Today was the start of our project work in Cefalu. After we woke up and had breakfast, we made our way downtown to city hall (right across the piazza from the cathedral) for a meeting with the Mayor's staff. This was for the purpose of giving us a historical background of Cefalu and its growth as a city... I have a feeling a few things were lost in translation, but we got the gist of it.
Shadows in the water in front of our hotel.
A cafe just off the main piazza.
The piazza in the morning.
Some local characters in the piazza... groups of old men were basically on every bench in town, it was pretty cool.
The scooped roof of City Hall.
City Hall from across the piazza.
After the meeting in City Hall, Niko, our historian, took us on a tour of Cefalu. Thankfully, Stanley was kind enough to translate for us. The first stop on the tour was the cathedral, which, apart from La Rocca, is one of Cefalu's most defining features.
The inside of the cathedral. It is very old and sparsely decorated, but warm inside because of the mosaics in the apse and the color of the stone. The cathedral also has modern stained glass windows that are abstracted versions of scenes from the Creation... an interesting juxtaposition, with the cathedral from the 1100s and the 20th century stained glass.
A closeup of the central stained glass window, above the entrance.
The entrance to the cathedral.
One of the cathedral's distinctive towers.
After the cathedral, we walked to a section of the city with a doorway in the old city wall. Through the doorway was a rocky section that extended out into the water... lots of fun and a great picture opportunity.
Next we went to another platform overlooking the sea, this one was less rocky and a little more stable... an actual platform to walk out on, not rocks to climb on.
Jake, Spiro, Amy, and Mo taking in the view.
After that, we continued walking around the historic center of the city, exploring tiny alleyways and backstreets and absorbing some local color... lots of random out-of-the-way places that were beautiful and unique, like this well-protected flower pot...
... and a padlock bigger than my head... and that's saying something.
Cefalu's beachfront during the day.
Next we wandered to Cefalu's medieval laundry facilities, fed by an underground river... it was a cool place, hunkered down in the middle of a solid block of buildings at the bottom of an awesome winding staircase.
Cool water spouts at the laundry.
A staircase hanging above the laundry basins.
Our tour ended at the laundry, and after that we split up into our respective teams and got to work. For the team I was on, this involved walking outside the historic center of the city to the more modern expansion to document some problem traffic and urban design areas. Most of the afternoon was spent documenting through sketches and photographs to gain as much information as possible to work with for our presentation boards. This elegantly symmetrical entrance/courtyard was on our way to the outskirts of town.
The entrance to the church of San Stefano.
A typical street in Cefalu's historic center, barely wide enough for two cars, with pedestrian traffic squeezing through whatever space is left.
Both the pedestrian and vehicular traffic on Via Roma got crazy when school let out, so several crossing guards came out to help keep the kids safe.
A mess of cars on Via Roma.
Some Cefalu signage.
More Cefalu signage... get all that?
A gas station that is literally in the middle of the intersection... we spent a lot of time thinking about this intersection because of its sheer craziness, about six roads have their confluence here.
That night, a bunch of us hunted for a place for dinner. However, Cefalu is a pretty small town and it was off-season, so we could only find one open restaurant... Il Vicoletto (I think), right off the piazza. Generally, when this happens in Italy, odds are that the restaurant will be extremely good anyway, and it was. I believe several of us also ended up coming back into the city for gelato later on in the night... since I'm now writing this almost a month after the fact, I may get some of my orders of events wrong. I'm also fairly certain that there was also some prosecco in there somewhere... anyway, since that's all I can remember happening, that seems like a good place to end... sorry about all the strange gaps between pictures, try as I might I can't get them to close.
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