Italy’s stunning, but slightly seedy, island paradise

This is why a tour of Sicily and its isles with Collette and a cohort of 24 is appealing. The bulk of people on our tour are descendants of Sicilian migrants, so they are keen to taste and smell the food and flavours of their childhood or their parents’ motherland. We visit wineries, farms that produce ricotta and award-winning olive oil and we taste other Sicilian specialties. It’s the open door into authentic homes where food is central that makes this tour special; something you may not get as a solo traveller.

It’s not just for safety reasons that I am happy to be chauffeured around by our coach driver Franco on a tour of the Mediterranean’s largest island just off the “toe” of Italy’s “boot”.

Sicily is about a third the size of Tasmania. If you want to see as much of it as possible, having your own transport will accelerate the process. Being driven avoids having to deal with local drivers (many of whom drive at the same pace as my speed-demon taxi driver).

Our first night is spent at a relaxing welcome dinner introducing us to the delights of Sicilian wines and food specialties such as pasta alla Norma (pasta with eggplant) and delicious cannoli.

The next morning, after a cappuccino and cornetto breakfast, we hit the streets for a food tour of the Capo market. It’s an old Arabian market of narrow winding alleys and colourful awnings protecting produce that ranges from red tuna caught that morning to fresh fruit, including citrus picked that day and squeezed into the most delicious juices.

The beautiful sing-song banter or barking between sellers –abbaniare, as it is called in Sicilian dialect – wafts down the alleys along with various aromas.

With our specialist food guide, we eat specialties such as paneli, a delicious chickpea croquette, deep-fried artichoke and swordfish rolls before girding our guts for the frittola – leftover scraps from a calf carcass, boiled then fried until crisp; and pani ca’ meusa, the spleen sandwich, for which this city is famous. Not for the weak-stomached. It is washed down by a delicious granita, the traditional Sicilian summer shaved-ice drink, served with brioche, in a cute cafe on the corso Vittorio Emanuele.

Vittorio Emanuele, the oldest street of the city for pedestrians only, leads to the port and the monumental Porta Felice city gate. We spend the rest of the day strolling around the Garibaldi Gardens with its twice yearly flowering jacarandas and head to the bustling port. I visit Mondello Beach to join locals swimming and sipping granitas.

After Palermo, we take a ride up the nearby hilly terrain to see Monreale Cathedral and its 2200 kilograms of pure gold mosaics, created in the Greek Byzantine way.

“Monreale is all about tolerance,” says Paola as we tour the ornate Norman cathedral, where the cloisters rival those of the Alhambra’s in Spain’s Granada. “Roman Catholic meets Islam, like the inside of a mosque, mosaics created in the Greek Byzantine way, and windows that look like they are from Morocco. Sicily was once the largest medieval social experiment in Europe.”

Next stop is Trapani in the north-western corner of the island. After almond biscuit cooking classes in hilltop Erice at Maria Grammatico’s pasticceria (she learnt her baking secrets from nuns) and a tour of the Alagna family winery in Marsala, we head to Agrigento, the hilltop city on Sicily’s south-west shore.

Founded in 582BC, it became one of the leading cities during the golden age of Ancient Greece. Wandering through the ruins with an archeological guide, it is easy to see why it is one of the island’s leading attractions. Some claim its Greek ruins in the Valley of the Temples, a vast archaeological site, are better preserved than Athens’ Parthenon.

The island’s rural areas we drive through are day-dreamy and delightful – undulating hills and canyons, gullies, aqueducts and viaducts, vineyards and tablelands of limestone. The stress level as a passenger is zero thanks to Franco, who remains cool as a cucumber even when our stationary bus is backed into by a moving one.

We meander through Ragusa, Scicli and Modica, which, along with four other cities in the Val di Noto, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, perhaps best known to viewers of the TV series Inspector Montalbano, based on the best-selling books by Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri.

In Modica’s English book store, I pick up a copy of Australian Peter Robb’s seminal Midnight in Sicily, which, published in 1996, brings the dark history of this island to light. Tour guide Paola also recommends The Leopard, a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life after the death of the local aristocracy.

Ragusa is built on a wide limestone hill between two deep valleys, Cava San Leonardo and Cava Santa Domenica. Ragusa Ibla (the old town) collapsed after a 1693 earthquake and a new town, Ragusa Superiore, was built on a high plateau above.

Scicli and Modica’s whitewashed wonders are captivating. We visit the only workshop of the master craftsman who makes the distinctively colourful Sicilian carts, dine at a ricotta farm on produce made fresh that morning, taste award-winning olive oil at another farm and visit an Aztec chocolate shop for samples.

In the land of fast drivers, it is these providores of the slow food movement and the warm welcome and food they share with us that mean we say ciao to Sicily with hearts and bellies full.

THE DETAILS

TOUR
Collette offers a range of different tours to Sicily including: Sicily and Its Isles (13 days): from $5299 a person; Old World Sicily and Malta (13 days), from $6549 a person and Southern Italy and Sicily featuring Taormina, Matera and the Amalfi Coast (11-12 days) from $4549.

STAY
Hotel Porta Felice, Palermo. Perfectly located 4.5-star rated hotel in Palermo’s Centro Storico. Wake to the sounds of church bells and the view of ruins from your room.

I Mulini Resort Luxury beachside resort on the northern coast of Trapani, complete with its own windmill, nestled between the sea and the beautiful medieval hamlet of Erice.

Poggio Del Sole Hotel A 15-20 minute drive out of Ragusa, with views of surrounding vineyards, or just lounge poolside at this four-star hotel.

FLY
Fly to Rome from Sydney/Melbourne with Asiana, Etihad, Emirates or Qatar from $1800 (flightnetwork.com.au). Fly to Palermo from Rome with  Alitalia (several flights daily) from $180 roundtrip or ferry from Civitavecchia port (70 kilometres north-west of Rome) or Naples to Palermo.

The writer travelled as a guest of Collette.