Passeggiare : To stroll without purpose.
A collection of travels, tastes and thoughts .
Enjoying the quiet rewards of wandering & wondering.
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The sun rises above the horizon, spilling gold across the sea and over the hundreds of pilgrims gathered at the Byron lighthouse. A middle-aged Italian man begins singing the opening lines of My Girl. Not an obvious soundtrack for a warm, cloud-free January morning, but a welcome one nonetheless.
Long before the sun appears around 6am, the streets of this small but famous New South Wales beach town are already alive. People of all ages run, walk, and cycle through the quiet roads. Being outdoors and connected to nature feels like a default setting here, something that comes up again and again, and one of the reasons Australia, and Byron Bay in particular, feels so appealing.
Usually, a rainy day would put me in a bad mood. Perhaps surprising, given I come from the north of England, but it’s never something one really looks forward to, especially when travelling in the hope of sunny climes.
And yet, on this latest trip, I’ve noticed a shift in mindset. Rainy days no longer bring the same sense of mardiness they once did. Of course, they can be a welcome relief from the heat, but more importantly they feel like nature’s way of saying, have a day off.
Eating out is one of the great joys of travel. I love food and I love trying as broad a range of things as possible while away, ideally local and ideally seasonal. We spend a lot of time planning what and where to eat on our trips to make sure we experience the best and most authentic food a place has to offer.
Sometimes, though, it is nice to make use of the kitchen where you are staying. A visit to the local market is always a must. It is one of the quickest ways to understand a place, its rhythms, its people, its priorities.
We take a left from the busy streets of the market. Catania is as edgy as I recall - the dark grey buildings, narrow streets and looming Mount Etna giving it a totally different feel to the baroque hillside towns of the Val Di Noto, where we have just come from.
With the turn we enter a steer that is strewn with half empty boxes and litter from the market stalls and one which is far quieter, almost devoid of people. We quickly approach a sign saying ‘Aldo, piano no.1’ with an arrow pointing up a suspect looking staircase.
Familiar unfamiliarity is often a feature of travel.
A trip to New York turns a lifetime of television and film into reality. Manhattan becomes a walking set of “wasn’t this in…” and “isn’t that where…”. Paris and Rome carry a different kind of recognition, the inherited romanticism of the Seine or the Trevi Fountain, places we feel we already know long before we arrive.
Sydney offers those picture-postcard moments of familiarity on first visit too. The Harbour Bridge, so often a backdrop to New Year’s Eve news stories, watched from afar while the Australians celebrate and you wait for the clock to crawl round to that mate’s house party back home.