June 5.
An old guy in a minivan yells at us. Something about Tedeschi — Germans. For some reason, everyone thinks we’re German. Maybe they’re the only tourists who go bike riding in Sicily. Anyway, whenever S. and I ride into a village, the old guys give us dirty looks. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t like cyclists or because they don’t like Germans.
We follow the coast, riding southeast along one of the sides of the triangle that is Sicily. It’s a mixed bag: partly azure seas and sandy beaches; partly illegally dumped trash. I find myself getting into one-sided arguments with the lady who wrote the guide book we’ve got with us. She’s a shameless Sicily booster. Everything is “breathtaking” and “ravishing” which makes me wonder if she wrote her book with a Sicilian mafioso holding a gun to her head. Don’t get me wrong, Sicily is a beautiful place, but it’s got a dark side. Poverty and corruption. Pollution and uncontrolled sprawl. The author of the guidebook never mentions the skeletal concrete structures that dot the landscape, for instance. You see them everywhere: half-built buildings with a rusting construction crane hanging overhead. I find out later these construction projects are infamous; that they may even be said to constitute a contemporary architectural style: Incompiuto Siciliano. Sicilian Incompletion. It’s hard to get a definitive explanation for these things. Some people say they’re the result of corrupt or incompetent local officials who start construction projects only to walk away when the money runs out. Other people blame corrupt real estate developers. A lot of people suspect these unfinished buildings are a way the mafia launders money, which might make the most sense given the mob’s historical ties to the construction industry. Whatever the explanation, these half-built buildings are strange to encounter. It’s like Sicily is in the business of building ghost towns.
As the coast bends due east, the trash and the traffic melt away, and we roll past olive orchards and grape vines. We wind our way up to a campground outside Selinunte, the site of an ancient Greek city. The campground is called the Athena. It’s empty except for an old German couple in a camper van who see us roll up on our bikes and greet us in German. They seem surprised when we’re not.