Around EtnaOkolo Etny

Sicily was the final leg of our trip. But first we had to get there, and the way from Sardinia turned out to be a bit more complicated than we'd imagined. We already had flights home booked out of Catania, but unfortunately there was no ferry running between Cagliari and Sicily for the next few days.

We did find a ferry to Naples, though, a city we love, so we didn't hesitate for long. In Naples we jumped at the chance to try the best pizza in the world at Da Michele, where you wait about an hour. You get a little ticket and you wait. This pizzeria is also a Michelin-recognized restaurant, and yet a pizza there costs around 5 euros. They make maybe four kinds of pizza, that's it.

The train that carried us south the next day dropped us off in the town of Reggio Calabria, and from there Sicily was maybe half an hour away by ferry to Messina. We'd been to Messina once before, and the route waiting for us the next day was also one we'd ridden in the past. We were happy to ride it again, because we had a clear goal, the restaurant Pane e Vino, located just outside the town of Milazzo.

At this place you pay either 15 euros if you're vegetarian or 20 if you eat meat, and there's no menu. You simply sit down, say whether you're vegetarian or not, and dishes start arriving based on whatever they cooked that day.

It's a fantastic concept full of fresh produce, local ingredients, and, honestly, an enormous amount of food. We worked our way through various starters, hams, cheeses, all the way to huge cuts of meat. Wine naturally comes with the whole meal, and at the end they bring out bottles of local grappa and tell you to help yourself to as much as you want (they clearly don't get many Slovaks around here). If you ever find yourself near Sicily's north coast, you absolutely have to visit this place.

The next day cycling was tough going after all that wine and grappa, but somehow we still managed to leave the north coast behind and head inland through Sicilian villages toward Etna.

The highlight was the local men playing cards in the village of Braidi. Back in Slovakia, every one of them would have had a beer and a shot of borovička in front of them, but here maybe one or two had a cup of coffee, and the rest played dry. Kika made friends with one of them, and ever since they've been sending each other photos on WhatsApp from trips they've been on.

Etna is hard to miss, since it's both the largest mountain on Sicily, and therefore in the whole wide area around wherever you happen to be, and it regularly sends up plumes of smoke. We spent the night somewhere beneath it, and on the last day of the bike trip we wandered through the town of Taormina, carved into the Sicilian rock with a view over the surrounding sea. We highly recommend Taormina too, if you're ever there it's definitely worth a visit.

The departure from Catania was an experience in itself, since the Catania airport clearly doesn't have much experience with cyclists. Even though we showed up six hours early as a precaution, we barely made our flight, and airport security even confiscated some very important parts belonging to our bikes.

Thanks to that, once we landed in Vienna we had no way of getting home, since we couldn't reassemble the bikes. Luckily Mišo came to get us by car, so in the end this trip too ended with a happy ending.