The day started well with the best breakfast yet, we were the only people staying in the small hotel yet the hostess had put on an enormous spread, meat, cheese, cakes, fruit. I am afraid we did not do it justice.
We spent the morning exploring Enna, it is a small city perched on top of a narrow ridge, at the highest point a Norman called Roger build his castle on the site of an earlier Roman one.
It covers a huge area, the guide who took us round seemed to enjoy adding rude comments about Trump, Teresa May and Berlusconi in his commentary. He also said that Enna is the highest city in Europe, this did not seem right but at the time I could not think of any above 1000m but having looked at Google there are quite a few including Davos at 1,500m. The trouble is that you then start to question everything else he told us, a lesson for my town guiding, keep to "facts" that people can't look up easily.
Still it is a very nice city although the two roads in and out get very congested even on a clear dry day, in snow it must be chaos.
When we studied the guide book before our holiday we noted all the "must see" sites and we are trying to incorporate as many as possible. The two people we dealt with in the hotel kept on talking about mosaics and an artist from Yorkshire whose exhibition we visited in Enna also said "you must visit the mosaics".
We did not have a clue about what they were talking about and it took us quite a long time to find any mention of them in our Eyewitness Guide. Eventually we found them, the Villa del Casale is absolutely amazing.
I took over 70 photographs and Gill took a similar number, that should be enough to deter any visits from children for quite some time.
The villa was a very large Roman building built around 300 AD, a few hundred years later it was covered in mud during a flood and that protected the floors. The place is huge and the majority of the mosaics are intact, the biggest, a hallway is 200ft long, about 15ft wide and depicts a hunt to collect exotic animals from Africa and India for the circus in Rome. Every room, and there are lots of them, has a different subject and in one you can see where the owners got bored with the design and had a new one put on top. Who says bikinis were a 1960's invention, the banner at the top of the page shows they existed in Roman times!
They are the best mosaics I have ever seen, including those in Rome and Greece.
After that unexpected excitement we drove to Catania where we are staying for two nights, this evening we had the first bad meal of the trip, a disappointing end to a good day.