Caltagirone.

Our next day trip took us to the picturesque town of Caltagirone, known for its ceramics over many hundreds of years. 

Tiles, tiles, and more tiles!

As you enter the town you notice that many of the lampposts, walls, roofs and even bridges are decorated with ceramic tiling. Caltagirone is another walled city high up on a hill top providing the citizens with panoramic vistas of the surrounding countryside and potential invasions – tourists and such like. Of course the main church has pride of place at the highest point (there are a huge number of churches here) and to get to it there are 200 beautifully decorated ceramic steps to climb with small lanes off of them as you climb. At the end there is a wonderful vista of the town.

Caltagirone wins the prize for having the best value café in all of our travels so far!
Six Euro for two people for excellent coffee and croissants!

Being famous for ceramics throughout the ages Caltagirone has a ceramics museum which we had to see. The ‘Museum of Ceramics’ was back on the outskirts of the town on the home so we got back into the car ready to fight the drivers and signposts once again.

The international sign language ..let all shout louder and wave arms!

hmmmm..  Did we miss a turning? Surely this cannot be the main route out of the town!
Oops! We found ourselves in a VERY narrow one-way street. Like so narrow we had to turn the wing mirrors inwards! On taking a blind 90°corner we were met by a woman in another frantically waving at us to go back – or something.  Goodness knows what she was indicating. Going back was kind of impossible! This is where sign language is very useful if only it works! Waving arms about the place and screeching unintelligible sounds doesn’t help much.  So we stayed were we were and John went out to confront the poor woman going through her epileptic fit! It turned out that the woman just wanted us to go back a few feet so she could reverse into her tiny garage in this tiny street.
“Oh! Why didn’t you just so that to start with!”
We reversed, she popped her car into her garage.

Meanwhile her husband had arrived on the scene and another car had arrived behind us! They determined that these dumb tourists had no idea what they doing to end up in their narrow street terrorizing the local neighborhood or even where they were going and therefore were in need their help!

There was a lot more waving of hands, pointing at weird places on the map, 4 people talking all at the same time, rotating the map and even a random finger on the location of the Museum!
It’s been my experience that in general when people are trying to communicate across languages that they don’t know that the common solution is to speak their own language louder. If that doesn’t work then speak the same words loader again and so on! Waving arms seems to help too!

This all clearly worked eventually because we understood to continue, turn next right and right again.  Amongst lots of happy faces, waving and shaking of hands, this we did and it took less than one minute to complete. Then we came to a stop. Blocked by a car.  The chap that gave us the directions had reversed HIS car back 400m along the narrow lane, turned along a few roads and and met up with us again!  I think Team Ferrari need him on their side! 

He pointed to another road and for us to follow him. Which we did.
Unbelievably he led us back to the main road to the museum – it had better be blimmin’ good after all this!

What a great chap!  Cathy got out for a photo-opportunity  and a thank you hug with the chap!

..and the museum was kinda good but after you have seen a 1,000 pots you’ve sort of been a little ‘potted out’!