A Sicilian Easter Weekend

Easter has always been a holiday I celebrated with big family meals, Easter egg hunts, and attending church, so I knew this year it would be hard to celebrate this holiday away from home. Because my friends and I were all in the same home-sick boat we did our best to make our most of Easter in Italy by taking a little beach vacation to Sicily (the island the boot of Italy is kicking).

As soon as we landed I could tell we picked the perfect spot for our long weekend. Sicily is filled with all sorts of cliffs, hills, mountains and of course the beach. The coastline was absolutely beautiful and the Mediterranean was an incredible blue and turquoise.

The AirBnB we rented for the weekend was in the town of Mondello–a tiny beach town just north of Palermo. The apartment was just around the corner from the center of town, 3 blocks from the water, and had a view of the sea from the bedroom. Yea, it wasn’t too bad.

We ate lunch at a pizzeria just off the boardwalk and we were proud to say that we could definitely taste a difference between the Roman pizza we’re used to and the Sicilian pizza (I like Sicilian better). Then after a quick afternoon nap we laid on the beach until the sun sunk below the hills. We did a little grocery shopping at the alimentari for snacks and ingredients to make our own Easter dinner on Sunday. We ate dinner next door to the pizzeria we were at for lunch. My friends enjoyed some fresh seafood pasta, while I opted for pizza again. The rest of our evening was spent playing card games in our apartment.

After sleeping in on Sunday morning we inspected the goodies the Easter bunny left us (thanks for sending us sweets Mom and Dad!), put on our swimsuits (even if it wasn’t quite warm enough to swim) and made our way down to the beach. We laid in the sun for the next few hours, managed to get a little sun burnt, then ate some gelato.

We decided that the best way to make it feel like a holiday was to cook dinner ourselves. It wasn’t the ham and potatoes I usually get at home, but we cooked up some pretty good (and authentic) pasta. I think we pulled off a pretty good holiday weekend for ourselves. I was grateful to be in place where the only thing I wanted to see was the beach, rather than a bunch of museums and monuments.

Sicily on Easter made for one Buona Pasqua!