Infiorata - Festival of Flowers

For our first family outing since Billy's return from Germany, we drove down to the city of Noto in the southeast corner of the island. The Infiorata takes place every last week of May in Noto. Infiorata is a "festival of flowers" featuring beautiful images that artists create from flowers, based on actual paintings they have previously done. The artists work from Friday to dawn on Saturday, and people line up to view the images on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning. On Monday evening, all of the flower art is destroyed by children running down the street!

We made it to Noto in the afternoon, and immediately obtained an enormous helicopter balloon and toy machine gun.

The toys at festivals are overpriced, but it was worth the money to see how happy the boys were with their new things!

The streets of centro Noto are lined with impressive palaces, like this one below:

We do not know which palaces belong to which families, but we enjoyed the spectacular architecture! We also visited the cathedral, which had gorgeous murals on the ceiling inside.

We had a delicious light lunch at the Ristorante il Giglio, located right in the Piazza Municipio. We ordered a salciccio piccante pizza, which has large, thinly sliced spicy sausage, and of course a Margherita pizza, which is simply cheese and tomato sauce. It was simple and delicious, and the restaurant makes a refreshing Bellini cocktail as well!

The restaurant is beside a large terrace, where the boys were able to run around and play. As you can see, it was very sunny and bright that day!

After lunch, we watched traditional fencing techniques being demonstrated.

Again, our photos were really washed out by the intense sun of southern Sicily. Sorry! Here is a shot of the street, showing how crowded and popular the festival is, along with some of the stunning baroque architecture found all through Noto.

Finally, here is a photo of the street of flowers. The line was too long for us to stand in with both the boys and a still-healing Billy, but I was able to climb up the bell tower of the cathedral for an aerial view of the flowers. There are many Japanese influences in the artwork.

 

The detail the artists were able to create using flowers is amazing, and the colors were very vivid in person. Here is another photo of the flower artwork taken by Andrea Salerno, found on the official page of the Infiorata.

 

More information on the Infiorata can be found on the Links page of our blog. Noto is a little over an hour from Catania, straight down the A-19 autostrada.

Landstuhl and Burg Nanstein

On Billy's first day after surgery, Logan and I ventured out to explore Burg Nanstein, a medieval castle overlooking the village of Landstuhl, Germany.

 

 

For 3 euros, we got to go inside and explore the whole thing. Only minor necessary improvements for safety, such as the wooden handrails, have been added. We climbed up to the very top, where surprisingly there was a grass courtyard. We explored low rooms with walls of sandstone and dirt floors, and we even went down into the cellars....or dungeons? 

Logan enjoyed finding and pointing out all of the "holes" in the castle.

There is a beautiful view of Landstuhl and Ramstein air base from the castle.

And--we even managed to catch an orb! This was in the first cellar, looking through to the second.

Orb in Burg Nanstein cellar.

From the castle, I decided to walk down into Landstuhl and explore the town with Logan in his stroller before trekking back up the hill to the medical center.

This is a photo I took from nearly halfway up the hill, returning to the medical center. You can barely see the castle on the opposite mountain. It was a hike!

 



The streets were so clean!

I cannot remember how to rotate photos, sorry!

Memorial garden.

My original idea was to have lunch at some sort of typical German restaurant, but it seemed that the Germans were observing riposo that day. I asked a couple of middle-aged ladies if they knew of a good German restaurant open for lunch--it turned out that one of the ladies was indeed German, but from another city, and her companion was Russian. They were struggling to understand each other already, then joined up with Logan and me in search of lunch. I knew only yes and no in German, and absolutely nothing in Russian, and they had only very basic English and no Italian! We walked through the entire village only to find all of the restaurants closed. We had such a great time though, seeing all of the sights and laughing at our language barriers. I ended up going to a supermarket bakery to pick up a couple of rolls and a pretzel to bring back to Billy.

Here are a few more photos of some of the beautiful homes and buildings in Landstuhl. Edited, of course.

It's been a while...

It has been a very long time since we have updated our blog! But we are back now.  We were unable to have post-worthy adventures due to Billy's herniated disk becoming worse. He ended up having surgery performed in Germany, and is recovering now.

Here's a pic of Billy post-surgery:

 

As you can see, he was comfortably medicated after surgery!

 

 

This was our first time outside of Italy for nearly a year. The Ramstein air base offered lots of "new" dining choices.... I was excited about taking Logan for dinner while Billy was sleeping in the hospital. And...we ended up at Romano's Macaroni Grill for some Italian food!

 

 

 

Logan and I were able to explore the nearby village of Landstuhl while we waited for Billy to be discharged. We'll be adding a post including lots of photos soon!