In pursuit of perfezione

Ostuni is very easy to visit by motorhome. In Italy this is rare, either access roads are asphalted donkey tracks, drivers consumed by murderous intent or you are squeezed into crowded sostas with small pitches among gnarled olive trees with low branches designed to dint any vehicle larger than a Fiat 500. With Ostuni it was easi-peasy all the way. We found an expansive, perfectly flat public car park next to the whitewashed town's ancient walls. It  only cost €5.00 to sleep overnight. 

We had a plan, we always do and as ever it didn't quite work out. Aside from appreciating the picturesque town the main reason for being here was to eat a sandwich. We are not talking about something prepackaged and half frozen like you get in M&S Food, what we were eagerly anticipating was a World Heritage standard sarnie - a Puglian 'puccia. After some considerable time spent on TripAdvisor and Google map's reviews we concluded that Ostuni's top-notch puccia place was a hipsterish looking establishment called Monna Lisa Caffè.

We knew it was up a side street near the town hall, to the right of a big column.

 It took some finding. It was as hipsterish in reality as its website promised. On a narrow street, opposite a dark doorway we found a clutch of low tables with even lower cushioned stools, each table had a dog-eared book on it, a nice touch I felt, to feed the mind as well as the body. We sat down. Eventually a slender individual with a vague expression appeared out of the shadowy doorway and handed us the cocktail menu (the place's cocktails are as well reviewed as its pucce). When we asked for the food menu we were advised that the kitchen did not open for another half an hour. Too long, we were starving, the only thing we had eaten all day was a sad croissant in the Grimaldi ferry cafeteria at about 7.30am. 

We were just going to have to wing it so far as choosing our pucci place. In the piazza next to Colonna di Sant'Oronzo there was plenty of choice, at random we settled on 'Drogheria Pugliese'.

How do you choose? All the pucce seemed equally delicious. In the end with or without chilli peppers was the decider, I'm avoiding chilli as it seems to react badly with my meds, Gill, all things being equal, leans towards 'a bit of heat'.

I went for 'Fogliarella', Gill chose 'Follifuoco' and we shared a bowl of fries with a mayonnaise dip. Both pucci were delicious, sparking off a conversation on the importance of 'squidge'. The quality should be showcased we agreed, imagining some kind of Christmas cookbook sensation celebrating squidgy dishes from across the globe. 

Noon is definitely very early for us so far as beer o'clock is concerned , but hey, it was our first morning in Puglia, it would have been ill-mannered to ignore the local craft beer on offer. They were just right.

Pucci ticked off, next we went in search of the perfect espresso macchiata. Ostuni's historic centre looks like a meringue, a white conical concoction plopped atop a steep hill. The narrow streets are a maze, but you know if you keep heading upwards you will reach the pinnacle eventually, occupied as you might expect by Cattedrale Santa Maria Assunta. 

The place is something of a tourist trap, particularly lower slopes where the streets are full of crappy gift shops, so many we failed to find anywhere to have a coffee. We struggled onwards, our early start, the uneven pavements and steep hills making it hard going. Further up was less frequented, more of a residential area, especially the narrow lanes to the rear of the cathedral. We got lost and never did find the front of it.

However, at the far end of a narrow alley we did stumble across a café. The upper streets of the centro storico seem to be some kind of conservation area with minimal signage allowed and no modern street furniture. 

Bar Perso side stepped the regulations by affixing a sign on the wall facing the panoramic view from its tiny terrace, not great as a marketing ploy, attractive only to pigeons. However, the way the place maximised the commercial potential of the adjacent narrow alley was more enterprising, no tables and chairs, instead a dozen or more grey bean bags strewn long the cobblestones and down the steps.

We headed for the bar stools on the small terrace. The bar was top was simple, a bare plank fixed to the stone parapet covered in bright tiles decorated with modernist inspired line drawings, a kind of Picasso-lite.

