He did it!  Allen finished his first screenplay and is registering it and entering it in contests as we type!  We celebrated with a little gelato and vino rosso at a sidewalk cafe at about 11 pm, watching the throngs of Catanese pass by, and then spent the entire night swatting away mosquitoes.  I swear, they must have sent out a blast fax to all mosquitoes in the western Mediterranean to please descend upon Room 101 in the Hotel Savona, where they can siphon off all of Allen's blood.  Must have had something to do with the fact that his screenplay is about a vampire!

Hopefully at one point in the near future above this entry you will see a photo of the one thing we never expected to see here in Sicily: SNOW!  Yes, the very thing we ran away from, the one thing I tell people I wouldn't shed a tear if I never saw again...but I guess that's what we get for climbing Mt. Etna in the wintertime.  Well, "climb" would be an overstatement; we sat fat and warm and happy in the back of an SUV (one of the few such vehicles we have seen anywhere in Italy).  Our guide, Sebastiano, took us to fields where new and old lava flows (most recently 2002) had blackened the landscape, houses that had just evaded the lava's grip, and one that was almost entirely swallowed up by it.  We also explored a lava cave, which is formed when the top of the lava hardens into a crust and molten lava inside the "tube" cools and settles.  It was eerily reminiscent of a very, very bad American movie we watched in Mexico, called The Descent, where a bunch of athletic and overconfident young women lower themselves into an unexplored cave and get eaten by monsters.  We wore helmets (which cracked with frightening frequency against the walls and roof), carried industrial-strength flashlights strapped to bags around our shoulders (Allen's battery went out so we had to share), and spied half a dozen bats, unfazed by our lights, but alas, no man-eating monsters.  Overall the trip was anticlimactic, in every sense of the word: we couldn't go all the way to the top and peer in, and there were no molten lava fields at this time (as opposed to a few months ago) to visit.  Instead, half of Catania had brought their sleds and plastic mats and were sliding down into snow-filled craters formed from spent volcano vents.  On the ride home, Sebastiano put on a DVD of what the volcano looks like when it actually explodes...  

We're planning to stay here in Catania two more days, on one of which we will take a day trip by train to Taormina, a seaside resort.   On Wednesday, we plan to leave for Siracusa, and spend a couple of nights there.  You'd think that after a year of private lessons and books and tapes and CD's, this wouldn't seem such a victory, but today I made a hotel reservation by phone, all in Italian - and saved 30 euros a night over what it would have cost over the internet.  We've found surprisingly few people here who speak English, so we are constantly being put to the test, and these pathetic little victories are all that stands between me and my now recurring nightmare : I have been sent to a group home for the mentally retarded because I can't understand what people are saying to me.