Losing the bus and finding a museum. In Marsala

It happens to many to sit on the steps of the Mother Church and see the sign of the bar at the corner of the square in the distance. The prospect of drinking something cool with thirty degrees in the shade, the clouded mind and the desert walking burns an inertial mechanism that drives you to get up and walk.

Before you even realize you are sitting down to scroll through the menu, among which there are obviously - in the center of Piazza Lilibea - Florio cellars Marsala, Pantelleria passito and a boundless list of bottles of Donnafugata wineries. After a careful examination of the various labels in which you deep down with sommelier making, which will cost you the curse of the waiter exhausted by your indecision, please consider that the best choice is the lemon granita or the unlikely granita in the pomegranate season (which ripens from mid-October).

Once regenerated you start thinking about those cellars you had already heard about, because they are famous all over the world, and suddenly you find yourself rebuilding the recent history of Marsala. Discover that the Florio were the personal suppliers of the House of Savoy, that Ignazio Florio in 1874 bought all the Egadi Islands and that his father Vincenzo, entrepreneur and wine producer, was the inventor of the namesake "targa", the famous car race.

The vast majority of people know it only as the land of landing, because here Garibaldi landed on 11 May 1860 followed by those Thousands with whom he went up the peninsula.

But you also realize that it is already four o'clock in the afternoon and that if you do not quickly ask for the bill, the waiter's new curses loom over you, that you've been there for two hours for a granita. Two euro tip is the minimum you can do before getting up and head sadly towards the museum Anselmi, which is normally only ten minutes walk from where you are, but that in August and thirty degrees at least become twice. There it almost always happens - not that you risk the Stendhal syndrome but the fainting of the heat - to be impressed by the testimonies of the peoples who have made Marsala what it is today.

The vast majority of people know it only as the land of landing, because here Garibaldi landed on 11 May 1860 followed by those Thousands with whom he went up the peninsula. But his story is much more: from here passed Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was later appointed quaestor of the city; the Arabs alternated (hence the name Mars- Allah, "port of God"), the Normans, the Angevins, the Aragonese and the Spanish rulers of the Two Sicilies. Each of these peoples has left its mark, with a sign, a symbol or simply an allegory of its passage. And it is known that in Sicily every trace of a passage is an indelible mark in the memory.

And so that thinking and thinking back suddenly you realize that it is almost time for dinner and that the bus you had to take has already left for ten minutes. Maybe it was the waiter's curses ... but you're glad to have lost the bus but to have found the museum.