Hi there, how are you today? I hope you are doing good. On my side of the globe, the weather is actually quite nice which is refreshing as since our return from Sicily the weather has been lousy! I’m slowly getting back on track with everything after being away for 2 weeks. It’s kind of revealing to see how long it takes to get back on track after being away for 2 weeks. Shows me that I actually do a lot of things when I’m at work and that taking 2 weeks out to just relax and enjoy myself means that I come back to a mountain of work and an endless to-do list! But, hey holidays are worth it! I really needed to get away and just empty my mind and resource myself.

So yes, I went with my husband and 3 children to Sicily and this was our very first time there. We stayed in a small town on the north coast called Ballestrate. It’s a small town that is not too touristic yet, most of the tourists were actually italians which was great. We are not big fans of overcrowded towns and beaches. Also, I got a great opportunity to work on my Italian and even though I say so myself, I made great progress! It even made me want to pick up where I left of years ago! So now I need to find the time and a place to go back to learning Italian which I think is such a beautiful language. I already speak French and Spanish so Italian is not difficult as there are many similarities.

Sicily is a really beautiful island with lots of picturesque towns and beautiful beaches. Unfortunately for us, there was a heat wave there at the same time so it was unusually hot and humid so that was a bit difficult for us as we are not used to such high temperatures and humidity. It changed our plans a bit as we did much less sightseeing and visiting because it was just too hot. So we did a lot more beach going than originally planned. But that is not a complaint! The beaches are beautiful, there is a little bit of fresh air, the water was the perfect temperature AND I got to do some knitting!

Some of you here have said you’d love to visit Sicily so I’m going to share some pictures with you as I’m sure you’ll enjoy looking at those and daydream a bit.

  These pictures are from the beach in Ballestrate. There are 2 beaches there and this one is a small, family beach where there were never too many people and this one was closest to our apartment so we frequently went there.

     two gorgeous places, the first picture is of the port in a town not far from where we were staying and the second is a very small beach in a town called Marinella. We stopped there on a day trip, eat lunch at the beach and took a little bath and I did some knitting of course

 A few more gorgeous beach pictures to get you daydreaming 🙂

 Did you know that Sicily has a lot of ancient greek ruins? It’s so impressive to walk among these monuments that are from hundreds of years before JC. Some of them are in remarkable condition. Very humbling

 We went to visit Corleone! The village we all link to films like the Godfather. The village is in the middle of nowhere and you really have to want to go there to get there as the roads are in very bad condition. The village is a beautiful rural italian village with lots of charm. We visited their Anti Mafia museum and that was an amazing experience. We were guided by a 17 year old italian girl who was a wealth of information and she explained the history of the mafia and just general culture of Sicily so well. Really amazing. The pictures of files above are from a room dedicated to the first ever Mafia trial in Italy which was held in Palermo, Sicily in 1986. There were 400 defendants, 100 of which were absent/on the run. You can see the incredible amount of files they had compiled for this complicated trial. On the third picture you see files up close and the name Greco appears on some of them. He was a big mafia boss and a big figure of this trial.

 We visited this chapel in Palermo which had amazing mosaics and here are a few pictures for you. I took those thinking I might use them for inspiration for colors or maybe a pattern.

 That is so true!

 And like I said, I knitted every time I went to the beach!  And here you see all 3 projects I worked on: a pair of tube socks (I’ll tell you more about those in a later post), my Mara Light shawl and a new sock design (also more on that later).

So as you can gather, this was a wonderful vacation and with that, let me just wish you a wonderful weekend. I’ll be back next week with more on my FO and WIP as well as more exciting news and an article by one of your readers.

Take care:)