Spectacular Sicily

It is almost a year since I last wrote about sun-kissed Sicily, an island that I have been visiting since 2015. There is still so much to discover on this incredibly diverse land with a history of 25 centuries of foreign domination that has produced a melting pot of enriching cultures, food and landscape.

Beautiful Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean and, thanks to the smouldering presence of Mount Etna, provider of lava-rich soil. The slopes of Etna, Europe’s largest and most active volcano, provide an abundance of food, especially lemons, pears, pistachios, walnuts, almonds and prickly pears. Famous too is the honey, flavoured with chestnut flowers, and Etna mushrooms. Strong Etna wines, benefiting from the volcanic earth and the altitude are exported all over the world.

Where else in a short amount of time can you experience active volcanoes, majestic Greek temples and ruins, extraordinary Baroque towns, a heart wrenchingly beautiful mountaintop town, an ancient romantic island just one kilometre long and an archipelago of seven exquisite islands?

All of this and more is part of the Naples/Sicily Tour happening in April and October next year. In fact, it is my first tour to kickstart the beginning of the season in Italy, which means fewer tourists and balmy spring weather. No better time and there is still room on this tour.

Compelling places not to be missed

A story about Taormina

Set above the shining blue sea, home to a superbly set Greek/Roman theatre and an impossibly picturesque medieval centre, Taormina is simply stunning. To stay three nights is heavenly, especially walking the charming, pedestrian only streets early morning without a tourist in sight. I love this time of day and feel incredibly lucky to experience all that is before me.

Greek exiles from Naxos arrived in Sicily and founded a colony they called Tauromenion. It was destroyed by the Arabs in 902, rebuilt, taken by the Normans and prospered sufficiently to become the seat of the Sicilian Parliament in 1410. By the 18th century, the first tourists were arriving in a town that was home to mainly fishermen, farmers and shepherds. There were no hotels, so in 1850 Italian aristocrat, Don Francesco La Floresta, decided to rent rooms from his house and create a guesthouse which he called Timeo.

A German painter, Otto Geleng, first travelled to Taormina in 1863 and rented a room from Don Francesco where he began painting. He then took his paintings to Paris, but the French critics didn’t believe that a snow covered volcano and blossoming almond trees were real. Geleng insisted that he had only painted what he saw and challenged his critics to come to Taormina and see for themselves. If they disagreed with what they saw, he would pay for their accommodation and travel, but if they agreed, they would have to buy his work and promote Taormina in the press. Geelong won the bet and in some ways forever changed the course of Taormina and the Timeo’s history.

Don Francesco expanded the guesthouse by adding another five rooms. By 1973 his home was transformed into the iconic Grand Hotel Timeo which celebrated 150 years in 2023. Literary artists stayed in the hotel from the late 19th century onwards including D.H. Lawrence, who perhaps inspired by the gardens of Timeo, wrote the classic ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Oscar Wilde fell in love with the hotel, as did Tennessee Williams.

We do not stay in the five star hotel that is a magnet for the rich and famous and perhaps a little pretentious. We stay somewhere better! Just 50 metres from Porta Catania, one of two entrances to the pedestrian street of the historic centre, is Hotel Casa Adele. Built by the Cascio family at the beginning of the 1900s, the family home was transformed into a guesthouse in 1949 by Giuseppe and Adele. In 2017-18 brother and sister, Giuseppe and Manuela, spent two painstaking years restoring the building to continue the legacy of their parents. They created a glorious boutique hotel that is warm and welcoming and incredibly stylish whilst maintaining the family history. Oh, and did I mention they have the best breakfast in Sicily!

Ortygia - the island of the sun

Travelling further south along the east coast, we reach Ortygia, the historic centre of Syracuse. The name means Island of the Sun. The ancient Greek ortyx is the quail, symbol of the sun.

Don’t be fooled by this tiny island one kilometre in length and barely 600 metres in width, connected by two short bridges to Syracuse. There is much to discover. A timeline dates back to 734 BC when Syracuse was founded as a colony by a group of Corinthian colonists.

Simply walking through Ortygia’s tangled mass of alleys is an experience, especially down the narrow lanes of the crumbling Jewish Ghetto. Here you will find the oldest Jewish ritual baths, or mikveh, in Europe that have now opened to the public. There has been a Jewish presence on the island for at least 1,400 years and perhaps as many as 2,000 years.

There are thought to have been as many as 100,000 Jews living in Sicily before they were expelled from the island in 1492 by its Spanish ruler, King Ferdinand II of Aragon. At that time Syracuse’s Jewish population was second in size only to Palermo and made up a quarter of Ortygia’s inhabitants. The mikveh was discovered in 1989 during restoration work on a medieval palazzo once owned by the Jewish Bianchi family. It lies nine metres below ground under the Residenza Alla Giudecca Hotel in the heart of what was once the town’s Jewish quarter and home to the synagogue. It lay hidden for so long because when the Jews fled into exile they filled the baths with rubble and sealed its entrance. The mikveh dates from the 6th century and was in continuous use until the 15th century when it had to be abandoned.

It is a moment in history to be able to descend the 48 steps to arrive in a square room with a vaulted ceiling supported by four pillars carved out of the limestone bedrock.

And then there is the incredible story of the Teatro Comunale - the municipal theatre. The construction of the building hit a thousand roadblocks, apparently due to a curse, and once finished it was used for just 60 years. It has been reopened since 2016. It is often closed. Sometimes it is open. Truly worth it.

Ortygia is also a goldmine of craftmanship. For wonderful lotions and potions, Italians always shop on the island: soaps, bath products and perfumes using local ingredients like almond oil and Sicilian jasmine are favourites. Ortigia, the shop of coloured essences and silks that has made the name of the island into a real brand, deserves a chapter to itself. The owner, inspired by the colours and scents of the island, has created her own Sicilian world, opulent and luxurious.

There are so many stories and secrets to share about the places we visit and stay in besides Taormina, Mount Etna and Ortigia . . . Castelmola, Noto, Marzamemi, Ragusa Ibla, Aeolian Islands.

Enough for now.

Ci vediamo la prossima settimana.

Deb