From ‘To the Baltic with Bob’ by Griff Rhys Jones

[on a boat] Sometimes, the fainter light was closer than the brighter. Sometimes a small and distant light would suddenly rush upon you and pass close by, the light itself rocking on what was now a black cone, speeding by a few yards away and back into the night. Sometimes the light that had begun to worry you, seemingly hovering aboard an obstacle and about to collide, gradually resolved itself into a star, millions of miles away and hanging low in the sky.

So at night, on a boat, you stare. You stare ahead, opening your eyelids wider, frowning hard……….peering into the black. After a while, your forehead hurts and your eyeballs ache and the back of your neck goes tense. And, you remember the chilling fact that a large boat can charge up from its hidden place on the other side of the horizon to be on top of you in seven minutes.

The Kiel Canal was built in the nineteenth century for strategic reasons. Germany wanted to be able to get her battleships into the Baltic. It was designed for, and still took, big ships, but of course the canal was largely redundant now. Real big ships were too big for it in the modern world. In fact real big ships could no longer enter the Baltic at all. The waters of the Kattegat were too shallow for ocean-going bulk carriers to pass through the Danish entrance and the canal was now far too small.

‘Why do you think, Griff, that I drive that battered old thing?’…………’Here, in Denmark, I could not be seen driving in a top-of-the-range Porsche or Ferrari, even though I could easily afford one. Danish people don’t like anybody to show off.’ ………The Danes do have an enormous social conscience and they pay massive taxes to support it. It is part of the fabric of their society. After the Napoleonic Wars, when they backed the wrong side and were mercilessly punished, losing Norway, bombed by Congreve rockets and shot to pieces by Admiral Nelson the Danes became a small nation and the conscience of Europe. …….Danes are very proud of their tolerant history……Hence the flags, and the patriotism. …..Spare, modern, practical and uncomfortable, that was Danish: nothing frilly or ornamental, please.

Danes are immensely proud of Denmark. This is because they are the most sophisticated of the Baltic nations. I was told this not only by the Danish, but also in Estonia, Sweden and Finland, without a trace of irony. Nobody said, ‘They think they’re the most sophisticated’, as we British might about the French. It was taken as a matter of course. Denmark looked south. A Finnish sound engineer solemnly told me that the Danish had much more in common with Italy than the Arctic circle. ‘They even drink more espresso coffee.’

At the beginning of the last millennium, the woods and bogs of Pomerania cut off the wilderness of Estonia and Latvia. There was no settled government up there. The fjords and bays were populated by individual pagan tribes. Russian hunters had come out of the east, via Byzantium, working their way to Novgorod. The Vikings came from the west by boat. Close behind them, the Teutonic Knights roved up from the south. These particular, ruthless crusaders helped establish trading posts, and a dominant class of expatriate merchants to rule them, but outside their walls it remained every man for himself. It was a lawless wild west of northern Europe. The Russians, the Germans and the Swedes have fought for control of the area ever since. Estonia and Latvia achieved their independence only in 1991.

The history of Russian involvement with the Baltic is the history of Russia’s urge to move west, to become European. St Petersburg was built by Peter the Great to modernize his country, to leave the exotic, Boyar Moscow behind, in the past…… But it only ever became an outpost. The real Russia stretched away across the steppes to the edge of Japan.

In the eighteenth century foreign visitors were struck by Russian stoicism. St Petersburg was a city of appalling disease and grinding poverty. Sixty out of every 1,000 people were expected to die every year, because they lived on top of a festering cesspit. Crime was inevitable and punishments were draconian. Things got considerably worse in the nineteenth century. Dostoyevsky himself was thrown into the dungeons on the island …………He was kept in solitary confinement in a cell that regularly flooded with the sewage-laden waters of the Neva.

Executions were so commonplace that the people on one side of the town could hardly be bothered with the beheadings taking place on the other. The visitor from London, used to high levels of public interest in this sort of thing, put it down to the Russian ability to absorb suffering. And, by any account, St Petersburg has been a city of suffering.

