Cycling the Sicily Divide (and then some)

Sicily had never really been on my mind, though to be sure there are a zillion places that are kinda on my mind in a small way, but I didn’t know much about Sicily other than the memorable scenes in The Godfather where Michael Corleone is out and about in the countryside, sees the beautiful Apollonia, is struck by a lightning bolt and marries her, then the car explodes.  Memorable indeed, but not necessarily a comprehensive picture of a huge island with its mountains, rivers, economy, language, food, and social structure that is only mostly Italian.  I have long been interested in Corsica; it has great steep rivers and is the birthplace of kayak creeking (the Perception Corsica kayak was introduced in the late 80’s or early 90’s) so I knew there had to be big mountains on that island and that’s more appealing, and I knew Sardinia was bigger overall so probably more riding there, so I had kinda overlooked Sicily.  But when Ash did some research and said “hey, there’s a ‘Sicily Divide’ bikepacktouring route; I’m gonna do it!” Of course that got me intrigued. 

The original plan was for us to stay in Morocco riding until I flew to the Zambezi and Ash would go to Sicily to meet our great pals Meghan, Kate, and Felicia for a weeklong tour, but we felt like we had seen and done all that we wanted in Morocco (we weren’t too keen to head back to the desert, and the folks we had met who had ridden the coast had told us it was pretty busy and the riding wasn’t nearly as good as what we had done in the mountains) and Ash wanted to go to Sicily sooner rather than later, and of course I didn’t want to miss out!  Cooler temps and Sicilian/Italian food of course sounded super appealing as well, so we were united in our desire to do the Divide.  

The Great Divide Route in the US takes its moniker from its focus on indeed crossing back and forth across the Continental Divide, so I assumed that Sicily had some sort of mountainous spine that runs the length of the island.  This is not quite the case; there are indeed moutains, but they are scattered liberally all over the island, and the Divide just kinda goes through the center, meandering up, down, and through the “mountains”.  For the most part, I would probably call them “big hills”; there are few over 4000 feet and the route tops out at 3000 feet. BUT……going up to 3000 feet from low points many, many times adds up!  We have sorta realized that when looking at a route that a total vert of 100 feet per mile is a ratio that is fun and doable with enough cliimbing and descending to make it fun.  Therefore, a 50 mile day with 5000 feet of climbing is reasonable.  As it turns out, that’s what the Sicily Divde route is:  350 miles and about 35,000 feet of climbing; a lot for a small island with “small mountains!”   It’s actually reminiscent of New Englad; not huge mountains but very little flat terrain and a bazillion tiny paved and gravel roads woven through very rural  – and sometimes very rugged terrain, and like New England it’s got tons of cute little villages scattered hither and thither, though unlike “New” England it’s habitation is super-old; we saw relics from the 10th-13th centuries BC, and it’s been well-inhabited by the Greeks, Romans, and Sicilians ever since.  

Sicily’s importance comes from its favorable location out in the Mediterranean – but not a desert like northern Africa, so apples and oranges, strawberries and avocados, olives and peaches all grow well in Sicily; just as California is to the rest of the US, Italy relies heavily on Sicily for its food.  Including, fortunately for Ashley and I, pistachios!  We both love everything pistachio, and it’s there as a baseline for everything from gelato to the cream inside of croissants to ravioli and a kind of bread-crust for meats.  According to the locals, the Sicilian pistachio is both greener and more flavorful than any other pistachios in the world!  (Of course it is). 

Sicily is also strategically located; we didn’t realize how close it is to Tunisia (not far) and as such it’s a critical narrow point in the Meditteranean, which made it a logical target the the Allies to snatch it from Mussolini and the Germans; they made a major landing on the south shore in July 1943 and swept eastward, taking the island in 5 weeks and disrupting the supply chain (a term we all now know) to all points Mediterranean. 

