Pandas and Poly Tunnels
Departing town and dodging Fiat Pandas making illegal, yet excruciatingly slow, turns. A BMW fails to stop at a stop sign and I am grateful to be on high alert. Cars sit double parked along the pavement, blocking a lane of traffic. However, it is apparently fine, because the hazard lights are on.
The road opens and follows the coast, with Sicily’s industrial edges, present. Bland apartment blocks rise beside littered streets. You will not find this on TikTok.
At last the autostrada arrives and we enter big sky country. The low December sun lights up the endless viaducts, each one giving a steady drumbeat under the tyres as we pass over the joins. The elevated view reveals mountains with the occasional farmhouse and its modern neighbours: wind farms, scattered across the hillsides.
The rolling hills of Southern Sicily, near Gela
The road narrows back to a single carriageway as we exit into bright light from a tunnel, carved beneath a hulking rock. Traffic slows behind a lorry loaded with oranges that cannot keep pace with Sicilian impatience. Drivers ignore the no overtaking signs and take their chances to continue at speed.
The landscape shifts again and we return to the coast. The sea is almost close enough to touch and the golden beaches look inviting to an Englishman, still in awe of twenty degrees in winter.
Another town arrives. Another cavalcade of Fiat Pandas. Another test of hazard perception.
The ubiquitous Fiat Panda
The pace of travel quickens and so does the scenery. Rolling hills appear that would not look out of place in the Peak District, if it were not for the expanses of vines now wrapped in plastic after the harvest. A tight bend later and it becomes a sea of poly tunnels protecting tomatoes, aubergines and peppers. Over the next crest it is orange groves, bright and ready for their moment on the market stalls.
Then, almost without warning, you glide through another coastal town and repeat the rhythm of the journey until Modica reveals itself with its steep ravine and beautiful hillside, basking in the golden December sun - a picture postcard scene that does make its way onto social media. The journey to reach it is something that should not be overlooked, because this is the real Sicily: a land of sudden change, of harsh contrasts and of pure life.
Modica, basking in the December sun