We were passing through by far the most exquisite scenery we had yet seen on the journey…….The southern coast of Finland, the northern coast of the Gulf, was dotted with over 80,000 islands. And every one was beautiful.

The border had moved back and forth along this fragmented shore many times in the last 1,000 years. The Swedes had been beaten back home by Peter the Great. For 300 years Finland had been part of Russia…..Russia had only let go of this wonderland, where the tsar had yachted, in 1917, where the Finns negotiated their independence with Lenin.

Finland’s entire history, like that of so many of the small countries of the area, had been driven by a wholly justified fear of its neighbours. The disputes, the civil wars, the blood-letting, even the internal political geography were caused by the aggressive policies of Russia, Germany and, before them, Sweden.

He [said] ….. ‘The Danes look down on the Swedes, who look down on the Finns, and the Finns look down on the Estonians, and the Estonians look down on the Latvians. And the Lithuanians, I’m afraid, are right at the bottom.’

And everybody still feared the Russians, if not for their military intentions, then most certainly for their criminal intentions ………..[gangs coming over]

From ‘How to Ikigai. The ancient Japanese secret. Lessons for finding happiness and living your life's purpose’ by Tim Tamashiro

“I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.”

-          Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Ikigai map has four simple directions to follow:

1.      Do what you love

2.      Do what you’re good at

3.      Do what the world needs

4.      Do what you can be rewarded for

……iki translates to life, gai means worth. Ikigai = life’s worth.

Dr.Santos demonstrates that studies show you can improve your well-being through regular efforts at eight things

1.      Acts of kindness

2.      Exercise

3.      Social connection

4.      Meditation

5.      Time affluence

6.      Good sleep

7.      Gratitude

8.      Goalsetting

“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.”

Kara means empty + te means hand. So karate ……translates to empty hand.

…..Angela Duckworth…… “grit is about having a goal you care about so much that it organizes and gives meaning to almost everything you do.”

Start with a list of the things that you love to do and what you’re good at. Take action to do something from your list each day.

Your true Ikigai is something that you would do for free if you were given the chance.

Start a list of things that you’re good at……..Look for a thread that connects your strengths.

From ‘Love and War in the Apennines’ by Eric Newby

It was very difficult to get out of a prison camp in Italy. Italian soldiers might be figures of fun to us, but some of them were extraordinarily observant and very suspicious and far better at guarding prisoners than the Germans were. It was also very difficult to travel in Italy if you did get out. The Italians were fascinated by minutiae of dress and the behavior of their fellow men, and the ingenious subterfuges and disguises which escaping prisoners of war habitually resorted to and which were enough to take in the Germans …………were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to fool even the most myopic Italian ticket collector and get the owner past the barrier, let alone survive the scrutiny of the occupants of a compartment on an Italian train……unless he was a professional actor or spoke fluent Italian. And in Italy, before the Armistice, there were no members of the Resistance or railway employees of the Left, as there were in France, to help escaping prisoners out of the country along an organized route.

From ‘Perhaps Tomorrow. The Memoir of a Sri Lankan housemaid in the Middle East’ by Pooranam Elayathamby with Richard Anderson

Egyptians were known to be especially cheap when it came to paying for services. How many Sri Lankan housemaids before me had spent months doing arduous work in the Gulf States only to return home empty-handed.

As the days wore on, I asked if I could have some time off to look about the neighbourhood and city……….. “I really wouldn’t mind going by myself”……… “I don’t think you understand your contract. You work for me. You can only leave the home with either Sayed or me. You’re here to work. You’re not here in Kuwait to be a tourist. This is why we keep the door locked. If you want to contact any of your family, you can write letters, and I will post them.”

I was shocked. What kind of country was this? No one had said anything about this kind of treatment. Who would know if anything should happen to me? ……..Several weeks of retrictions made my time in the house very monotonous.

