Zingaro

It is a sunny morning. We are on a way to Zingaro Nature Reserve, with one of the most beautiful sea sides in Sicily. We stop at the front of a supermarket to buy some breakfast. Exactly: breakfast ready to eat. It is a common custom to buy bread, cheese and mortadella in a grocery store, supermarket or simply on the market, and ask the shop assistant to prepare a sandwich of them. And of course you don’t pay for the sandwich like in a restaurant but only for the products used to make it.

Fresh bread with Italian mortadella is something really tasty. I don’t really know why only the Italian mortadella is so good. I have never liked it in any other place of the world. But that one here is actually better that ham.

While we eat our huge sandwiches, Mauro drives his Punto completely packed. Angelo sits in the front seat and Silvio in the back between me and Freya. He hugs us with his arms spread widely like a true macho, il Padrino (the Godfather).

 

Zingaro, one of the Sicilian natural parks is located on the rugged and rocky coastline close to Castellammare del Golfo. There is a lot of caves and natural grottoes made by the sea water in the hard limestone cliffs there. The park stretches between lovely seaside Scopello to the east and San Vito lo Capo to the west. The mountains of 1000m rise over transparent turquoise water with the bottom covered with small white pebbles. The humid microclimate allows many of particularly rare species of plants to rise there, and most of them are protected.