Mazara del Vallo

Mazara del Vallo is one of the most important fishing centers of Italy, located on the southwestern coast of Sicily.
During our recent trip we enjoyed some time at a beach popular with kite surfers and wind surfers.
During the evenings we enjoyed delicious seafood dinners. One night we experienced an unbelievable seafood soup with couscous.
On another evening we went to the Trattoria delle Cozze Basirico. Frommer's 2010 guide gives this description:
Set on the southern outskirts of the town of Mazara del Vallo, about 5km (3 miles) from the center, this restaurant might remind you of an oversize railway car that just happens to serve vast amounts of seafood to hundreds of diners every night throughout the summer. Don't expect grandeur; this is a gutsy, two-fisted place whose walls are open to the sea breezes. The overworked staff is coyly clad in exaggerated sailor costumes. There are no printed menus here: A fast-talking waiter will tell you that the only options are selections from the buffet-style antipasti table, several different preparations of mussels, and steamed octopus in either lemon or tomato sauce. Drinks of choice include wine or beer, a suitable accompaniment for the restaurant's widely acknowledged specialty, mussels.

For the antipasto we each had a steamed octopus in tomato sauce,

served on the plate looking up at us.

For the "primo" we had gamberini pasta (shrimp).

We shared a spada steak (swordfish) for the "secondo."

Two bowls of muscles, one in lemon sauce and the other in tomato sauce, brought our meal to a conclusion. We had no room for dessert! (Well, we might of had a gelato on the way back to the hotel!)

Giovane di Mozia

Just off the coast of Marsala in Sicily is the island of Mozia. This island was first settled in the 8th century BC and became a shipping center and trading post for the Phonecians and Carthaginians. Called Motoya, it was one of the most important settlements in the Mediterranean area. Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse destroyed the settlement in 379 BC. During the Middle Ages, Basilican monks settled on the island and renamed it San Pantaleo. In 1888 the ancient city was rediscovered by Joseph Whitaker, a wine merchant and amateur archeologist from England.
While excavating on the island, Whitaker uncovered the ruins of the Phoenician city of Motya. He died in 1936 and most of his finds are housed in a museum on the island that used to be his home.
The jewel of the island is a Greek statue discovered in 1979 called the Giovane di Mozia - the Young Man of Mozia.


The Young Man of Mozia is a breathtaking marble statue of a young man, perhaps an athlete, dressed in a finely-pleated, clinging tunic, with his hand on his hip. It is thought to be a work of the Greek sculptor Pheidias and dated about 440 BC.

Sicilian Sea Salt

In Trapani (Sicily) you can find salt marshes with some of the windmills that used to drain water from the water ponds in the flat marshlands of the region's coast.
Getting salt from the sea water is a slow process requiring hard labor and the hot sun of the long, dry Sicilian summers.

The ancient Egyptians knew how to get salt from the sea, and with the Greeks and Romans the "industry" flourished in Sicily. The windmills were added in medieval times. By the nineteenth century, Sicilian sea salt was exported to European countries as far away as Norway and Russia. Today many recipes specifically call for sea salt. In Sicily, the sea salt is often sold wet or damp. For this reason a few grains of rice are sometimes placed with in the salt shaker to absorb moisture and prevent hardening.