Our two espresso macchiata arrived in cups equally stylish, you got the sense it was all carefully curated, the entire place was very cool. The vista was not cool at all, it was stupendous, a forest of olive trees stretching all the way to the deep blue Adriatic, a very humanised landscape, profoundly inhabited for at least three millennia.

Bar Perso was one of those places where we look at each other, but no longer need to say 'its really civilised here'. Because we know. We asked for the bill, €4 00 for two coffees, very civilised and inexpensive - perfezione?

Not quite, we were still a few steps away from perfection. We required delicious gelato. As you probably guessed we had already undertaken a thorough gelateria audit before we arrived in Ostuni. After some deliberation we had concluded that Cremeria alla Scala was the most promising, all we had to do was find it. Google maps does not cope well with hilly places, if somewhere is 50m distant horizontally but 30 metres away vertically the app goes into 'does not compute' mode. We had no option, we had to rely on common sense, always a last resort - 'Cremeria alla Scala', scala means 'steps', here's some steps, I wonder if the cremeria is at the bottom of them... Of course it was.

And did the place deserve its 4.6, rating? Of course it did, higher even... perfezione!

 

 

Prog Rock at dawn

As the afternoon wore on the thunder storms and downpours diminished, to the point where there was a blue sky interlude long enough to allow us to pedal back towards Igoumenitsa using the half built  bike track. 

It's a rare thing in Greece, any provision for cyclists, so even unfinished projects seem remarkable.

It was attractive ride, raising our spirits a little. Being grounded in Camping Drepano for three days is almost guaranteed to make you grumpy. The unkempt, ramshackle aspects of the place begin to become irritating, nothing terrible, just a slow agglomeration of minor annoyances - the temperature of the showers fluctuates depending upon how many people use them at the same time, the plumbing in the washing up place is so disfunctional that your waste water bubbles up in the next door sink as you empty your bowl. These are not in themselves major issues, but they join all the other 'for heaven's sake' moment.

The improvement in the weather meant we could cook outside. We needed to grill the chicken we had in the fridge so it would not spoil when we have to turn off the gas during tomorrow night's crossing to Brindisi. Out came the Cadac, the smell of grilling chicken attracted a dozen or so of the site's feral cats who gathered in the dusk spookily. just staring or padding about, the two big lanky black ones resembling miniature panthers. Suddenly they scattered as one of the site's stray dogs decided to investigate what was cooking. She was huge, like a cross between Fozzy Bear and a St Bernard, but a gentle giant who after a few minutes resigned herself to the fact she was not going get a scrap. She flopped down, but continued to regard me out the corner of her eye disconsolately.

In between the downpours we tried to dry our laundry by placing the clothes horse underneath the wind-out awning. It kind of worked, now we had a heap of damp clothes rather than a mountain of soaking wet ones. Maybe they would dry in the morning, with our ferry due to depart at 1am on Friday we were in no hurry to leave the campsite early on Thursday. Aside from the laundry, splash back from the heavy downpours had coated our outdoor furniture and groundsheet in a thin layer of sticky mud. We had stuff to do but no need to make an early start.

Which made waking up a first light very annoying. The volume of the area's ambient hum seemed to have tripled, then a scops owl started to beep, a dog barked in the distance, more of a soundtrack than a dawn chorus, like a track from 'Animals' which didn't quite make the final cut. I lay back expecting the intro. to be interrupted  by a series of spacey sustained notes, or a spooky minor diminished seventh played by a stout balding fellow in a black tee on a battered black strat. I thought I was simply wiling away a moment of insomnia, until I discovered later that Pink Floyd were planning to light-up Battersea Power Station at the weekend to mark a reissue of Animals. My prog rock dawn wasn't imagined, I was having a premonition!

The rest of the day was comparatively mundane. We spent the morning 'de-mudifying' the van. Early afternoon we headed to Lidl, which was never going to be uplifting. However, we did have a good chat with a young English couple who had just arrived from Albania in their venerable Fiat panel van self build. 