Technically, the Divide route starts in Trapani on the far western point, but with Palermo being the biggest city on the island and the most common airport “they” (the route creators) had an option to spend the first day meeting with the route, starting off right with a 2500 foot climb out of Palermo into the mountains that surround the town (one of those mountains is Monte Pelligrino; a 1600-foot peak that literally towers over town and is a fun, short shakedown ride with Big Views):

I mentioned The Godfather earlier, and indeed the Mafia – or “Casa Nostre” – has had a huge impact on Sicily, and Palermo has been the center of it.  Above Palermo is the suburb of Monreale, and there they have a “Mafia Museum” (in the same building they have some interesting archeological artifacts and a very weird exhibit of a Korean video store???  Apparently the museum was the recipient of a big donation from a wealthy Korean benefactor, and this is an ode to him??).  The Mafia was first A Thing in something like 1890, and it progressed to the point where it ruled Sicily with far more influence than what Rome exerted, and did so mostly with violence; in the museum they had hundreds of grisly photos of crumpled bodies in pools of blood on the front page of the Palermo Daily Sun newspaper.   There was one civic leader who had the boldness to take on the Mafia in the 80’s, and on his way home from a meeting in Rome with officials to try to get help on the island a bomb went off under his car with such force it blew a huge crater on Palermo’s major waterfront boulevard:

The museum had one strange exhibit that had ten little cubes in a dark room, and when you stepped (stumbled) into one a video would start playing with the volume a bit too loud talking about various aspects of the Mafia.  One of these was of a scientist-type guy in horn rims and a white smock talking about water and how important it was to both a person and a society, which was nice, until you realized that with a bit of glee he was talking about how if you control (limit) water you can bring a society to its knees.   Odd.  

According to what we saw in the museum, the violent rule of the Mafia kinda ended in the mid-90’s (?!?) and was the beginning of the rise of Palermo from a violence-ridden apocalypse to just a moderately grimy city trying to be a tourist destination.  

But what about the Sicily Divide? How’s the riding?  In a word: sublime.  As I noted over and over, the riding in Morocco was amazing, with many days of riding on single-to-1 ½ lane roads going up and over fairly high cols, and while indeed Sicily’s elevations are more modest, we continued on our streak of riding on virtually car-less one lane roads that “rolled” (climbed and descended!) the many, many high hills of the center of the country.  

   interestingly, this is not a bikepacking.com route, but seems to be sort of a state thing, and they have done a great job with both making it sound as great as it is, creating a great route, and promoting some much–needed tourism in the center of the country:  !  

Not that cyclists are necessarily big spenders, but the center of the island is really reliant on the aforementioned agriculture, and as we all know small scale farming is a tough business, and with places like Palermo promoting tourism hard the center of the island is apparently suffering, and since there’s really not much opportunity for camping and there are lots of guest houses mixed into the rural areas, getting cyclists to visit the center of the island is very appealing to them, and whether it’s Sicilian thing or a cyclist thing, the people we met along the way LOVE seeing us, and many places – like the one shown above – have little stamps for the Sicily Divide passport that we neglected to get.  It’s nice to feel wanted!

The Divide route is designed to be done in a week or so – and is easy enough to do so, since you can ride with a really light kit, but the perimeters of the island are popular for a reason, so we did some adjacent “lobes” to the route to see some of the cool sites.  Agrigento was one’s a decent-sized city overlooks one of the world’s best-kept Greek ruins from when “Greece” was a far more vast empire than what we know today:

We wiggled our way east along the coast from Agrigento to Licata where the Allies landed (the landing was a successfully executed ruse using a decoy dead body with planted “evidence” that Sicily was not a target, vividly detailed in the great recent movie “Operation Mincemeat”).  It was interesting to note that this operation was practically as big as the D-Day landing in Normandy, and at that there are a lot of commenorative sites and monuments, but at Licata there is….nothing.  Then it occurred to us:  this landing was of The Allies onto The Axis’s land, and the Americans, Canadians, and Brits weren’t there to liberate the country from enemies ala France, they were there to take it over!  So as important as the landing was to ending the war and creating a relatively peaceful region/country, it was still a military invasion, so it’s more understandable that there wasn’t much there to remind Sicilians of this monumental point in their history.  

Another part of the “lobe” that we were on is Piazza Armerina, an amazing ancient Villa that has as much square footage as a football stadium and all the floors are made of tiny pieces of tile that were inlaid as incredibly intricate and detailed pieces of art.   Even by today’s art-deco standards these floors and their art was incredible.  

