Sicily: mud slides, mosaics and hailstorms

Our Enna correspondent writes...

"We are living in the laps of the gods here - and the gods can be pretty pitiless at times! They gave us great, cool weather this morning, so even Jony didn't complain about the 35k of hills to get us to Villa Romana del Casale.  The point of going there was to see the most staggering mosaic floors: acres of them, from the 3rd/4th centuries AD, in a villa complex that had been in continuous use until the 12th century, then abandoned under a mudslide, almost perfectly preserved until the 1950s. Luckily (or deliberately if you believe in godly strategy) their late discovery means that they have been sensitively excavated and presented, the most important features left unrestored; the least interesting restored or reconstructed to give a fascinating idea of the scale and shape of the original buildings. 

Alice, our BnB lady from last night, had given us such a spread at breakfast this morning that we felt it rude not to make at least some kind of inroad, so we had brought the pizza, panini and shortbread with us to have for lunch. It turned out that she and her husband had been pasticcerias in a former life, and the basement space where we parked our bikes overnight was the old bakery. She had an electric tricycle that she now uses to take her wares to the local market - much safer on the steep, greasy paved roads than her bicycle. 

So we sat by the road in the sunshine for our picnic, then made our way up the first hairpins of the afternoon. I, inevitably, had run out of water (btw, if my obsessions of this holiday have been water and coffee, then Jony's are definitely cake and WiFi). He refused to come up the final hill into town, where I planned to refill my bottle, as the signposts for Enna, tonight's destination, were in the opposite direction. I shot up the hill (maybe), bought water and returned to find Jony sitting smugly next to the water fountain.... The gods then got their revenge on both of us: the signposted route took us back into town on an even longer and steeper road than the one I had just taken!

But there was more to come: we chose the 'pretty' route to Enna and all started well. We were congratulating ourselves on a route that took us along the contour of the hillside whilst across in the distance we could see the main road diving up and down through the valley. Then the road got a bit muddier and the first cracks appeared. We got to the head of the valley and the entire road surface disappeared under a sea of sand and mud as the hillside had clearly slid down and across it. We picked our way for a couple of kilometres, walking, wading and squelchily-riding until we finally got back to a managable surface and thankfully rejoined the major road.

One of our reasons for choosing the pretty way was that it passed the lake at Pergusa - looked good on the map. It turned out to be pretty awful, with a race track encircling it, but it is the location of the underworld god Hades' kidnap of Persephone. Perhaps he was flexing his vindictive muscles as we derisively dismissed the place. We had been glimpsing a perched town from time to time as we rounded the hills approaching Enna, but knowing that we had passed through Enna station on the train to Catania, were fairly sure that the town-in-the-sky was not the one we were headed for. And so we rolled confidently into the valley, and Enna Bassa. Uno espresso lunga (slightly more than a thimbleful) and uno chocolado caldo - we are almost fluent now! Enna itself was still being signposted. In the sky. In fact 4km into the sky. And pretty much straight up. But espresso makes good cycling fuel - I can't speak for hot chocolate - and we made it to the top.

The gods hadn't quite finished though. We were almost at the apartment, and the the fog that had begun to form became denser and darker; we could hear thunder rumbling around. We had just stopped to consult the map when the first spots of rain began. We retreated under a canopy beside the road and could hear a strange hammering sound. Cars began to shoot into the space beside us, also under the canopy, and then we realised what was going on: there were hailstones - jagged lumps of ice, an inch across, thumping down amidst torrential rain. The hail was clearly not a surprise to local drivers who were doing their best to shelter their cars. When the storm and the consequent flooding subsided, we made our way to the apartment. Our host for the night showed us her car, with dents in the roof and bonnet, that had just been caused by even larger hailstones in the same storm.