They truly were digital nomads, the woman explained that she had not had a permanent address for the past eight years, and now she and her partner lived in their van permanently. Something of a challenge during the recent heat wave as they had converted it with anonymity and security in mind with big roof lights but no side windows. We chatted about places we'd both visited, everyone loves New Zealand it seems! They aimed to get from Igoumenitsa to the Turkish border in one hop, possible I guess given the new motorway from here to Thessaloniki. The pair were running short of 'Schengen days' and planned to spend three months in Turkey to 'reset the visa'. I admired their spirit and single-mindesness. It must have taken determination to stick to their vegan principles during their three weeks in Albania; they fell into the Lidl vegetable aisle as if they'd been lost in the Sahara then discovered an oasis..

It was good to have an easy going chat, I think people have been quite standoffish this trip. I am not a 'people person' particularly, but I am not completely unsociable. WhatsApp helps as it means we can keep in touch with the kids on an ad-hoc basis and at least chat with someone other than each other from time to time. Otherwise we revert to a kind of gibberish only spoken by us - 'Pellian' - consisting of phatic grunts, inane neologisms and lame in-jokes.

It was still mid-afternoon and we had no need to present ourselves at the port much before 10pm. I suppose we could have found a parking place in the town and visited the archeological museum or maybe driven to see the ruined amphitheatre a few kilometres away, but our enthusiasm seemed to have wained. Instead we drove back towards the lagoons to the beach parking beyond the campsite and stared at the view. 

Gill did some knitting, I wrote the first couple of paragraphs of this post on the notes app. This prompted a somewhat rambling discussion about which version of 'Echoes' was the best, the original on 'Meddle', 'Live at Pompeii' or Gilmour's 'Live in Gdansk'. All very nerdy! Our conclusion was the Gdansk version due to the exceptional interplay between Gilmour and Wright;  but it's not perfect, I insisted, Dave Mason is missing. The way he drums a tad behind the beat gives an edge to Pink Floyd's performances, like Charlie Watts did for the Rolling Stones. 

A litter strewn beach backed by magnificent Eucalyptus, a rambling conversation about music trivia, the silvery glittering sea, a ferry to catch later, time passing slowly, pointless moment by pointless moment - there is something strangely liberating in all of this, how if you travel long enough the episodic acquires significance. Time becomes your significant other.

We decided to drive to the port while it was still light. It proved to be a smart move. Mediterranean ports are not disorganised, they have been shipping people and goods about for more than three millennia; perhaps its this long history which means they don't deem it necessary to explain the obvious, like where to check-in or even bother with an entrance sign.

Our previous experience in Brindisi taught us that we needed to check-in at the Grimaldi desk in the terminal to get our boarding cards. Rather than trust that we would find a parking space at the terminal we stopped in some waste ground between the 'Corfu port' and the 'International Port' and I hopped out to explore on foot. All the parking directly in front of the port was occupied by motorhomes, some had been there a while with tables and chairs next to them and a sun lounger or two on the nearby grass, the big visitor car park to the left of the terminal was empty apart from a few abandoned lorry trailers, so we headed there.

There were only half a dozen people queuing at the Grimaldi desk, each person seemed to have a complicated problem so it took about quarter of an hour before it was our turn. With us it took no time at all, our passports were checked cursorily and we were handed two boarding cards with our cabin numbers on and a Grimaldi bumper sticker with the numbers 16 and 22.30 scribbled on the back to remind us of the correct ro-ro dock and the time to present ourselves. 

As evening approached we decided to head through security and into the docks. We decided it would be easier to find where we needed to queue before nightfall. However, we had a problem, the way into the visitor car park was was well signed but the way out was closed off with a barrier. The only way out seemed to be to ignore the no entry signs and drive the wrong way through the entrance. By the time we came to depart there was a small gaggle of bewildered drivers from northern climes all tussling with the same dilemma. The dock security gates were next to us, in a rare outbreak of assertiveness I wandered across and posed the question to the security guys, "How do I get out?" The Greek solution to my obvious question was simple, ignore the no entry signs, so I did, followed closely by four Dutch motorcyclists and a German hot-hatch. Momentarily I had seized the initiative, not a quality I am know for and certainly not something I am going to make a habit of.

