I awoke before my beloved, tried to dress quietly in the dark and carried my
shoes down the stairs. Once out the front door, I waved at the daughter of
the launderette owner as she played on the flagstoned corner and nodded a
greeting to the fat, string-vested gentleman who lived in the ground-floor
flat across the street.
Strolling towards Via del Teatro, I took care not to acknowledge the thinly
disguised police stakeout at the end of our road (two sweaty, heavy-lidded
men who’d been growing stubble in the front seats of a Fiat Bravo for the
past 48 hours now) and headed to my cafe. I’m sure the officers’ interest
lies with my fat shirtless friend, who receives elegantly dressed visitors
at all hours of the day and night.
After juicing up on a double macchiato and a custard croissant at the bar,
flicking through the morning’s Gazzetta dello Sport, I headed back home,
picking up some fresh bread on the way – the old lady at the panetteria
popped a couple of free biscotti in the bag for my wife, whose smile she
likes. Back on my street, I looked up at the laundry – my laundry –
fluttering from the balcony, and thought, “So, this is my life now. I live
in Sicily. I am Sicilian.”
The complicating detail that I’d only rented the apartment for three nights,
and was on a return flight to Gatwick in a couple of days, didn’t have to
intrude on the fantasy just yet. Put the espresso-maker on, mi amore,
I’m home.
There’s been an intriguing twist in the tale of the continental short break.
It seems some travellers who previously relished the convenience of checking
into a hotel straight from the train or plane now mildly resent the
concierge’s cosseting, motherly embrace, and the endless reminders, from the
generic global breakfast to the Hollywood contents of the flatscreen, that
you are an outsider here, a visitor, one step removed. If you really want to
know a place, you need to deal with its people, sample its lifestyle and,
top of my list, you need to try your hand at buying and preparing its food.
Urban self-catering, once a niche option, is on the rise, with holiday-rental
agencies springing up in towns across Europe: three months used to be a
short let for an apartment – now it’s three nights. For my first experience
of the phenomenon, I chose a city that may once have been the most powerful
in western civilisation but has since settled to a more parochial,
manageable pace – the faded masterpiece of Syracuse.
In its heyday, Syracuse bested Athens and Carthage in battle, played host to
Plato, Archimedes and Livy, and was proclaimed by Cicero to be the most
beautiful city in the known world. But two and a half thousand years is a
long time in politics, and the giant now slumbers at the southeast corner of
Sicily, its glories echoing only through the narrow streets of the old town,
Ortygia, clustered onto an island jutting into the Ionian Sea.
It was here that we rented our studio, in the old Jewish quarter, where
crumbling decrepitude is slowly being replaced with renovation and revival –
though you’ll still see plenty of joists overhead, preventing the tiring
buildings from kissing one another across the alleyways. On one side of our
building, the sea glittered in the spring sunshine, while on the other side
the mopeds scooted, the shopkeepers flirted, the teenagers pouted and the
elders pottered, Italian life being lived, as ever, with one eye admiringly
in the mirror.
First priority was food, and the town markets. Ortygia’s daily gathering is a
boisterous, rough-edged affair (any woman under 30 who walks the length of
the stalls on her own will either be offended by an operatic chorus of
whistles and catcalls, or be mortified by the silence) where the fishmongers
slap the octopuses awake to show how fresh they are and keen-eyed matrons
patrol the vegetable displays in search of today’s finest tomatoes. And,
needless to say, when you make your picks and get it home, the food’s all
astonishingly flavoursome, enough to leave any supermarket-shopping Brit a
touch bewildered by how much taste actually belongs in proper produce.
In recent years, Syracuse has acquired a second market, a sign of the changing
times – here, organic olive-oil producers sit beside stalls selling
ethically sourced coffee and fair-trade fruit. Beautiful enough to attract
intellectuals and impoverished enough to ferment anger, this city has long
had an activist bent – the local antiMussolini campaigners are remembered as
favoured sons, and there surely can’t be many cities in Italy where you have
to sign a petition against veal farming to get a bowl of vegetable soup.
There are more conventional tourist moments in Syracuse, of course – the
cathedral, wrapped around a Greek temple, is remarkable, and the puppet
theatre, run by three brothers keeping their great-grandfather’s art alive,
is a wonder – but it turns out that in city self-catering, the magic is in
the mundane. The shopping trips, the neighbourly nods, the Sunday stroll
along the waterfront with what felt like the whole city in their finest
attire, the nocturnal walks through empty streets, the silence snapped by
bursts of TV and screaming kids – real life.
