Assettati

 One of the things that I was hoping would happen when we got settled was finding great little restaurants, away from the main tourist thoroughfare. We tend to not eat in the Piazza Duomo very often, although the vibe up there is pretty cool. One night we stumbled into a little place around the corner from our apartment, and about a hundred feet from La Sirenella. It's called Assettati (which is sort of Italian/Sicilian for "you sit"). As it turned it, it had just been purchased by a guy name Salvatore, who grew up here in Terrasini, but then twenty years working in and running restaurants in Philadelphia of all places. It may not have been our intention, but Assettati quickly has become our go-to place (and we'd eat there more if Janet was playing the responsible party and directing us to other restaurants or eating at home - which is clearly crazy talk). Anyway, it's absolutely wonderful, and I think we've eaten there six times (it will be seven in a couple hours) in the six weeks we've been here. Highly recommended.

Too Many Sunset Pictures

 Yeah, I need to stop posting so many sunset pictures, but, seriously, one of the advantages of living in this sleepy little beach town is amazing sunsets every night. We're moving into our new apartment tomorrow, and even though we won't be right on the water any more, we'll at least have a balcony to sit, enjoy a homemade Aperol Spritz, and revel in this beautiful world.

Those two jagged rocks, which I've carefully and clumsily centered to capture the sun, are an iconic image of Terrasini.

Movies in 2026 246

 

La tete d'un homme (Julien Duvivier, 1935)

At least I was able to finish out on a good movie, Julien Duvivier's 1935 film Un tete d'un homme. 

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Cemetery Man (Michele Saovi, 1994)

Sadly, this experiment is coming to an end. The Criterion Channel, acting oddly corporate, has decided that since I'm travelling overseas I can no longer access the website. The lockdown is so complete I couldn't even get into my account to check my status or to send an email asking for assistance, which led to me searching for an email address where I could send them a note - and cancel my subscription. This pains me because I've been a member of the Criterion Channel for years, and I'd hate to think how many thousands of dollars I've spent at the Criterion Collection, but it's hard to justify paying for a subscription that is blocked. I guess the Criterion Channel was to good to be true in a grossly corporatized America. I guess I've have to start conveying my DVDs over on my next trip home.

Another Path

 Here's a picture of my lovely wifey. I don't need any other reason that that to post it, but it's also a nice shot of the path that runs from the area around La Sirenetta up to our Via Trento, the street of our current apartment. We almost always take the more direct trek along the road, but then we remember that if you go around the other way you get a lovely view of the ocean.

And, yes, we're definitely taking a different trek.

Something Like a Change of Season

 Yesterday I mentioned that the weather had broken a tad here, replacing the endless and tortuous days of blazing heat, wilting humidity, and a particular cruel sun with days that are a little more livable. Part of that relates to a few rain showers, which, again, is the first rain that Sicily has seen since early May. When we woke up to rain one morning, Janet and I walked down to La Sirenetta simply to drink coffee and watch it rain. We've also seen the arrival of some clouds, which were a no show for the first month+ of our time here. We may actually survive after all.

Here's a picture I snapped from inside La Sirenetta, just sitting and watching the rain as if I'd never seen it before. When I taught in Abu Dhabi I don't think it rains for a year straight, and the professors would talk about a time when it actually rained and the students ran outside en masse simply to stand in the rain. I felt just about like that the other day.

I took this picture one night on our passegietta along the longomare. It was so creepy. What looks to be buildings or rock formations or giant cacti or robots in the background were clouds. All hell broke loose in the middle of the night in a wild storm.

I don't normally post (or take) pictures of clouds, but their appearance after weeks of cloudless skies is almost disconcerting. 

A Worthy Subject for a Dominic Starnone Novel

 Janet snapped this picture the other evening when we were out for our nightly passegiata. Normally, I do my best to eliminate every picture that she takes of me, but I couldn't find any reason to complain about this one. 

My brother Eric opined that I looked awfully happy, and I could only respond that we were on our way in search of pizza - how could I not be happy.

Oh, and I recently read the wonderful Dominic Starnone novel, The Old Man By the Sea. 

La Colazione Italiana

 The other day I was on my daily walk and was surprised to find La Sirenetta was closed for the day (I stop there every morning - so expect a lot of La Sirenetta stories as I get caught up). Consequently, I decided to try a place that I walk by every morning. I always refer to it as the posh place, although that's not it's official name. Seriously, is this a beautiful place to have your morning coffee and cornetto or what?

The only disappointing aspect of the story was that, when repeating the story to my friends back home, I proposed that by being closed La Sirenetta might have Wally Pipped itself, and no one got the reference. This speaks to a profound loss of cultural intelligence.

Movies in 2026 244

 

Penance (Kyoshi Kurosawa, 2012)

This is another one of those films that I would have never seen without the good graces of the Criterion Channel: Kyoshi Kurosawa's 2012 Penance. I'm not a huge Kurosawa fan, or maybe it would be better to say that I like his films although I don't like them as much as I think I should. It's not that I want to say I like Kyoshi Kurosawa films because I want people to think that I'm a sophisticated consumer of films, but rather that in some ways I like the idea of Kyoshi Kurosawa more than the reality of his films. They are always creepy and unique, but they're also awfully slow moving (which is almost never a problem for me, obviously). In this case it is especially true because Penance is a series of five interrelated films, each a little over an hour long, which tells the story of a group of girls who witness the disappearance of another young girl, although none of them can remember the face of the man who took her. The murdered girl's mother blames them and curses them all to do penance for their crime in not remembering. I'm in the middle of the five films, so I suppose I should have waited until the end, but I'm so far behind in my posts that I took the opportunity to mention Penance, although it's more of a placeholder at this point. At this point I'd say it's worth checking out, although I don't know if I would give it a glowing recommendation yet. More later.

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.

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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.

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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.

Movies in 2026 240

 

Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1962)

And I'm way behind in my year-long capture of movies watched, not so much in movies recorded, but instead on movies watched. Just recently I started downloading movies from the Criterion Channel, in lieu of streaming (for the last month we've acted as wifi vampires at several local coffeeshops. The first movie I downloaded was Shohei Imamura's essential 1962 film Pigs and Battleships. It's a film I've watched many times, not only because I used it in my Japanese film noir class, but also because it is a wonderful film. Essential viewing.

Made It

 Well, that was a challenge, but we made it. Actually, we arrived here in Terrasini on 13 August, it just took a month to get wireless set up. But, much more on that later. It's enough right now to mark that we're here safe and sound. Many, many more stories to come.

I snapped this on one of our first mornings here, looking back over the harbor towards the mountains. Our apartment is in the midst of those white houses up on the hill. Again, much more later.