Join me on one of my favorite day-trips in Italy, when we took a train around Mamma Etna, an active volcano, ended in a city we never heard of, had some of the best food in the entire world: Pistachio Pancetta Pasta, Tender moist grilled chicken (no American steroid monsters), and Pistachio Pancakes made with the most perfectly balanced Pistachio cream to ever grace this planet.
It turns out that the city that we visited is right next to the home of Pistachio in Sicily - it was literal heaven!
I am officially a Pistachio monster now haha.
The city itself, Randazzo, also turned out to be an amazing city, with streets and buildings made entirely from volcanic rock, which gave the city a regal, dark, yet warm and cozy feeling, full of small streets and cafes and taverns, some of which opened out onto a valley that spanned far and wide to provide you the most picturesque of places from which to watch the sunset.
When we returned home from our trip, the hostel family had finished a home cooked meal and the Sicilian Mamma greeted us with open arms, warm hugs, smiles from ear-to-ear, laughter, even more food and, of course, wine.
The day trip, the city, the food, and the company was perfect!
This was one of my favorite adventures to recount and relive and I hope you enjoy it :)
Have you ever been to Sicily?
Leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts! :)
Transcript
Hello. Hello and welcome back to no fairy tale travels. After last week, I've been thinking a lot about food because Japan is the number one place for food. I've never had better food than I have in Japan. So I was thinking, Hmm, what should I talk about this week? Well, food, but let's go to place. Number two, which is Sicily, Italy, and here, we're going to go to Catania. So on the east side of Sicily, and I'm going to take you through a full day's adventure that is rife with food and drink and laughs and amazing sights. And just a fun day that started out with no plan whatsoever. Just I wake up in the morning, I'm having breakfast at my hostel and my friend says, you know what? We should take a train around the mountain. And that's how our day began. No other plan, nothing.
So before I begin go to no fairy tale travels dot sub stack.com. Look for the post for this podcast and give it a, I think it's a heart fair heart or a thumbs up. Give me some love on sub stack. Okay. And if you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave them there and I'll get back to you. Let me also open up some wine. I'm feeling in a very good mood that didn't make sense. I'm in a very good route. Oh, let me all right. Let me retry this. I didn't have that much wine today, but I feel like I can't speak I'm in a very good mood today. I am feeling good. And this wine is called a rough oh, a little bit more. Okay. Or rough day Cabernet. Oh, that sounds nice. From the Thracian valley, let's go to Italy, Catania, Italy, a place of, of food that is just on another level on another planet.
Second, only to the food in Japan. It's hard to explain how the food in Japan is so amazing, but it just, it truly, truly is, but okay. I'm staying on Sicily. So let me take you to my day in Sicily Catania, I wake up in the hostel and amazing hostel a family run hostel, and it's just, Ooh, I could talk all day about how great that is, but we'll get to it at the end. I'm down there for breakfast, having some espresso and talking to my friend and we're saying, what should we do today? Should we have another feast day? Should we walk around? What should we do? And we look off and we say, you know what? We're surrounded by all of this volcanic rock, this beautiful rich black volcanic rock. We should go and take a train around the volcano. The still active volcano mama Etna. That's what they call it. You can look up videos of it erupting it's it's it's it feels like it would be kind of scary to be in Catania when the
Volcano is erupting, but it's not going to erupt in this story. Don't worry. So we say, you know what? That's, that's kind of cool. Let's take a train around it and see what we see. So we walk up the hill to the train station, through the narrow streets and we get to this beautiful Kuwait little, two track train station. Of course we miss the last full train around. So he say, you know, what, what are we going to do? Are we going to go home and be defeated? Well, no, because we don't have a plan. How you can't be defeated when you have no plan. You just want to take a train around the mountain. So we go to the bar and we have a few drinks, the train bar, and we sit outside in the sun basking in the beautiful warmth of Sicily and just think, Hmm.
All right, well, let's just take the next train, no rush. And by this point, it's my friend myself, and we managed to get a new Polish friend, a lovely lass from Warsaw. And I have to tell you a Polish girl can drink as much as five average men from the west. So she happily went toe to toe with us an hour, a day, drinking at this point morning drinking. So we have a few drinks and then we get on the train. And by the way, you have kind of two choices to explore this mountain. Apparently we learned this as we were on the train. One way is you can hike up the mountain. You take a bus and then you hike for hours and hours and hours. And you kind of don't really get to the top of it. And then you hike down and your day is over and it's a volcano.
It's just, you know, you see a lot of black, I don't know, sand soil, our version of exploring the volcano bit more enjoyable. You sit on the train and you just look out the right side of the almost completely empty train as it just chugs along, going around the outside of the mountain. And you see this beautiful picture, ask a view of the volcano for over an hour and you just relax. You let your morning drinks seep deep into your soul. As you enjoy the view. It's really, really nice. I mean, this could be a tour I should charge for this tour. This is just a regular train, by the way, a regular commuter train that people on the villages or the cities around the mountain take to get to Catania, which is the biggest city in the area. And at this time of day, so 10 30 in the morning or so there's almost nobody on it.
