We took our second cruise on the historic sailing ship Sea Cloud with Roger and Peg in May. She is a four-mast hand-sailed barque that was built by Marjorie Merriwether Post and EF Hutton as their private yacht in the 1930’s. Our first cruise on her was in the Caribbean in 2018. This time we sailed from Naples, Italy around Sicily to Malta and back through the Aolian Islands in the Mediterranean.

The stops in Sicily included Palermo, Erice, Marsala, Syracuse, Taormina and Messina. The Aolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea included Lipari and Stromboli. Most impressive was the island of Malta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the Great Siege of Malta took place in 1565 when Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent tried to take the island from the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (an order of Crusaders also known as the Knights of Malta). That was our first exposure to the history of the Ottoman Empire, which expanded greatly when we visited Türkiye later in 2023.

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