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A woman in Sicily faced a massive fine for illegal parking when a police officer accidentally noted the year 208 instead of 2008:
Police in Sicily issued a whopping 32,000 euros ($44,500) fine for an illegally parked car after totting up 2,000 years of interest by mistake, Italy’s Repubblica newspaper said Wednesday.
The interest due was calculated from the year 208 A.D. after a policeman dated the fine back to the year 208 instead of 2008.
The lady called in a favor from the Emperor (pictured) and had the fine waived.
Link -via The Agitator | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The last time we checked in with Michael Powell and Juergen Horn at For 91 Days, they were preparing to leave Bolivia and move to Palermo, Italy. Of course, part of soaking up a culture is the wonderful food in the different places they’ve been. It turns out that the people of Sicily love fried food.
We’ve already sampled an unhealthy share of fried Sicilian delicacies, and plan on eating a lot more. The Ballaró Market, south of the Cathedral, is an excellent place to sample some cheap grub. We tried panelle, which are chickpea fritters thought to be Arabic in origin, and crocchè: mashed potatoes and eggs covered in breadcrumbs. But my favorite was perhaps the rascature, a dish which literally translates into “scrapes”. These oddly shaped balls are a mixture of the panelle and crocchè, and whatever else can be scraped off the bottom of the cooking pan.
The thought of eating the fried “scrapes” from a little stall in a street market shouldn’t be appetizing, but my stomach grumbles as I type. I wants them rascatures, and I wants them NOW!
Although you can’t actually taste them, you can read about and see pictures of the different dishes at their blog. Link
For a small fee, you can tour the underground catacombs of the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, Sicily, where 2,000 well-dressed but decaying bodies, mostly from the 19th c., are on display. Nobody knows exactly why they have been preserved.
From the February issue of National Geographic:
“Their jaws hang open in silent yowls, rotting teeth grin with menace, eye sockets stare bleakly, shreds of hard skin cling to shrunken cheeks and arthritic knuckles. These people are mostly small, their arms crossed as they sag against the wire and nails that hold them upright, their heads lolling on shoulders, bodies slowly collapsing with the effort of imitating a past life…”