It was completely empty, I think, except for one other person. So we make our way to one city seems like a nice city. We don't know that much about it, except for one thing, it is the home of pistachios Piscataquis. So pistachio in Italian is stocky. So that's, that's what I'm going to call it now because it sounds just cooler than pistachio. So we go through the home of the pistachio and we get to where the train ends and we have no idea where the hell we are now, it's this little city I'm going to read it off a map. So I make sure I get it right. This little city called run dot soul, R a N D a Z Z O. We have no idea where we are. We've never been there. We've never read about it. We don't know what's going on.
We just wanted to take a train around the mountain. And this is where it stopped. We get out of the train and we still have no idea where to go, what to do, what to see. So we see a group of uni students, university students boarding the train, and I say, Hey guys, where should we go for some food? We want to get some good local food, no touristy crap. And we want to have drinks and food and enjoy the day. Where should we go? They pointed us in the direction. They gave us the name and we headed down there. And we ended up in a restaurant that had no more than six tables inside menus. Only in Italian, no English, not a single word of English. And a waiter also did not speak English. And the menu had no more than 10 items on it.
And those 10 items span, basically sandwiches, pasta, and dessert. And then you could get some vegetables as well. Now this city is virtually next to the home of pistachio in Sicily. So what better place to order pistachio dishes? I hadn't really found that I liked pistachio at this point in my life. I'd never really had that much pistachio, just some nuts here and there and not that special. So I order the stocky pan cheetah pasta. And I have to tell you, this is the number one pasta and one of the top 10 foods I have ever eaten in my entire life. Top five. This is definitely in the top five. So Japan holds number one, spot. Number one, this is the top five pistachio Penn cheetah pasta. And it was the bow tie pasta. It probably has a special name. I don't know what the name is. It doesn't matter. It was so amazing, just thick, rich, beautiful flavorful sauce. And just those few ingredients that combined with flowing red wine carafe after corral, after Cref, I nearly burst my stomach with one of the most pleasurable eating experiences of my life.
Pistachio panchetta pasta. You must have this at some point in your life. This puts me above cloud nine and cloud 10 or 11 or 12. It was amazing. Honestly, I just want to, I just want to think about this pasta forever and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever and ever, oh, my stomach hurts so much after that pasta. It was just so, oh, it was so filling and we had had a lot of wine. So there was a lot of wine already in the stomach for the second dish, or maybe someone else just ordered this and I had some of it. We had chicken and then they give you French fries. The French fries look kind of bland and silly actually compared to the beauty and the, the, the unmatchable taste, the, just the heaven, like embodiment of serenity and happiness. That is the pistachio pinch at a pasta.
All right, I'm going to get over the pasta. Okay. The chicken was amazingly tender, white meat, chicken. The likes of which I didn't realize until I just came back to America. It can be kind of difficult to get here because you can taste the hormone in enriched fat, little chickens here. You can taste it when you eat them, it does taste different. And there you just don't have that. You got your lovely little skinny chickens is still have some good meat on them. Tender juicy white meat, grilled to perfection. Not too much, not too little, just perfect. You don't even need a sauce for it.
Now we have more wine and more wine and more chicken and wine, and we get to dessert and nobody has room for dessert, but we decide that we just can't pass up the [inaudible] pancakes. This is pretty much when we get on the big stocky bandwagon. After this day, life was all the stocky. I want to use that for good. How are you feeling today? Very Piscataquis life is stocky. Trey Piscataquis. See, um, oh my gosh. Okay. So he ordered Piscataquis pancakes and these come out like thicker than crepes, but thinner and more delicate than American pancakes and filled in the middle with their home made stocky cream sauce. That is sweetened to perfection, but not overdone. And, oh my gosh.
Oh, if there is a heaven after you die, they give you a pice stocky pancakes. Okay. Oh my gosh. Oh, after the meal, somehow we managed to excavate ourselves from the chairs, go outside and wander through the city, the city, which turned out to be a beautiful old, maybe ancient city with a lava cobblestone streets and a lava stone walls for the small buildings. And as you walk through these dark yet, oddly warm streets, you can't tell if you're back in some sort of Spartan city where you think Leah Knight is going to walk around the corner. You don't know where you are. It is amazing. It is immersive. It is beautiful. It is in chanting. It is so perfect and going there with no expectations, having no idea what was going to be there, wandering the streets, bellies full of, stocky and pasta and wine swaying slowly walking like penguin, soaking up all of the beauty that there is finding a viewpoint to look over the valleys of Sicily, watching the sunset, a truly beautiful, relaxing, lovely experience with almost not a single additional soul in sight. My friends do not ever travel in high season. If you want to enjoy anything that you do, shoulders season grew all the way.
This was just perfect. We decided there there's no point in looking for the train schedule. We are going to enjoy ourselves here until we are done. And if we miss the train that's life, you got a credit card, you got a passport. You're going to get a bed. So we wander the streets. So small, you think barely two average Americans could fit walking shoulder to shoulder. Yet the cars drive through them. These tiny little horse carriage [inaudible] lanes, uh, lava stones on the ground and the walls and the sidewalk. Actually, there is no sidewalk, just random little bumps that you have to be careful of.