I also noticed that very few of the clerks and general market help were Kuwaitis – most were Egyptians, Iranian, Bangladeshi or Indian. The men who collected the money or attended the sales were usually Lebanese or Palestinians.

Unlike Kuwaitis, Saudi men tended to show far greater respect to women.

As Saudi Arabia is primarily a Sunni nation, the abaya is the preferred covering that most women choose. Hannan further explained to me that women who favored western dress and did not cover were frequently insulted by nasty sexual comments or sometimes even assaulted.    

Except for recent generations, Kuwaiti are primarily the descendants of Iraqis, Iranians, and Saudis, as people from these countries were the firsts to occupy this area of western Iraq.

For the most part, it was largely the Bedouins in Saudi Arabia who gave from their hearts to help people in need. Their life in the desert had made them that way, and it was a wonderful thing. Recent generations of Bedouins liked to trumpet this stereotype, but for them it was largely a myth.

Arabs abhor manual labor, and with the new constitution guaranteeing every Kuwaiti a government job, there is virtually no incentive for anyone to accept a menial job until a middle management position opens in some ministry, agency, or local bureaucracy. However, there are many Kuwaitis who do own private companies, but most manage to start them through deals with foreign corporations that are required to turn over majority ownership of their local business operations to them. An enterprising Kuwaiti who starts and builds a business totally on his or her own is a rare exception.

People from northern India invariably looked down their noses on Tamils from South India as well as on Indians from places such as Hyderabad, Kerala and Goa.

An occasional policeman would notice me and ask to see my bataka, but it was largely a ruse as he, like many others, just wanted to flirt with me. The Kuwaiti policeman seemed to take a great interest in a woman’s appearance, but unlike foreign workers who just made catcalls or whistled, they were somewhat constrained as they were in uniform, so they would use a ploy of gratuitous ID checking just to meet girls ………It was all just part of the routine for foreign women working in Kuwait.

From ‘Bullets and Bylines. From the frontlines of Kabul, Delhi, Damascus and beyond’ by Shyam Bhatia

…..Indira Gandhi ……..Select journalists had been invited to see the body and pay their respects…….Rajiv Gandhi …..was standing by the body………I brazenly asked if he knew about the revenge attacks that had resulted in the deaths of so many innocent Sikhs. He replied, ‘What can I do? My mother’s been killed.’……..Later that day – too late – he did order a crackdown on the rioters.

[after American invasion of Iraq] ……Gradually, the mob started to melt away. One or two men ……..wanted to talk more. ………one of the men ……..suddenly shouted alour…. ‘……..you’re Indian.’ Unsure about what this implied, I muttered something noncommittal………But there was no need to be concerned, as far as the Iraqis were concerned, this newly discovered India link was a cause for celebration.

‘I’m sorry if we frightened you,’ said the man who was questioning me. ‘My people are in love with India.’ …..more Iraqis gathered next to me and extolled the virtues of Bollywood. One ……said, ‘I love Indian films and Indian actors, especially Rajesh Khanna.’ Another asked, ‘Have you seen Amitabh Bachchan in Muqaddar ka Sikandar?’ He went on…….. But tell Amitabh all Iraqis love him.’

To my utter, open-mouthed astonishment another older man with a red bandana tied …………started talking about the 1964 classic Sangam, directed by Raj Kapoor……

………..in many key countries like Afghanistan and Iran, it was my Indian core that proved priceless. I will never forget the experience of arguing with Iranian guards along the border with Azerebaijan, who arrested me as a suspicious character……..they softened when I started talking about my Indian childhood and memories of watching Bollywood films.

What saved me was the desperate singing of a famous Raj Kapoor song remembered from my Doon School days. ‘Mera joota hai Japani, yeh patloon Inglistani, sar par laal topi Roosi ….phir bhi dil hai hindustani’……….As I came to the end of this impromptu, amateur concert, the previously sullen and aggressive armed men around me were transformed. It turned out they were all fans of the Indian film industry who laughed and clapped, returned my passport and treated me to copious amounts of cream, honey, naan bread and distinctly illicit and secretly brewed un-Islamic local vodka.

