June 2.
We catch the morning train to Genova. This is part two of the plan: Nice to Genova, then an overnight train to Sicily.
The train is packed. There is no room for our bikes, even bikes that are cleverly disguised as bags. So I haul them to the back of the train car and wedge them next to the toilets.
The train rolls at breakneck speed through the night. It’s nothing like being on an Amtrak train unless your Amtrak engineer is a meth head. When dawn breaks, we’re in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot. A guy hops aboard the train with a thermos of super sweet black coffee. S and I buy a cup. It’s the liquid version of a slap in the face.
At the town of Messina, the whole train rolls onto a ferry to cross over to Sicily. For a half hour, our train ride turns into a pleasure cruise across the Strait of Messina. There’s been a train ferry here since 1899, a few decades after Italy unified itself into a single country. Back then, these Italian train lines were more than just a mode of transportation. They were a way to physically connect all the little pieces this country was pieced together from. The Risorgimento was a political idea, but the train helped make it real. As for this train ferry, it’s like a mooring line that lashes Sicily to the mainland. Which is to say that Sicily is officially part of Italy, but it wouldn’t take much— maybe just a pair of sharp scissors— to cut the line and set it adrift again.
We finally arrive in Trapani, a port town on the far west side of Sicily. The place was once famous for its mattanza, an annual tuna harvest that involved lots of spearing and clubbing of fish. It was a bloody affair that has faded away along with the stock of Atlantic tuna.
S and I read that there’s a cable car in town that takes you to the top of Mount Erice.
“Sounds fun,” S says.
“Yeah,” I agree.
We hop on our bikes and head for the cable car. This is our first official day of cycling in Sicily and only now, as we roll into the crush of Sicilian traffic, does it occur to me that I had spent so much time worrying about how to schlep our bikes a thousand miles across Italy in bags that I hadn’t dedicated much thought to whether Sicily is a particularly good or safe place to ride a bike.
When we roll up to the funicular station, we ask the guy in the ticket booth if it’s okay if we take our bikes on board. He shrugs. I can’t tell if it’s a “what do I care, I just work here?” kind of shrug, or a “if you want to test the weight limit of an old cable car hanging from a questionably maintained cable, it’s your life” kind of shrug. When the little fiberglass car drifts up to the platform, we cram ourselves and our two bikes into the thing. Then we float quietly up the side of the mountain in our own private plastic bubble.
The funicular could pass for a ride at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, but instead of taking you to the future, this ride takes you a couple thousand years into the past, to a site on top of Mount Erice that was occupied during Roman times by a temple dedicated to Venus where the priestesses practiced sacred prostitution.
On top of the mountain, we find a souvenir kiosk selling refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers that say “Got Sex?” At first, S and I think this is a subtle reference to both sacred prostitution and the California Milk Processor Board’s “Got Milk?” advertising campaign. But later, when we see these same refrigerator magnets at souvenir stands all over Sicily, we realize we were overthinking it.