Acireale

More padlocks in Acireale!  These are in the Villa Belvedere gardens along with the gold fish.  There is also a calendar date garden here, 3 February 2009.  How do they manage to change these gardens every day?

This is a brief post about our second day visit to Acireale.  In my next post I'll get on to Catania and St Agatha.  Acireale is another of the towns around Etna.  We just missed the carnival there which is on this week but the decorations were already up in the streets and I walked the triangular route of the procession.

The bus dropped us off at Villa Belvedere gardens which is a great starting point with views out over the sea and adjacent to a neatly manicured Tuscan landscape.  There is also a dramatic statue of a woman appealing heavenwards over the prone body of a man with a large rock on his chest. 

Acireale has the usual Piazza Duomo as well as Piazzas Garibaldi and Cappuccini and Europa.  I also noticed some nicely laid out vegetable shops and home-made produce shops (Nostra produzione).  But what I noticed most here were the posters and one in particular for the Festa della democrazia.

In the cathedral, it took me a little while to work out the lines laid diagonally across the floor with star signs running down each side.  Eventually I linked it with the small hole in the dome on one side and worked out that it was a sun calendar.  Every time I begin to think I've seen it all, something else emerges to startle me about the creativity and energy of people who came before me on this planet!