Yesterday evening we wanted to try the pizza in Villalba, 20 minutes from Case Vecchie. Villalba is a cute little village with oleander trees and ficus magnolia along the edge of the main road, a pretty ancient church and lots of old men sitting on chairs outside the coffeeshops, chatting and staring at you since you are a foreigner (even though you arrive from only 20 minutes away!).
We wanted to have a pizza, but the Chalet pizza restaurant was closed (I wonder why in Italy pizza is always associated with Switzerland, so even if it is not named chalet, the furniture is always in a sort of Tyrol style!).
On our way back, we bumped into a man, Michele Valenza, who was working on a marble sculpture. My friends Kate and Guy had told me about this incredible sculpture lost in the middle of Sicily, so we stopped and here is his story: He normally works for the Comune, but has always loved doing sculpture which he does in his time off. Several years ago, from some mysterious connection, he was invited to Seoul. He organized a container of 50 sculptures to bring, spending at the time eight million liras. He was terrorized because he didn’t really know what he was going to find and he had spent all of his money on that trip. If things went wrong, he said, he didn’t have the money to come back. Luckily for him things went well and he sold all of his works of art. Now he is a well-known sculptor, and his next plan is to go to Russia for a month to sculpt a Polifemo head two metres high!
At Case Vecchie, the hot and dry summer winds have arrived. In some days one can feel the Sahara winds getting very close in this part of the country! The landscape is now golden, and most of the hay has been cut and collected in beautiful rounds which dot the surrounding fields. The wheat is nearly ready, and the peasants are waiting for it to be bright gold before harvesting. So now there is an ocean of golden wheat waving into the wind. Pompeo is intensively working on the vegetable garden, and the first eggplants and peppers and zucchini are coming out. I am anxiously waiting for the various tomatoes to be ready—Americans, Sicilians, a sort of potpourri of different tomato nationalities!
Yesterday we went to Polizzi Generosa, which is, as the name tells us, a “generous” city—there is so much to see. If you want to see inside the churches, you need either a little luck or to know someone in town. Fortunately, I had the phone number of the parroco of the cathedral, so with Kathy and Richard we got to see the incredible masterpiece painted apparently by Memling which arrived in Polizzi at the beginning of the 19th century. That was quite a treat, but the church also hides incredible treasures like the “urna”, a fabulous silver box where the body of San Gandolfo, the saint patron of Polizzi is kept. 
