Well, my week on the Solitaire II, studying Italian and sailing through the Eolian Islands, had come to an end. Last night our sailing group officially said goodbye, and my departure date from Sicily was fast approaching. Only four more days of discovery were remaining.
A week on a sailboat does many things, but one thing is for sure it creates a huge amount of laundry. The entire suitcase that I had taken onto the boat was in desperate need of a good cleansing, so it was time to use the washing machine in the spacious five-bedroom apartment above the Laboratorio Linguistico language school. Claudia, being from Germany, was in charge of selecting the laundry settings on this European machine, and shortly after my dirty clothes and those of two of my shipmates were turning happily in the frontloaded washer. Then we hung up the clothes on the balcony of our bedroom and Lorenzo, our favourite Catholic priest, joined us to sit for a bit outside. After a while he headed off to get his hair cut while Claudia and I met our other shipmates, Franco and Agnieszka, who were going to take us on a tour of Milazzo.
Milazzo is a town with a population of about 30,000 people on...