From ‘We are All Stardust. Scientists who shaped our world talk about their work, their lives, and what they still want to know’ - Conversations with Stefan Klein

Neuroscientist V.S.Ramachandran on consciousness

……at that time a man had appeared in my lab with a huge bejeweled cross and told me about his conversations with God. He said he had understood the true meaning of the cosmos.

A madman?

No, not in the least. Based on previous work by Norm Geschwind, we conjectured that a region in this man’s temporal lobes, a cerebral center behind the ears, was much more active than normal. That’s often true of epileptics. His religious experiences might have to do with this heightened activity.

…………

Those effects have actually been known for a long time. People who suffer from overactive temporal lobes – for example, during an epileptic seizure – report mystical experiences. Some neurologists have even attempted to explain famous experiences of religious revelation, such as those of Saint Paul and Saint Teresa, as cases of temporal epilepsy.

Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn on aging

………ciliates…….single-celled organisms…….They can reproduce asexually by simply doubling themselves……..Ciliates are immortala…..can divide endlessly, perpetually beginning a new life.

………..telomerase. it helps form a sort of protective sheath on the chromosome – the telomere, to which ciliates owe their endless life.

As we age, more and more cells die off without replacement. As a result, our bodily functions deteriorate. But humans have telomerase too. ….scientists found that in families with members who don’t produce enough telomerase due to genetic disease, those members suffer unusually early from age-related afflictions. This proved that telomerase delays aging for us as well.

…….we’ve witnessed a tsunami of insights on the connection between aging, diseases and telomere length.

What determines how well our cells regenerate?

The circumstances of life play an important role – especially chronic stress. ……The greater the number of terrible experiences they had to cope with, the more their telomeres had shortened on average.

As if each blow of fate cut off some of the thread of life.

Stress early in life seems to leave particularly deep traces in the nucleus. These results make one thing quite clear: how critical it is to protect our children. There are people, however, who can get over even great hardship amazingly well.

Apparently, how long we live is also hereditary.

……….To live to 120 is clearly permitted by the current gene pool of our species.

…….The three big killers of the elderly, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, clearly are influenced by the state of our telomeres.

……..Telomere length by itself predicts a particular life expectancy only in statistical terms……..It is the combination of many factors that matters.

…….I’ve tried to exercise thirty minutes a day. That’s the only magic bullet against physical decline that I accept. The evidence for it is compelling.

……..Not even an expert can tell the difference between the organs of a young turtle and those of a hundred-year-old turtle.

Apparently, those amphibians have extremely efficient repair mechanisms………..an animal can either reproduce mainly in its younger years, as we do, in which case a longer life offers no biological advantage, or it can produce offspring until it dies, as the turtle does, in which case each year is a gain. However, it costs the organism a lot of energy to constantly stave off decline.

Physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis on human relationships

……Every culture is rooted in a social network in which people reinforce one another’s attitudes.

Biochemist Craig Venter on the human genome

I have two copies of very fast metabolizing genes, and so I can drink lots of coffee and it has no impact. People who have slow metabolism or even medium metabolism for caffeine have a greatly increased risk of heart arrhythmias or heart attack if they have multiple cups of coffee, so it helps explain all the confusing information in the scientific literature about caffeine’s being good or bad for you. It totally depends on your metabolism.

Neuropharmacologist Walter Ziegigansberger on pain

The truly bad pain is the agony that begins very gradually – the slight ache in the back that gets more and more intense and over the years comes to define a whole life.

Sensitivity to pain is hereditary. And there are even people who are, as a result of their genetic endowment, completely insensitive to pain. Gender also plays a role. Most women are more sensitive to pain than men. That has to do with the female nervous system. Red-haired women, however, have an advantage. They have a genetic variant that makes them particularly responsive to certain opioids.

Whether the painkiller comes from outside or inside ultimately doesn’t matter. With techniques like meditation and yoga, you can induce the brain to use its own substances.