And best of all, there was the food. We asked locals for recipes, took notes
in trattorias, tried making an orange-and-parsley salad, melanzana
with rosemary, wild mushroom tagliatelle, with variable success but
consistent pleasure. On the final day (having spent a pittance on
ingredients), we splashed out on a long Sicilian restaurant lunch, and felt
able at the end to enjoy a glass of Canella with the masterly chef,
Salvatore Giuca, and talk food.
As he enthused about flavours and traditions, he got up intermittently to
explain to American backpackers who popped their head round the door that,
no, he didn’t do pizza. “They ask all the time. I say, you want pizza, go to
Naples. That is their food. This is Siracusa, we cook our food
Siracusana.”
I nodded ruefully. “That’s tourists, Salvatore. What can you do?”
Travel brief
Where to stay: The Sicilian Villa Company (0871 711 0089, www.thesicilianvillacompany.com)
offers the Cesare 2 studio apartment from £74 a night, and has seven other
flats in Ortygia. Or try Open Sicily (0870 111 8451, www.opensicily.com),
which has properties in Ortygia from £70 a night.
Getting there: British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com)
and Air Malta (www.airmalta.com) fly
to Catania from Gatwick. There are also summer charters from Gatwick,
Manchester and Dublin. Book through Charter Flights (0845 045 0153, www.charterflights.co.uk)
or Alternative Airlines (0871 222 9222, www.alternativeairlines.co.uk).
As parking is a shocker in Ortygia, your best bet is to take the train from
Catania to Syracuse (£4, about two hours; www.trenitalia.com)
and enjoy car-free living; but Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk)
has a week’s rental from the airport from £143.
Food: Ortygia market is at the bottom of Corso Umberto every morning
except Sunday, and the farmers’ market is on Via Trento on Saturday
evenings. Salvatore Giuca’s masterpieces can be sampled at Trattoria
Kalliope on Via del Consiglio Reginale (00 39 0931 468008, www.trattoriakalliope.com).
Four more apartment strategies
ARLES
There’s an alternative to renting a villa in the Provençal countryside –
and you may find it’s much better value. While the larger cities such as
Avignon and Aix-en-Provence feel crammed in high season, smaller towns offer
space to breathe as well as a bit of bustle. Arles is a smart choice, with
easy access to the wilds of the Camargue, and a famously bountiful Saturday
market. Property no 95134 at www.holiday-rentals.co.uk
is a three-bedroom townhouse with a roof terrace; from £664 a week. Nîmes is
also a good base – it’s only three hours by TGV from Paris (£109 return from
London from www.raileurope.co.uk).
Check out property no 94171, a duplex with terrace, from £278 a week.
SEVILLE
The covered markets of Seville are often cited as the best places (outside the
bullring) to encounter the true nature of “the frying pan of Spain”. They
offer fresh fish from the coast, Andalusia’s finest fruit and veg and an
unparalleled language lesson. Friendly Rentals (0800 520 0373, www.friendlyrentals.com)
has a one-bedroom place in the old town, with pool and terrace, for £186 for
three nights.
CRACOW
Live out your John Le Carré-novel fantasies by renting an apartment in this
creaking, characterful great Eastern city – and get a bargain in the
process. Old City Apartments (00 48 606 941483, www.oldcityapartments.eu)
has a generous one-bedroom flat, just 200 metres from the main square, for
£62 a night, with no minimum stay. You can pick up groceries from the stalls
on the west of the main square. And no, it’s not all potatoes and cabbage –
Cracow is the hub of Poland’s fruit-farming empire, so you can enjoy a quick
detox after hitting this buzzing city’s vodka parlours.
PARIS
The city where self-catering is booming fastest – Parisian hotel rooms are
notoriously poky, breakfasts now average £8 for bread and coffee, and six
meals out in a three-day break will grind down any credit card. By contrast,
the city’s food markets remain vibrant, authentic and excellent value.
France Appartements (00 33 1 56 89 31 00, www.rentapart.com)
has a one-bedroom pied-à-terre, just off the Champs Elysées, for £73 a
night, and a three-bedroom flat at the Trocadéro for £181 a night.