So as you Dodge the cars and you're looking around, we found a beautiful, old, lovely cafe, kind of like a patisserie, like a bakery, like a sweet shop with a beautiful vaulted ceilings, 20 feet high. What is that? Four meters, five meters, six meters high, very, very high ceilings with ornate decorations on them and paintings and beautiful tables that are dainty yet heavy at the same time with stone and marble and fit for a king or a princess, or just three travelers. Having a great time abroad. We have espresso, we have sweets and cookies and we have digestives, which really, it's just a lovely word for highly alcoholic beverage. After your meal to help you digest everything. Of course, it probably does work, but it's also a nice excuse to have a couple amazing shots of alcohol. Oh, what a great time. And, you know, throughout the whole day between the three of us it's stories, it's laughs.
It's talking about all of the beautiful adventures that we've gone on in the past that we've gone on together that we want to go on in the future, laughing at our mistakes. Cheersing to our triumphs traveling is about experience and sharing them as well as making them and the whole day drinking and sharing experiences and laughing, laughing, and the good times laughing at the embarrassing times, laughing at all of the times. And we met our Polish friend in the hostel, by the way, which is why you stay in a hostel and not a hotel. And I met my friend in a hostel, although a couple of years before this. So the whole thing is you're sharing wonderful experiences with wonderful drinks and wonderful food and wonderful scenery and a wonderful view and no plan. And now it's evening, the sun is setting and we're in this lovely cafe in a city that we never even knew existed when we woke up that day. Oh my gosh. It's such a beautiful moment, such a beautiful day. And then at some point we decided it was time to head to the train station. We had found that there was one last train home, and we had about 20 minutes to make it just enough time to stop at the wine store. As we walked into this place, we saw walls of wine and to
Nothing else, wine here, wine there, wine everywhere. And just the three of us and the owner. And we tasted wine after wine until he found the one that was perfect for us. Perfect. To finish the evening. Perfect for the train ride home. Perfect for the wait for the train. Perfect for full Belize. So we got our wine, we made it back to the train station. We opened them. We had some cups because of course, when you buy a wine, he knows you're not waiting until you get home. So you get some cups with it. So he opened the wine on the train station platform, wait for our train to come. And yeah, this is about when my memory starts to fade just a little tiny bit, but I know that we had a lovely train ride home. There was no view because it was after the sun had set.
We met lots of people. There were a lots of uni students on the train going back for university. So I guess it must have been the beginning of the week. And we had a great, great time and finish all of the wine on the train. It's, you know, you make friends a lot faster in public transportation. If you have alcohol. I, and the moment that I say that, and I'm trying to make it a beautiful experience. I realized that in a lot of places you could be arrested for that. I don't know if it's legal in Italy or not, but we had such a great time and we had so much fun with the uni students that we met there, sharing our drinks and laughing and teaching each other. How to say funny words and Italian and English and the Sicilian version of this and the Sicilian version of that and how it's better than Milan and all of these other things. It's just, it was such a fun experience, a real fun experience. And then when we get to the train station, this is definitely when the train station in Catania. This is definitely when I remember almost nothing until somehow we, the three of us managed to lock arms and sway ourselves down the hill, back to the hostel, no injuries, no injuries.
And I'll never forget what happened. When we got back to the hostel, a family run hostel, the parents had come back to the hostel that night to make dinner. And they made a beautiful, lovely feast. And we got there right when they had finished. And right, as we got into the common area, I see the mother with open arms, a laughing and smiling and coming up to me and giving me the biggest hug and on her face, I could just, I could see the joy that I enjoy, how much you are enjoying my country and my culture, the food and the scenery and the cities and the city where we had been that whole day was very near where she was born and raised. And she loved that. We had an amazing experience. There was no judgment of, oh my gosh, I can't believe you drank.
There was, oh my gosh, you had so much beautiful wine. And you had such a good time with your friends and all of you are back now and everyone is smiling and laughing and I'm so happy to have you back. And if you want any more food, we've got food here. And of course, there's a big bar there, so you can drink more wine. And of course, of course, of course, when a happy Sicilian mother is talking to you about food, you don't say no, even though your stomach almost exploded. Not that long ago, you just say, yeah, I would love it. And yes, I would love some more wine. Of course it was a warm feeling of acceptance. It was energy feeding off of energy. Yeah. I'll never forget that. Look, I'll never forget that. That was such a beautiful moment. And one of the times when, when I just really felt like I am home, I am home hostel life, baby. Cheers. There's nothing better I can say than that to end it. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I hope you have a wonderful week. And if you have any questions or comments or you want to give me a like go to no fairytale travels dot sub stack.com and find the post for this podcast and leave it there to see you next week, guys,
[Podcast] Amazing Sicily Day Trip - Pistachio Heaven from Catania to Randazzo