What actually causes the perception of pain?

Almost everywhere on your body, there are sensors known as nociceptors, which respond to heat, intense pressure, or chemical stimuli. When you’re injured somewhere, the nociceptors send a signal to the spinal cord, where something important happens: The pain signal takes precedence over all other messages from your body. In addition, the information is divided. One channel leads into areas of the cerebrum that localize the injury. Other impulses enter the deeper brain regions and trigger the unpleasant sensations.

You once asserted that dangerous pain isn’t intense, but faint.

The body is prepared for an acute injury. Opioids are released; in the worst case scenario, you pass out. But a nagging, recurring back pain, say, always slight, slight …..it can drive people to despair. All day long you’re focusing on whether its coming back. Gradually you get anxious. And then something fatal happens, You become more and more sensitive to the pain, because your nervous system is beginning to change. When the neurons are stimulated again and again, they amplify the incoming signals more and more. That’s how the brain learns – through repetition. In this case, it unfortunately learns pain. In that way, the initially slight sensation becomes stronger and stronger. In the end, the pain defines your whole life.

…….to doctors who cause anxiety. Because they don’t know for sure, they make diagnoses like: “Well, your back, its not the strongest. Even if you don’t have any serious problems now, you probably will in twenty years.” Out of fear, patients begin to pay attention to every little ache in their back. In that way, they program themselves for pain. And because they believe they have to go easy on their bodies, their muscles weaken and tense up all the more at the next opportunity.

There’s even a name for that process: iatrogenic, which refers to an adverse condition caused by a doctor.

……….We doctors should at least watch what we say – especially when we’re actually looking at healthy people. Language is the sharpest of all swords.

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy on motherhood

Because women by nature have a slightly lower threshold for responding to a baby’s cries than men do. Even if both parents have the best intentions, she will get there before him to comfort the baby. Thus the baby becomes more attached to the mother than the father. In that way, a slight genetic difference between the sexes in the threshold of responding to infant cries develops into a great asymmetry.

From ‘Vroom by the Sea’ by Peter Moore

It is not the done thing to directly confront people in Italy. The concept of saving face is as strong there as it is in Asia.

……the Rally 200 marked the moment when Piaggio abandoned Italian families and went after the burgeoning youth market instead.

It was a move driven by financial necessity. By the end of the 1960s Italy’s standard of living was high enough for people to consider buying a car as the family vehicle rather than a Vespa. Indeed scooters became an unnecessary reminder of the tough times after the war. They were hidden in barns or shoved at the back of the garage, making way for the shiny new Fiat or Lancia.

Italy has one of the highest levels of organically grown crops in Europe………wasn’t just for environmental reasons….chemicals were expensive.

Elba is the third largest island in Italy after Sicily and Sardinia. It is a distant third – the island is only 28 kilometres long and 19 kilometres wide – but its mountainous, heavily wooded interior and stunning white sandy beaches make it one of the most beautiful. Legend has it that Venus the goddess of love, was strolling through the Tyrrhenian Sea one day and accidentally lost a precious jewel from the necklace she was wearing. The stone fell into the water and became Elba. ……..the highest point of the town was crowned by Villa dei Mulini, Napoleon’s residence when he was exiled to Elba in 1814. ……….Iron ore was mined here until the Second World War. And the Romans were partial to the wines that were produced there. But the regularity with which control of the island passed between Pisa and Genoa, then the Medici, Spain, Turkey and France, seems to suggest that no one was really bothered if they kept it or not.

Napoleon only stayed on Elba for nine months but in that time he revamped the legal and education system, modernized the economy and built a network of roads……..According to legend the first thing Napoleon noticed was about Portoferraio was the stench. On Elba the locals still emptied their chamberpots straight into the streets. One of Napoleon’s first acts as sovereign of his new domain was to build latrines, employ refuse collectors and institute large fines for people who continued to soil the streets.