A Greek primary school arithmetic problem: if it takes two and half hours to load a ferry and the same amount of time to unload it, how long will it take to complete the operation. The answer is three hours, this apparent arithmetical impossibility was achieved by having scores of large trucks entering the ferry (some forwards others reversing) on the left side of the stern ramp, at the same time as trucks exited the vessel in a similar haphazard manner on the right side of the same ramp. This is because Grimaldi's ships are more like big floating multistorey car parks rather than conventional ro-ro ferries, the upper vehicle decks able to accommodate big articulated trucks. They are impressive but tricky to load and unload.

The upshot of all this resulted in us departing at 1.45am, three-quarters of an hour late. By the time we had queued for towels and bedding it was well after two in the morning before we settled down. The cabins were small and the bunks uncomfortable.

At 7.30am on the dot a voice on the tannoy announced it was time to vacate our cabin. Ten minutes later cleaners were hammering on doors to chivvy people up. Outrageous considering we were not due to dock in Brindisi until nine, and a complete rip-off given that we were charged €200 for an overnight cabin that we barely used.

Disembarkation was just as chaotic, a forty minute wait in a cramped, crowded corridor before the door to the vehicle deck was opened. 

Then I had to reverse the van down a steep ramp while an aggressive deckhand waved his arms about and shouted, 'quick, quick, quick!'  Grimaldi! Never again we promised ourselves, but they do cover some alluring routes, like Cagliari to Palermo, so....

It was good to be back in Italy. We were stopped at the security gate where a gaggle of bored looking officials were waiting to check if we had any Albanians spirited away in the garage. One guy popped his head around the habitation door. "You have beautiful little house," he commented. Italian charm, it's irresistible! 

Gill set the sat-nav for Ostuni, we had a long anticipated and we'll deserved lunchtime appointment with a Puglian sandwich and a gelato.

The mysterious hum

We did not expect Camping Drepano, the nearest campsite to Igoumenitsa ferry port, to be up to much. We weren't disappointed. Google reviews do a bull-shit bingo style summary of popular words used to describe places. 

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I have no idea why Peggy Schwimd gave it five stars, the site is not terrible, but it's very scruffy. 

However, none of the reviews mention the site's most striking and irritating quality - the mysterious background hum that pervades the place day and night. At first I thought it might be the distant rumble of marine diesels as numerous ferries chug past, but the sound is too persistent for that and more of a whine than a throb. It had to be from an industrial plant. When Gill went to reception to ask about laundry arrangements she also enquired about the hum. Apparently it emanates from a plastic recycling plant a couple of kilometres away. There is a certain irony in this, as Greece is the least organised place we've ever visited regarding recycling arrangements, to the point where we were carrying two big bin bags of glass, cardboard, tin and plastic items in the rear garage in the hope of finding skips to put them in. We didn't. Judging by the state of the verges most of it seems to get tossed out of car windows.  

Camping Drapano is located on a thin spit  surrounded by lagoons which form the southern edge of the delta of the river Thyamis. The area is sparsely populated but criss-crossed with tracks and minor roads. Soon after we arrived we unloaded the bikes and set off to explore them. 

The ride was cut short when it began to drizzle, the first rain of the trip. We have had over a month of hot dry weather, that's tantamount to a drought, so I guess a bit of rain will be welcomed by the locals. 

However we didn't get a bit of rain. An hour or so after we got back within a few seconds of each other our phones both  gave off a loud fire alarm type sound. This was triggered by an emergency signal from Greek met. office warning of a 'hazardous weather event'. I think this must have used our phone's emergency frequency, not something we've come across before, but maybe more common in areas prone to tropical type storms or other general emergencies like volcanic eruptions or tsunamis. It gave us a bit of a turn.

