I wish we could report all kinds of exciting tales of Mount Etna and touring the city, but our colds have pretty much limited our impressions to Italian TV and nearby restaurants.  Our regard for the latter, as you would imagine, far exceeds that of the former!  There is only one TV channel in English in our hotel, which is CNN, and there are only so many times you can watch the same expose of Iraqi police training, so we've tried to watch programs that are understandable even if your Italian is as wretched as ours.  There's one that's like "World's Funniest Videos" or "Candid Camera", which is by far the best thing on.  (All the American movies are dubbed into Italian, and were bad enough when they were in English.)  It's the game shows and competitions that are just beyond belief.  We saw one that was like "Dancing with the Stars", only it was on ice, and the stars (who did not know how to ice skate at all) had to learn to do a pairs routine with a professional skater.  The routines were interesting and impressive enough, but the talking, talking, talking!!!! The judges would evaluate each one for about 30 minutes, arguing with the performers about how they executed each move.  There would be call in votes for who wins, but we finally gave up after about 3 hours (!), of which approximately 10 minutes was devoted to skating and the rest to fluff and analysis.  Also, the worst teams seemed to win, which is apparently why Italians don't have much faith in the electoral process.  It was obviously rigged.  Then we saw a quiz show, something like Jeopardy, in which -- now I swear to God, I am not making this up -- the way they pressed the buzzers was to urinate into a toilet.  They were all on stage in little commodes where you could see their heads and feet, swing doors covered the rest, and you could hear quite distinctly who "pressed the buzzer" first.  I'm not even going to describe what happened in Round 2.

Which doesn't make for a very good segue into the part about the restaurants, does it?  Suffice it to say there are dozens of wonderful little trattorie and osterie within easy walking distance, which have these amazing antipasto bars with 10-12 choices of fresh vegetables, each in a marvelously different preparation but all involving lots of olive oil and garlic.  Just one plate of this is enough for a meal.  They also have wonderful bean soups and many fish dishes, especially swordfish and shellfish.  The local specialty pasta sauce is called Norma, which is made with tomatoes and eggplant and is absolutely scrumptious.  It's the week of Festivale (like Mardi Gras) here, and instead of lots of public drunkenness and raucous behavior (well, we haven't been out late at night) we see all the children walking by in these adorable and elaborate costumes, just like Halloween - princesses, pirates, animals -- except no one is begging for candy.  They're just out strolling with their parents, eating gelato.  Since it's warm enough to sit outside at a cafe drinking espresso and watch people, we have found terrific free entertainment right out on the sidewalk!