Cefalu, where we arrived on New Year's Eve, turned out to be a great place to celebrate the turn of the quarter-century.

After dinner, and a bit of a walk through the illuminated streets, all abuzz with little groups of people making their way to and from various festivities, we headed for the square in front of the cathedral, where Kalavria were performing a stompily infectious kind of music, with guitars, squeezeboxes, drums, saxophone, and vocals.

There must have been thousands in the square by the lead-up to midnight. But the atmosphere was awesome. Young and old, everyone relaxed and happy, no-one overdoing anything. A bit of a contrast to the somewhat anarchic celebration in Bar last year...

Kalavria took us very jollily almost up to the countdown. Some official decided it was time for a speech, but the crowd had no intention of missing the moment, and drowned him out with their numbers: Cinque, quattro, tre, due, UNO!!

And just like that, it was 2025.






Kalavria did another song, and then, as a DJ kind of act came on to replace them, we decided it was time to go home to bed.

Yesterday morning, New Year's Day, we were fairly late out of the blocks, and ended up joining the vast crowds swamping the promenade to start the year with fresh air, sunshine, and views of the sea:






After that, all we needed to do was grab a couple of coffees and cannoli (a snip at EUR 4 the lot), and head for home.

On New Year's Day, I like to sort out my computer. Yes, I know that's very nerdy. But it's kind of satisfying to start gearing up for the year ahead. So I set up a brand new 2025 master-folder, deleted a year's worth of emails, and started to bring some order into the chaos of my To Read list (still lots of work to do there...).

I'm not making any resolutions. I looked back at last year's, and found that of the six I'd written down, I'd (kind of) achieved one...

I totally loved, however, this little meditation by Maria Popova, called Some Blessings To Begin With. It's all beautiful. Read it. But this bit is particularly poignant:

"Bless the last aspen leaf, waving at the tip of the skeletal branch like a bright yellow flag of resistance to gravity and time, beckoning an allegiance to life...

"Bless time, for how despite all its blessed and blessing indifference, it gave the aspen leaf that little extra bit to blaze and gave us, each and every one of us alive, this symphonic interlude between the eternal silence of not yet and never again."

Anyway, today. Time to look in a bit more detail at this amazing place we're currently living in. It was founded around the 4th century BCE by the Greeks (the name Cefalu apparently comes from the Greek kephaloidion, and refers to that girt big head-shaped lump of rock that looms over everything). Like everywhere in Sicily, it seems, it has witnessed a lot of action: Arabs, Normans, Aleister Crowley... (I'm not putting him on the same footing, just noting that little towns never know who's going to happen along.)

Cefalu is a higgledy-piggledy delight of lanes, arches, squares, and impossible topography:








It also does a great line in balconies:





The Cathedral, founded by King Roger II of Altavilla in 1131, and never actually completed, is absolutely superb (and all the nicer for not being subjected to the queues that prevailed everywhere in Palermo):









And, of course, every walk ends back by the sea:




It's busy here at the moment, but not unmanageably so. I've a feeling that everywhere in Sicily will continue busy until Monday 6 (Epiphany) rounds out the holiday season. After that, we'll see...