What happened was not a 'weather bomb' but 12 hours of heavy rain, some of it torrential. I was glad we had moved off the terraced, steep sites we had been on previously, they could have been tricky in a downpour. The aftermath here resulted in nothing more than droopy trees and big puddles.

 

Spectacular cloud formations piled up around the mountain tops.

The site itself now looked bedraggled as well as unkempt.

As the storm cleared the pallid sun set  quietly over the misty hills of Corfu. It brought people out of their vans clutching phones; nobody seems to carry a camera these days.

Next day, another message from local media dropped into my phone reporting that schools had been closed yesterday in Corfu. 

The article was illustrated with a photo of a road covered by about 3cms of rainwater. The headline 'Floods in Corfu' was pushing it, really if you read the piece what it actually reported was the fact the threatened cyclone had not materialised.

It remains unsettled though, bright periods interspersed with darker, rumbles of thunder drowning out the ambient hum from the recycling plant. Regular sharp downpours have put the kibosh on any plans we had for cycling into Igoumenitsa and visiting the archeological museum. Instead I have spent the afternoon interrogating Trip Advisor and Google Maps seeking cool places for lunch in Ostuni, Lecce and Otranto. There are many.

"Are we 'Greeked' out'?" Gill enquired. I glanced out of the window, the rain coming down in sheets; I watched a bedraggled cat, one of the many feral moggies plaguing the site, crawl under a tattered tarpaulin, the campsite handyman drove past in his rusting Isuzu 4x4, it sounded as if the exhaust had dropped some years ago. "Yes, probably," I half assented. Then I read the description of the 'elevated' pizzas on offer in 'UEMÈ' in Lecce.

"No, it's definitely time for Puglia", I asserted, "I am 'Greeked out'."

 

 

Back the way we came, again

I don't like re-tracing our steps, it doesn't fit with the spirit of our project, to go places we haven't been before. I take Gill's point that the same road going in the opposite direction is tantamount to making different journey; nevertheless it remains the novel prospect of familiar territory. 

Does observing somewhere from another angle really make it new? I think this is a philosophical question rather than a geographical one!

Anyway, whatever philosophical stance we  might adopt, geographically, once again we are safely esconsced in the Plateria Camperstop. As I connected the Ehu I noticed we were parked in exactly the same slot as we had been ten days ago. I made a conscious to embrace anew the spirit of adventure by plugging us into the socket next to the one we had used before. 

A van arrived with Danish plates. They had driven through Poland, the Czech Republic, then south through the Balkans. How was Albania? I enquired. They were positive about it. They were on an open ended trip, planning to fly home from time to time. I gave them the details of Camping Scarebeo in Sicily and the airport parking near Pisa where we stored the van in 2015/6. It's impossible for me to avoid going into full scale outraged re-moaner mode every time I recall just how our freedom to roam has been curtailed.

We decided to stay one night at the camper park before moving to Camping Elena about 2 Kms down the road. We needed a Lidl and this meant driving into Igoumetsita before settling down in a site for a few days. Sadly, we have got to the stage where we have no idea which day of the week it is.  Friday we discovered, and in Greece the weekends seems to involve celebrations into the small hours - once again from a nearby restaurant Greek folk music until 2.30am. This time it was not death by a 1000 bouzoukis but torture by some sort of primitive woodwind instrument full of eastern promise. It was very loud very fast with more of a pan-Balkan vibe than Hellenic. Indeed if it had been wafting through the airwaves rather than from the Italian restaurant next door you might have  identified the radio station as Iranian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Lebanese, or Moroccan. So much of the traditional music of Europe and the near East has a common Eurasian root, probably because back in the mists of time we all migrated from Africa via Turkmenistan.

On our previous visit to Plataria we were a little tardy getting to the bakery and devastated to discover that by noon they had run out of cheese and spinach pies. This was definitely a matter we needed to put right, so we unloaded the bikes and pedalled along to the village. There was hardly a soul about. We concluded that the entire community must be sleeping off the after effects of last night's Balkan hooley. This did not explain why the two pies we bought at 10.45am were the last in the shop. Maybe half the people from last night's shenanigans piled back to Yanni's to make it an all nighter, then were struck by the post ouzo munchies at 7.00am, and forming an orderly queue outside the bakery before it opened almost cleaned it out of spinach and feta pies.