He was an embalmer………It turned out that the worst part of being an embalmer wasn’t sticking your hand up the orifices of a corpse as I had guessed. It was coming home smelling of embalming fluids.

……first sight of Sardinia….looking craggy, wild and empty. Elsewhere in Italy a stretch of coastline like this would be crammed with lidos, apartments, gelataria and pizzerias. Here, on the north-east coast of the second-biggest island in the Mediterranean, there wasn’t a single sign of human habitation.

Sardinia has always been a world apart. D.H.Lawrence described it as ‘lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere’. The Phoenician, Carthaginians, Romans, Pisans, Genoans, Spanish and Austrians all tried to get a foothold before abandoning the island to malaria and the fiercely independent locals who lived in the mountainous interior. Its been part of a unified Italy since 1861. Indeed Giuseppe Garibaldi used it as a base for his military campaigns. But it has steadfastly retained its own dialect, costumes, cuisine and tendency to resolve differences with the odd blood vendetta or two.

Italians, it seems, invest their holidays with the same manic energy that they do all other aspects of their lives.

……..Porto Cervo, the town at the northernmost tip of Costa Smeralda (Emerald Coast), a 10-kilometre stretch of pristine coastline that is one of the most exclusive in the Mediterranean. Originally uncultivable farmland, the entire region was purchased in 1962 by a business consortium headed by the Aga Khan. Back then the local farmers were glad to sell. It was back-breaking work just to scratch an existence from it. Now it is home to some of the most expensive properties in Italy and the tiny bars in the hinterland are propped up by grizzled, bitter shepherds who claim they were duped out of their land…….the marina in Porto Cervo is regarded as the best in Sardinia, with berths for 650 vessels.

Italy table service can double, even triple, the price of a cup of coffee.

……..La Maddalena……a waterfront avenue lined with date palms, but the island’s charm lay in the little rocky coves that decorated the coastline, each with white sand beaches and turquoise waters so bright, so perfect, that they looked like they had been touched up by using Photoshop……..La Maddalena was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been to………

Santissima Trinita di Saccargia is a stunning Pisan church that sits alone in a pretty valley 15 kilometres south-east of Sassari. Built in 1116, its zebra-striped façade and belltower are all the more striking for being set in such splendid isolation.

The Nuraghi were a society of builders, metallurgists, shepherds, farmers and fishermen and their culture was the predominant one in Sardinia from 1800 BC until the Phoenicians and Carthaginians started sniffing around in 900 BC.

Nuraghic settlements were always set around a nuraghe, a distinctive circular tower made from the square basalt blocks that gave the culture its name. The nuraghe at Santu Antine is considered the most technically perfect of all the nuraghi on Sardinia, set in a triangular bastion with smaller towers on each point. Archaeological finds suggest that it might have been a royal palace. It sits alone now, but in its heyday it would have been surrounded by the hundreds of homes, stables and workshops of a thriving community.

When Alghero was captured by the Spanish in 1353 they dispersed the local population to nearby Villanova and replaced them with Catalan settlers.…..Date palms were planted along the avenues. And new immigrants traded directly with Catalonia rather than other parts of the island. ……Alghero became known as Barcelonetta – Little Barcelona. It retains much of that Catalan character today.

…….in Alghero……I was particularly taken by the old town, a jumble of cobbled lanes, stone buildings and terracotta roofs……. The Spanish influence was never far from here.

The bay at Porto Conte is one of the most beautiful places in Sardinia.

Bosa sits 3 kilometres inland on the banks of the Temo River, Sardinia’s only navigable river of any length. It is encircled by mountains and its tight, narrow streets press against a hill crowned by the atmospheric ruins of Malaspina Castle.

……the only thing that set Nuoro apart from any other Italian town of its size was its setting. Monte (Mount) Ortobene sits on its north-east corner, and beyond that the Sopramonte massif, a sheer wall of granite that looked positively otherworldly.

…….Sardinia……the island is as close to Africa as it is to Italy.

