Ricotta dreams

I mentioned previously that I've been taking advantage of the a few weekends free to get around some final spots.  One of these was Vizzini, where I went to la Sagra della Ricotta (Ricotta festival).  Vizzini itself is a gorgeous old mountain village where you get the impression that time has stood still for a while and the guys cooking up the ricotta in the big vats didn't do anything to change that impression.

If I understand correctly, ricotta is sort of curds and whey (I don't know which).  True ricotta is made from sheeps' milk, but there weren't enough sheep for the festival and so this lot was made with cows' milk.

And it was fantastic!  You had to really fight to get into place to hand over a bowl when it was ready, which they then filled with this half solid half liquid mix of ricotta heaven.  That was of course the savoury version - the street was lined with stalls of the sweet version in the form of cannoli and all sorts of other yummy things.

On the side we had, amongst other things, an antique car show and here is one of the tiny original Fiat 500s.  Although this is all dolled up for the festival, in reality you still see quite a few of them around in operation!  Makes a Smart car seem oversized.

We also had a horse parade.  Here you can see their many feathers (for a moment I thought I was in South America or something)... there are much  better pictures of the horses and their colourful little carts but I like this one for the view of the locals :).  A bit different from the trendy young things in Ortigia!

One week to go....