Today I got up and had a light breakfast that seemed to be entirely insufficient in the eyes of the cousins. After that we had to go downtown, and we used the opportunity to visit Teatro Massimo, which is the large opera house in Central Palermo. The business took longer than expected, so things were a bit rushed when we returned to the apartment for a quick lunch of antipasti, Tagliatelle alla Bolognese, roast pork, fried potatoes, bread, oranges, pears, strawberries, and cannoli. Note, this is a quick lunch.
By this time we were definitely behind schedule for the trip to the airport, but with the supernatural power of Sicilian driving leading the way, we were able to make it in time for me to make the flight. As it turned out, however, the flight was 45 minutes late, so we needn’t have worried.
I arrived in Torino, caught the shuttle bus downtown, and checked into my hotel. By this time it was evening and pretty much everything in town was closed for the day, so I wandered the streets until dinner. I really wasn’t oriented to the city well enough to find anything too exotic, so I settled in for a pizza that was recommended one of the guidebooks. According to the book the Torinese say that it’s the best pizza outside of Naples, but right now I’m thinking that the pizza in Sicily was better. True, that pizza had the advantage of context, but context sometimes is an essential and irreplaceable ingredient.
I finished the evening with a trip to GROM, Turin’s famous gelateria. There are many GROMs around the world, but this was a visit to the very first. I don’t usually prefer going to chains, but sometimes, when the pilgrimage involves the original, exceptions can be made. GROM, by the way, definitely doesn’t suck!
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