‘Masks are a very important part of Sardinian life,’ explained Mario. ‘They allow the ordinary peasant to aspire to something more mystical and extraordinary than their dreary, everyday life.’

I headed south from Nuoro through the wild mountains of Barbagia……..its legendary ‘dark heart.’……They were the only region of Sardinia that had never been subdued by foreign conquerors. And the fiercely independent locals still liked to indulge in a bit of petty banditry and the odd blood vendetta.

……..Cagliari is actually quite a pretty town…..set on a wide sweep of a bay, backed by mountains, and flanked by lagoons dotted with migrating flamingos from Africa. And beyond that, a stunning coastline dotted with some of the most beautiful beaches in Sardinia.

A gallery of locals watched from the balconies and windows of their home overlooking the square. This being Italy, each one of them had an opinion on what should be done and weren’t afraid of expressing it.

Palermo’s golden age began in 831 AD when it fell under Arab rule. For the next 200 years, and then under the Normans who followed, it was regarded as one of Europe’s greatest metropolises. It rivalled Cairo and Cordoba in beauty and its educational institutions were considered the greatest of the era. The Arabic influence is still apparent in the architecture of the churches and in the palm trees that grace the parks and streets.

The city again flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the Baroque period……..

Palermo’s strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean saw it bombed heavily during the Second World War. Only pockets of its former glory remain and the rest of the city was rebuilt quickly and shoddily. The funds that had been earmarked to rebuild it were siphoned off by the Mafia. Now, 60 years later, people were still living in their patched-together homes next to the craters created by Allied bombing over half a century before.

‘People here think of themselves as Sicilians first,’ explained Sergio. ‘We are also very suspicious of outsiders.’

Most of the houses remained half built with rusty reinforcement rods sticking out of the top for extra storeys that would never be built. Sergio had told me that as long as a house remained unfinished  in Sicily the owners didn’t have to pay tax on it.

In that way, the Sicilians weren’t any different from other Italians. They’d use any excuse to take a break and have a drink.

I backtracked …..to Erice, an ancient stone town that crowns the mountain that towers over Trapani and the bay. Known in the ancient world as Eryx, it was the site of a temple dedicated first to Aphrodite, then Venus under the Romans. Some say the temple was home to sacred prostitutes who carried out sacred prostitution. And it is interesting to note that it was left to its own devices by every invader who took the town. The Romans actually stationed 200 soldiers to protect it.

I ….wanted to visit Segesta and a Doric temple that many believe is the most magnificent in Sicily…….The Elymians started building the temple of Segesta in 430 BC and, it has to be said, they knew how to pick a building site. The temple enjoys a setting as dramatic as Erice, one of their earlier projects. It sits beside a deep canyon…..

…….headed….up…..to the remains of the Temple of Hercules. In its day it was regarded as one of the most beautiful temples of antiquity. Now all that remains are eight broken columns of different heights put back in place by the Englishman Sir Alexander Hardcastle in 1924.

I’d come to Piazza Armerina especially to see the mosaics in Villa del Casale. Set in the hills 3 kilometres south-west of Piazza Armerina, the villa was at the heart of an immense Roman rural holding and built some time between the third and fifth centuries AD. Its fame – and UNESCO listing – comes from the mosaic that decorate every one of the 62 rooms. They are regarded as the most outstanding Roman mosaics in the world and were preserved thanks to a flood that buried them in mud in the twelfth century. They were discovered again in 1950………..The level of detail is so extraordinary, archaeologists have built careers around analyzing the footwear, hairstyle and clothes depicted. ………

Perhaps the most famous room is the Hall of Female Gymnasts in Bikinis. It features a mosaic of female gymnasts in bikinis. Archaeologists claim it is a ‘rare and precious record of fashions at the time’.

Caltagirone has always produced ceramics. Farmers constantly unearth prehistoric pots as they plough fields ……The Arab name for the town, Cal’at Ghiran, can be translated as Castle of the Vases.

