Sicily, from golden mosaics to Greek temples

Round the island

The loop starts in Palermo and mostly keeps to the coast. It passes Etna and Syracuse, then comes back along the south and the west. At Cefalù, the old town and its Norman cathedral are squeezed between the Rocca crag and the beach. In an hour’s drive, you go from a Greek temple to a Norman church or a Baroque town.

In Palermo, the Normans, who arrived in Sicily in 1061, blended Byzantine, Arab and Latin art. In the Norman Palace, the Palatine Chapel sets Byzantine mosaics beneath a wooden ceiling painted in the Islamic tradition. Above the city, Monreale Cathedral, built in the 1170s, is covered with more than 6,000 square metres of gold mosaics. Together with Cefalù Cathedral and other monuments in Palermo, they have been listed as a World Heritage Site since 2015.

After Taormina, a road climbs Etna to the Rifugio Sapienza, at around 1,900 metres, at the foot of the Silvestri craters, born in 1892. The volcano rises above 3,300 metres; every eruption changes its height. Sicilians call it ’a Muntagna, the Mountain. Etna has been a World Heritage Site since 2013.

Catania is one of the eight. In 1669, lava from Etna surrounded its castle. After the 1693 earthquake, the city was rebuilt in lava stone.

In Caltagirone, since the 1950s, the 142 steps of the Scalinata have been faced with majolica, a painted ceramic.

The Greek cities

The Greeks were founding cities in Sicily from the 8th century BC, facing the Phoenician trading posts in the west. Founded around 733 BC by settlers from Corinth, Syracuse stood up to Athens. In 413 BC the Athenian army was defeated, and its prisoners were shut up in the city’s stone quarries, the latomie. Caravaggio is said to have named one of them the Ear of Dionysius: the tyrant, so the story goes, later listened in on his captives there. On the island of Ortigia, the cathedral is built into a temple of Athena.

The poet Pindar called Agrigento the most beautiful city of mortals. Its temples stand in a line along a ridge, south of the modern town. The Temple of Concordia is still standing because it was turned into a church. Selinunte, destroyed by Carthage in 409 BC, still has its ruined temples facing the sea. At Segesta, a city of the Elymians, a Doric temple was, it seems, never given a roof.

What not to miss

1. 1The theatre at TaorminaAn ancient theatre with Etna and the sea as its backdrop; below, the islet of Isola Bella.
2. 2The Villa Romana del CasaleSome 3,500 square metres of 4th-century mosaics, among them the women athletes in bikinis.
3. 3The Scala dei TurchiA stepped cliff of white marl, open for twenty-minute visits, booked and ticketed in advance.
4. 4The salt pans of TrapaniWindmills and mounds of salt; in the Stagnone lagoon, the Phoenician island of Motya, reached by boat.
5. 5EriceA medieval hill town perched at 750 metres, often wrapped in mist.
6. 6The Zingaro reserveSeven kilometres of coast without a road, to be explored on foot from Scopello.

Sicily in pictures

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The Silvestri craters on the southern slope of Etna; below them, the Rifugio Sapienza and the plain of Catania.

The Sicilian table

In Palermo, people eat in the street: chickpea panelle, pane ca’ meusa with veal spleen, and the arancina, which turns masculine — arancino — in Catania. In the east, in summer, breakfast is a granita with a brioche. In Modica, chocolate is worked cold and crunches between the teeth.

The Arabs brought sugar cane and citrus fruit, and perhaps the name of the cassata. Trapani serves fish couscous, and Marsala its wine, which the English merchant John Woodhouse made famous from 1773.