Whatever the reason, we were delighted we managed to snaffle the last two. We found a bench facing the beach and consumed our pies thoughtfully while watching the ferry from Igoumetsita slowly chug its way towards Lefkimmi across a glassy sea. 

Greeks today no longer can claim to be  paramount in art, architecture or philosophy, but they are still top dog so far as cheese pies are concerned, we agreed.

Stopping for brunch in Plataria ensured we drove through Igoumetsita at exactly the same time as most of the population headed out for a pre-lunch 'tête-à-tête' in one of the scores of cafés lining the seafront. Many diners appeared consumed by suicidal ideation, leaping in front of a British motorhome their preferred way to end it all. Our arrival also coincided with the regional finals in Greece's most popular emerging sport - 'haphazard parking'. I think we spotted a few potential future Olympic champions on our way to Lidl. We made it, stressed but unscathed as ever. There were a few other vans in the car park, A Toyota Hilux de-mountable, a Landover Defender conversion as well as the usual cute VW camper and  German coach builds more or less identical to ours. The Lidl car parks of southern Europe - definitely a moho tribal gathering place. 

We retraced our steps, yet again avoiding crowds of pedestrians tired of life, slaloming through randomly parked cars, past the port, up the pot-holed hill, back towards Plataria. Just before we reached the turn-off for Camping Elena we happened upon a petrol station with cheap diesel. At €1.79 per litre it's as cheap as we've seen in weeks, so we topped up. "That should get us north of Rome", I speculated.

Arrival at Camping Elena is memorable for three reasons. The first is entirely predictable, the approach to the place is terrifying, a steep slope - at least a 25% decline, hairpin bends, overhanging olive branches, jutting dry-stone walls, the usual thing. The second reason is a tad surprising, but not entirely unexpected, given the first; the layout of the site was just as vertiginous and the roads as narrow and hazardous as the way down to the site. The third memorable aspect was entirely unpredictable, the guy who runs the place is a dead ringer for Nick Cave.  

Clearly Nick understood the challenges posed by the layout of his site for the driver of a 7m van, he directed us personally into a particularly tricky pitch on a hairpin bend, ensuring we were safely tucked into our space with a sea view that would command the premium rate. Who is going to argue? I was happy simply to arrive in one piece.

Camping Elena is basically the same proposition as Camping Kalami which can't be more than 2km to the north - both steeply terraced sites with restaurants and a narrow shingle beach offering excellent swimming in the sheltered bay. We used both, I think I preferred Kalami because the the beach is a bit wider and the facilities more modern. It also seemed to have a more mixed group of campers. German tourists predominate in both, but Elena is like the Bundersrepublic de-camped to Greece, I estimate 90% of the clientele were German speaking, which is ok, just a bit weird, to visit Greece but only mix with Germans.

In this respect our particular pitch proved to be Elena's most multi-cultural spot, next to a couple of tiny pitches reserved for small tents. Over three days they were occupied by an Albanian couple who we rarely saw, a skeletally thin backpacker with dreadlocks, a pair of Polish bikers on a roadtrip and a single woman from Switzerland who seemed to be sleeping in her car. They were all under thirty and despite differences in culture, dress, demeanor, girth and behaviour they had one thing in common, they all had a hammock, even the backpacker and the girl sleeping in her car. I decided it was a millennial defining thing, have hammock, will travel.

The things I will remember about our stay here...

It was a fabulous place for a swim, no, that is not me trying to swim in a fedora..

The sunsets over Corfu were spectacular...

The place sold their own olive oil -  in re-used plastic water bottles, a sure sign of zero km produce...

It's the third place we have stayed over the years with a moveable grey water drain... Greece 2, Sweden 1.

