Day 1: Home to Milazzo via Lamezia

At some point over the Christmas holidays when I was searching for cheap bank holiday getaways, I found relatively inexpensive Ryanair flights to a place called Lamezia in Italy. I had never heard of Lamezia before, but when I googled it I found it was in Calabria; one of the few regions of Italy which we've never been to. I booked the flights, originally with the plan that we would spend a long weekend in Calabria itself. But when I started researching I realised that it would be possible to get from Lamezia to the northern tip of Sicily and then from northern Sicily, to the Aeolian Islands... Once I started reading up on the Aeolian Islands I was hooked and our bank holiday in Calabria started to morph into a bank holiday in Sicily.

What I hadn't realised at the point I booked the flights was that I would be spending the week leading up to the trip working away in the Isle of Man.

The Isle of Man was very scenic and the weather was exceptionally good for most of the week, but with my flight back to the UK scheduled for 17.15 on Thursday evening and my flight to Lamezia at 09.00 on Friday morning, I was really cutting it a bit fine. Thankfully, everything did go to plan with my homeward journey and I got back to Nuneaton around 20.30 last night. That just about gave me time to unpack my bag and repack it for Italy, though didn't leave a lot of surplus hours for sleep. We left home at 04.30 on Friday morning.

The journey down to Stansted was uneventful and our flight departed with only a slight delay. The sky was quite clear as we flew across Europe and at one point we had a beautiful view of the snow-covered Alps.

Lamezia is really very far south in Italy and so the flight took almost exactly three hours. We landed in Lamezia at 1pm local time and immediately saw that it was a tiny airport of the Ryanair shed variety.

We had a bit of a queue for passport control, though no awkward questions when we finally got to the front. The airport is a bit outside the town centre of Lamezia Terme itself, so in order to get to the main train station we had to catch a bus. Conveniently, it was sitting waiting outside the terminal at the point we stepped outside. Tickets only cost a couple of Euros though, unusually, it was only possible to pay in cash. Luckily we had some!

We arrived at the station with just under an hour to spare until our train, which gave us time to eat a couple of slices of pizza at a cafe outside the station. Then we had a journey of just over an hour on a regional train, taking us south to the town of Villa San Giovanni. There were a lot of tunnels on the journey, but in places it was very scenic as we travelled along the coast.

The reason for taking a train to Villa San Giovanni was that it is situated on the Strait of Messina, just across the water from Sicily.

When we got off the train we had to walk a short distance to the ticket office of the ferry company. Although we'd bought train tickets from Lamezia Terme to Milazzo, those didn't include the cost of the ferry. Luckily it was only an extra €2,50 each and a relatively quick journey of 15 minutes or so.

Before too long we were getting off the boat on Sicily and looking back across to mainland Italy.

The boat had taken us to Messina, from where we had another 30 minutes by train to the town of Milazzo where we are staying for the next few nights. Milazzo is one of those strange towns where the railway station is on the outskirts, so once we arrived we had to catch a bus for 5km or so into the town centre. The bus dropped us near the port, from where we had a walk of a further kilometre or so to our apartment.