Catania, Sicily
10th August 2009
La pescheria
I decided to spend our second morning in Catania visiting La Pescheria (the fishmarkets). I left a not so keen Jesper (who not as enamoured of marketplaces as I am, vegetarian and a seriously anti-morning person) snoozing happily and headed out into the streets. The day was already warming up, the sun climbing high in the sky and sear down between the crumbling, age-stained buildings.
Happy basalt elephant with a few pigeon friends
Our pension was very close to Piazza Duomo, the main square of Catania, with its enigmatically smiling elephant. The elephant has been charmingly carved from basalt and is always adorned with one or two opportunistic pigeons. The geologist that I am, I appreciate that they chose a piece of basalt with rather large vesicles (the holes left from gas bubbles in the lava). So not only is it a nice, cheerful statue but also shows evidence of its former life, molten and glowing red, with bubbles of foul gases tangled amongst the tacky threads of lava. I wonder if that’s why the elephant has such a laughingly knowing look, gazing down upon the square with its buoyant smile. Born from fire, carved by careful hands and propped up in the square of a city too close to the foot of hulking Etna. The elephant knows that its days as a statue are numbered and eventually it will be engulfed once more in some future outpouring, melting and dissipating to be scraped up into new shapes by mother nature’s own potters hands.
Fishy fish
Fish encrusted weights
I could hear and smell the fish market before I crested the edge of the square and saw the stairs plummeting down into a mass of humanity, red umbrellas obscuring the sight, here and there a glimpse of the silvery gleam of bucketloads of fish. The sound was a cacophony of Italian shouts, the competition for customers, the instructions to men carrying massive sackfuls of dripping fish, all echoing off the high walls. The smell was strong, a salty tang on the breeze with the underlying reek of seafood growing hot in the slowly warming sun. Everywhere dead eyes stared up sightlessly as mine flicked from side to side absorbing the chaotic scene.
Growing warm in the summer sun
Swordfish steaks
Giant swordfish, their battle weapons cruelly shorn, their bodies growing short as steak after glistening steak was cleaved from their newly dead mass. Boxes of tiny sardines, tumbled and shiny, flashes of rainbow, pink and dark green. Sea urchins spikey and indignant neighbouring feebly squirting clams and large cubes of frozen octopus, their proud tentacles folded into impossible shapes. Everything was oozing, dripping long tendrils of slime onto the ground which was becoming slick with blood, sea water and whiskery prawn shells that made a satisfying crunch beneath my feet.
A bucket of sardines
Octopi
The strangest of all were long, bright, silver fish with elongated noses and pink bellies, curled back against themselves like one of those loop-the-loops from toy racing car sets. I have never seen anything like them before, and yet, more likely than not we have swam in the same ocean together.
What on earth (or sea) are these?
Escape!
As I walked on through, dodging a meaty red slosh of water to keep the fish wet I saw a small squid draped over the side of a dirty, yellow bucket, as though in a final attempt at escape. Fish vendors were enthusiastically squeezing large sponges full of seawater over the fish as they shouted to passerbys. I sidestepped a final bucket of water and climbed my way up the stairs happy to breath the comparatively fresh air of the square and headed back to the room.
Crunch
Melons masquerading as fish?
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