And the weather's changed, right on cue - the equinox, a few degrees cooler - in the twenties not the thirties,  one morning we woke to temperatures in the low teens. It felt chilly. How will we cope with a the Pennines in November? 

House of the dead, or just a house?

I liked the morning view from our door at Camping Nissos. The blue sea sparking saying, "Time for a swim!" It was going to be difficult to leave.

Then this happened.

The occupant of the Campervan had every right to park in the pitch next to us. However, being German Swiss he was culturally naïve; he simply did not understand that the English don't just look at the view, they own it, because along with gravity, the steam engine, hydraulics, the mini-skirt and Marmite, 'The View' is an English invention. So to block an Englishman's view is not merely impolite, it's tantamount to declaring war. I decided he was surly, Gill judged him 'a bit creepy'. That was it, we had no option - we left immediately.

Our ferry to Brindisi is in a week's time. There is still some debate about quite what we will do and where we might stay, but we are going to start drifting northwards taking baby steps to Igoumetsita, which is less than 70kms away. 

Unlike our trip to the Peloponnese in 2015, the Ionian coast is not a place which bristles with ancient ruins. However, one archeological site caught my eye on the way down here, but we didn't have time to stop. The Acheron Nekromanteion is thought to be a place of pilgrimage associated with the cult of Persephone. On the other hand it might all be wishful thinking. Whichever the case, as we were passing the place again we decided to take a look.

In Greek myth the river Acheron was regarded as one of the entrances to the underworld, the kingdom of the dead ruled by Hades. So it is unsurprising that a sanctuary dedicated to Persephone, Hades' wife, would be located here, but it is difficult to prove its exact location.

For a long time archeology had a tail wagging the dog problem in so much as there was a tendency to view its findings as a kind of validation of written history or legend. Nineteenth century archeologists searched for Troy, or when they found a golden death mask at a tomb at Mycenae declared it to be Agamemnon's, even though there is no evidence that such a person existed outside of the Iliad. It's the same thing with Arthurian sites in the West Country - Tintagel, Camelot, really?

The remains of the Nekromanteion has a similar issue. The place is presented on the information boards and downloadable PDF guide. as a late Hellenistic sanctuary dedicated to Persephone - so around 100BCE probably.

So visitors today are invited to see the suite of rooms as they enter the ruins as lodgings for ancient pilgrims.

Next comes a the zigzag corridor, labelled as a 'labyrinth', then beyond, the sanctuary itself where adherents could commune with the spirits of the dead.

There's a spooky cellar beneath which may have been an earlier sanctuary.

More recent research has cast doubt on all of this, citing the dearth of figurines and other religious items unearthed during the dig as evidence that the place had a more mundane purpose and was in fact a large fortified farmhouse.

Does this matter? It is still a very beautiful place overlooking the mythical river Acheron. The odd awkward fact is not going to stop people romanticising it. For example, a sign off the main road just before you get to the turn-off to the sanctuary directs the visitor to Odysseus's Landing. This is because in the Odyssey Homer's hero  is sent to consult the ghost of the prophet Tiresias and in a chilling scene travels to underworld and communes with the spirits of the fallen heroes of Troy, then meets his long deceased mother. So the story goes - Odysseus went to the underworld, it's entry point is the river Acheron, so he must have landed near here. It's like visiting Nottingham and expecting to bump into the sheriff.

What I love about ancient sites is not so much what makes them famous, more the sense that the place has been peopled for millennia. Here, at some point a Byzantine church was built on top of the remains of the Hellenistic sanctuary, or farmhouse depending on which archeologist you believe. 

The massive jigsaw-like stonework from Classical era contrasts with the Byzantine mason's work, built in the Eighteenth century, but looking medieval.

By limiting the Greek part of the trip to the area between Igoumetsita and Lefkada we have missed out on some archeological sites, perhaps I regret that, but we do get to spend more time in Puglia. Everything is a compromise, Greek remains versus Italian cooking, not so much heart over head, more stomach over brain.