That said, I couldn’t help but imagine the many servants who were tasked with the incredible tedious work of arranging and inlaying these bazillions of tiles under the watchful eyes of the art director/project manager, all for the sort of hubris of the rich villa owner.  Of course, probably most/all of antiquity stuff was conceived of by the wealthy and executed by the poor, which is not much different than the house in Deer Valley with discos, lap pools, funiculars, bowling lanes, etc. that I have been built by people who can’t even begin to imagine such wealth.  

But I digress…..

We wound our way back north to the Sicily Divide route, passing cool little villages that were mostly draped over the top of towns with their requisite tiny little cobbled streets:

Cool castles from oh-so-long ago that were the progenisis of the towns in the first place:

And great little farm roads linking them:

As I mentioned in the Morocco posts, we had given up on our camping gear there because we weren’t using it and shipped it to Austria

(Where it just arrived, a month later!  Mostly due to Austria customs…) so we were dependent on staying in places.  We had gone back one time zone and Italy/Sicily had just changed back to standard time from daylight savings, so it was pretty much dark at 5:00; even though we had nice weather that makes for a long night in a tent so we were happy to be staying in guest houses, and as always we were able to meet some super nice folks:

Who typically fired up some amazing meals for us:

Anod we climbed, and descended; we had a 5 day streak of doing something like 5500-7200 feet of verties per day, going from the mountains:

Down to the sea:  

And back up!  

We had one evening worth recounting in a bit more detail; there’s a kind of Big regional/small national park in the NE section of the island called Nebroni, and Ash – as our Chief Navigator – correctly anticipated would hold a lot of great riding.  The forecast had turned from perpetually benign to a bit of rain on the day that we climbed into those mountains, and sure enough the clouds were gathering and dropping to create fog, which in turn created mist, which eventually became rain, and while we climbed we were staying warm, but we were at our highest point yet on Sicily at over 6000 feet and we knew that even if we could beat darkness – which we couldn’t – the descent to the sea would be miserable at best.  We knew that there was a quite-remote lodge/hotel in the park, near the top, but we hadn’t been able to get much information on it to know if it was even open late-season.   But through the dusky mist we saw a sign for the place, caught a glimpse of a building with lights on and cars in the lot, and sure enough, not only was the place open, it was fabulous:

Before we even saw our room they fussed over us and got us some much appreciated tea and shortly were warm, dry, and eating the best meal we had in Sicily, which is saying a lot!

The fog lingered the next morning as we finished off the climb and started the descent, but soon enough we were in the mild temps of the beach.  All was good.  

Our last destination was Mount Etna.  It’s an active volcano with plenty of recent eruptions and is kinda puffing all the time, and there have even been some pretty recent lava flows:

here are two ski resorts on Etna, both at about 6000 feet; one small one on the northeast side and one south facing; not sure how that one has been faring lately at a pretty low latitude?  Etna is something over 10,000 feet and is pretty similar to the Pacific NW volcanoes, but they have a gondola going up off the base for the first 1500 feet and they have these huge 4wd rigs that drive people up to a refugio at about 9000 feet, and beyond that you gotta have a guide, so we just hiked up most of the way to the rifugio, ogled at one of the handful of subcraters:

he climbs to the resorts have been featured prominently in the Giro D’Italia:

But those guys always finished at the top, we got to ride down another long descent to the sea!

This part of the trip was highly-anticipated by us:  our friends Meghan Higgins, Kat Ferguson, and Felicia Oliveira came over to meet us (well, Ashley!) to do a weeklong tour in the SE part of the island, which is famous zone for road riding.  I was fortunate enough to have a day with The Ladies in Catania, and we made the most of it, wandering around town and (mostly) just yukking it up. 

With a heavy heart I left the ladies to their tour and started working my way via two wheels, ferry, and steel wheels up to Rome to catch a flight.  

Overall Sicily was a fabulous place to ride; we took to calling it bikepacktouring light; it’s easy to navigate, there are a bazillion little roads that are an incredible web around the island that the likes of Komoot etc generally map out well (watch out for the mud that occassionally washes across the road; super gooey!), there’s some cool history, tons of great places to stay, and the food is superlative.  A perfect place for an intro European tour.