Yesterday The Significant Other and I sat on our small front balcony in the gentle October sunshine as the sun began to stripe the colours of sunset across the sky. Gazing at the sea due North, we noticed something we never have before: to the right of the scattered cargo ships which seemed to balance precariously on the far horizon, we spied land.
We knew that Sicily can be seen from Gozo on a clear day – and a smoking Mount Etna too if you have the lens, patience and talent of my friend, top photographer Daniel Cilia whose photo (above) I am using with his permission (well, I’ve asked. If there’s a photo of pure blue sea above you’ll know he was reticent!). However we’d never spotted it before and rushed for the binoculars. Scattered along this southern edge of Italy we could see several towns and a quick google-map search suggests we’re looking at a city called Gela. Surely Gela (which in Italian means cold/freezes) is the home of gelato? For an ice-cream fanatic, it seemed too good to be true, that I can spy such a momentous place from my balcony. And it was, too good to be true that is! According to Wikkipedia, gelato in its modern form, whilst credited to an Italian chef Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli in the late 1600s, was first invented in his Parisien “Café Procope”.
Either way, it matters little to my tastebuds: the heavenly ice-cream here on Gozo is surely the food of the Gods, a cool stretch away from the threat of molten magna. Best enjoyed in Xlendi, there’a a range of flavours worthy of worship (the carrot cake flavour is beyond divine) and the scoop size is as consistently phenomenal as Daniel’s photos.
