Panorama Photo

The first time that I cycled through Gangi, in the far interior of Sicily, was in far 1996. I just skirted the village, which looked out quite abandoned at the time, stopping only at the fountain along the SS120 (the fountain lies where one sees the moving light below the Etna), There I met a former truck driver, and speaking with him I discovered that he knew perfectly every village of my valley, namely, the Valsugana. Indeed, he had worked 20 years for an industry 5 km from my home.
In 2020 I found a completely different Gangi, completely restored in the format of "the perfect village", maybe even too perfect to be true, and only for the particular situation it was not full of tourists.
This is what one sees at dawn, with the Etna in the background.
Every village in internal Sicily, in order to be stable, had to be built on firm rock. The other village visible in the distance below the volcano is Troina, at 1120 m the highest of the incredible series that one encounters on the unique SS120, the road joining Termini Imerese, on the northern coast, to Fiumefreddo di Sicilia, below the Alcantara gorge (Al-qantara being Arabic for "fiume freddo", namely, "cold river"), which in turn lies below the Etna or Mongibello, Mons-Jebel being half Latin, half Arabic, the "Mountain-Mountain".