The city is famous for its distinctive polychromatic colours introduced to the local craftsmen with the arrival of the Arabs. The blues and yellows are particularly vivid………

The city’s most famous landmark is La Scala, the stone staircase built in 1608 to link Santa Maria del Monte cathedral at the top of the hill with the Palazzo Senatorio below. The risers on each of the 142 steps are decorated with hand-painted tiles, no two of which are the same.

Most Italian women seemed to have husky voices.

Ortygia has always been the focal point of Syracuse. Two and a half thousand years of history are crammed into a medieval maze less than 1 kilometre long and 500 metres wide. You’ll find the city’s most impressive buildings there, like the sixth-century Temple of Apollo and the stunning Baroque Duomo.

Italians visit pubs in packs. They laugh and joke raucously among themselves. And they use their mobile phones to coordinate their arrival en masse so that no one endures the shame of being alone.

…..the Aeolian Islands, a chain of volcanic islands sprinkled off the north-east tip of Sicily. They took their name from Aeolus, the ruler of the winds and master of navigation. Ancient poets described them as ‘rocky jewels set in an azure sea’ and the entire archipelago is a designated World Heritage Area.

………Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano; a day rarely passes without a shot of steam and ash or a rumble underfoot……..Mushrooms grow wild on the slopes of Mount Etna. The locals have their own secret spots where they find the plumpest and juiciest specimens……The slopes of Mount Etna were home to some of the most fertile farmland in Italy. The rich volcanic soil was what gave the mushrooms served in the restaurant their distinctive flavor.

Panarea is the smallest and prettiest of the Aeolian Islands…….Stromboli is the quintessential volcanic island. It is a perfect cone, 924 metres above sea level, and one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupting continuously for over 2000 years.

The rest of Italy rarely has a good word to say about Naples. They regard it as a lawless and lazy city, full of people living off state funds paid for by their taxes. (Even if many of them avoid paying taxes themselves.)

………….Neapolitans are among the most fervent Catholics in Italy. …….their Catholicism isn’t the most traditional form of the religion. Miraculous cults have always been popular here and in the seventeenth century there was a brief obsession with worshipping the dead……….This populist approach to religion means that the churches are always full. Its as though the street life of Naples spills into the church. People continue conversations and even arguments as they enter, dipping their hands into holy water and then wagging them to  continue making their point.

Pizza was originally a peasant dish, made simply from dough, olive oil and tomato. It was sold from stalls on the street and was eaten at any time, day or night.

Pizza is inextricably linked to Naples that its surprising to learn that it was first introduced in the 1800s.

……Amalfi Coast …….the famous stretch of road just north of Salerno…………..The road easily lives up to its billing as the most beautiful road in Europe. …….Less than a century ago it was little more than a donkey track. It winds its way along the side of the mountains, following every indentation and crevice, the ocean a sheer drop of a couple of hundred metres below. ….so narrow and treacherous in places……….The road stretches 50 kilometres from Salerno in the south to Sorrento in the north.

………Positano. It was love at first sight………John Steinbeck ….wrote that ‘nearly always when you find a place as beautiful as Positano your impulse is to conceal it.’

Villa Cimbrone was built in the late 1800s by an Englishman by the name of Lord Grimthorpe. It is set on the furthest tip of Ravello’s ridge and boasts a clifftop belvedere that offers arguably the best view on the coast. It is known as the Terrace of Infinity, and sits suspended over the valley below.

……..The Blue Grotto…..a pool glowing the most astounding shade of blue.

The incredible colour and freaky glow are caused by the concurrence of two natural phenomena. The sun beams in through a large underwater entrance below that effectively filters out any reed tones. Then the limestone bottom of the cave reflects the light directly up.

San Giovanni Rotondo …..is the burial place of one of Catholicism’s newest saints – Padre Pio. ……….Padre Pio is one of the most popular saints in Italy. ……Seven million pilgrims visit the town each year, making it the most visited pilgrimage site in the world after Lourdes.

Sergio had told me that Italians make quite a big show of being religious but then instantly forget about it.