegiata. It looks like we're all being queued up to be fed to the ravenous sun god (which is sort of what Sicily is like in July and August). 

Need Bread?

 This odd picture reminds me, in an appropriately strange way, of the United Arab Emirates. I sometimes will try to explain to my friends that in the truly posh Emirati malls there were vending machines where you could buy small gold ingots; you know, for those days when you're shopping and you really feel you should bring home some gold. I'm not certain that my friends believe me, although I've shown them pictures (and, for that matter, it's celebrated somewhere on the pages of this blog, infirm with years and creaking under the weight of over three-thousand posts). In this case the vending machine wasn't dispersing gold ingots, but instead bread. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll let you know if it's good.

Because you know, when you really need some bread, walking on the backstreets of Terrasini, at three o'clock in the morning.

Movies in 2026 243

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1982)

Here's one of those movies that I had always heard about, but never actually taken the opportunity to watch: Lou Adler's 1982 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Famous Stains. I mainly associate Adler with the music industry, so I guess it's not that strange that he would have directed this effort. It didn't receive much initial love, although critics have been kinder in their criticism over the decades. Mainly, today, it's odd to see how Diane Lane and Laura Dern haven't aged, and how Ray Winstone has aged (although he's, typically very good in this movie). It's the story of Lane's band as she, chameleon-like, searches for the right persona to make it big. I don't think I would recommend it heartily, but there are some nice peculiar moments, and you could do worse things with your time. 

Oranges

 Here's a picture of Janet not stealing an orange on the walk home the other day.  We're still trying to adjust to a very different climate, one that features palm trees and oranges and prickly pears (I'll tell that story soon) - as compared to evergreen and tons of snow.

Janet is mainly mugging for her husband here, and not actually swiping oranges. Plus, the orange is about a month shy of being ripe. And we're not even talking about the famous Sicilian blood orange, which won't ripen until mid-winter.

Movies in 2026 242

 

Summer 1993 (Carla Simon, 2017)

And another Carla Simon movie, and I liked this one quite a bit as well. This film, earlier than her recent film Romeria, explores a similar earlier event: the time right after her father and mother died of AIDS. This one, Summer 1993, covers the time when she as a young girl moves to live with her uncle's family. It is very touching, and also gets at the paranoia relating to the early days of the AIDS years. Highly recommended.

Movies in 2026 241

 

Romeria (Carla Simon, 2025)

I don't know if I'll recapture the film-watching momentum that I had earlier in the year (waiting out the Vermont winter is a great impetus to watch movies, exploring a beautiful new Sicilian world less so), but I'm happy to finally get wifi and access once again to movies. The other day I watched Carla Simon's new film, Romeria, and was very impressed. Carla Simon is a very talented Spanish director, and one of those folks that I would have never discovered without the Criterion Channel. The film is a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman trying to uncover the truth (in an almost Proustian fashion) of the mysteries and family lies surrounding the death of her parents from AIDS. It's very powerful, and highly recommended.

The View from the End of the Lane

 Our apartment here in Terrasini is an odd little place. It's not that it's bad, per se, and there are parts of it which are really nice. It was recently renovated and it's pretty solid. The problem is that it's a tiny one bedroom, which simply doesn't begin to serve the needs of two people who are either working/writing or writing. Plus, it's down near the water in the midst of the old fishermen's village, which is charming, and I love it, but it also leaves a twenty-minute walk up the hill to go shopping or find any shops. This wouldn't be a problem if you aren't a sixty-six year old man who walks with a cane (although I'm getting around better than I thought I would). However, the biggest problem may simply be something which would be hard to fix: it's a first floor apartment, which means that there's no balcony and the doors/windows are covered with frosted glass. We often feel like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, part of this great experiment. We could be anyplace in the world for all we'd ever know from inside the apartment. However, then you'll open the door, turn left, and there's the Mediterranean Sea (which, oddly, makes the painfully sanitized environment inside the apartment even worse). Yes, in many ways this qualifies as the very definition of #FirstWorldProblem, but it's still not what we were hoping for. So, I guess I'll stick with too far too walk to buy groceries as the biggest reason why we're moving to a different apartment later in the month.

Here's the view from the end of our little lane. It's an amazing world that almost startles us every day when we open up the door and escape the science experiment.