Caltagirone and Ragusa ...

We had another successful Saturday of site seeing.  Fun!  We only had a vague idea of where we were headed this time, but we took an educated drive and were lucky enough to happen upon an amazing day.  We drove down to Caltagirone from Catania, which was about an hour drive.  In the city center there is this HUGE staircase going up into the Duomo (church).  It has 142 steps.  On each of the steps, there are hand painted ceramic tiles that represent every 10 years these steps have been around. They were built in the 1600s.  They were amazing.  This city is world known for their pottery and ceramic tiles.  I can see why!  Their whole city is adorned with them.  We climbed to the top and rewarded the kids with a little pastry treat to try as we looked out at the view.

 

 In the picture below we are all standing on our favorite tile!

About half way down the stairs there was a 'museum' that had a few cool things in it.  This being the coolest thing, a terra-cotta statue of Italian life.  It had amazing details!

  

By the time we made it back to the bottom everyone was hungry for lunch. There was a nice little "hot plate" bar there that was perfect for us.  Jake bought 3 different things and we let the kids each taste a bite and they decided what they wanted for lunch.  Jenna, Owen and Lydia chose a slice of pizza, Anthony chose a hot dog wrapped up in a roll thing and Jake and I had a combination of a Ham "hot pocket" (SO good) and a little pyramid that was fried with Ragu in it.  It was kind of like corn bread wrapped around a beef stew and fried.  It was yum!  After that I found a beautiful ceramic, hand painted nativity to add to my collection.  It is SO hard to chose which Nativity I love the most.  I could have dropped A LOT of money in that store.  All the ceramic pots, plates, decorations were amazingly beautiful!

 Next up, we went to the city of Ragusa.  There was not really a lot of things to see there except take in the beautiful Italian city and see the pretty churches.  Plus, Jake gets to drive again in a little city with their tiny little streets.  He really does love it.  Funny.  Glad he does, because I get nervous just being the passenger. It was fun to see yet another landscape of Sicily.  This one had lots of little rock fences.  EVERYWHERE.  It was very interesting to see.  I cannot even imagine making all those fences out of rock.  It would take forever.  We also got to see some dairy cows, or in Owen's words *dirty* cows.  What a fun day of site seeing!