Do as the Italians do, and head to the local Irish pub?

If you’re ever in Taormina, check out the Time Out Pub – Where Sicily Meets Ireland.

You get the feeling Sicliy’s met a lot of Ireland.  In Catania, I asked (once again using my 2 day old Italian) at a chemists for some sunblock.  Not looking up, but very helpfully replying in Italian and then after my “um, er” flipping through the book for “Slower please” (Parli piu’ lentamente, per favore.) in English, the Chemist said, “yes I have some 20 SPF right here.”  He looked up, saw my mother and me, switched the bottles in his hand and said, “For you, I have the 50 SPF.”

Legend has it that Yeats designed the Irish Pound and other coins after the Sicilian coins he picked up in Siracusa, Sicily – finding them to be the most artistic of coins and the only punt he had in his pocket at the time.  Speaking of Siracusa, check out Ulysses Irish Pub.  This pub has the added value of being named after a novel by James Joyce named and patterned after a novel (ok, epic) by Homer about a man who spent a lot of time on Sicily – Geography of the Odyssey.

The crowd at Friends was watching an Italian team compete in a UEFA game.  Not sure if it was Roma, or not, but how perfect for this post would it be if they were all watching Michael Bradley?   There’s a pizza shop in Point Pleasant NJ, where [they] “love-a that-a bald-a kid!”  (Drawn from Jeff Bradley’s FB acct.)