The best coastal towns within an hour of Catania

Savoca

Why visit Savoca

Savoca sits fifteen kilometers north of Taormina, on a hill above the Ionian coast. The centro storico runs along the ridge in stepped lanes and balconied stone houses, with the Capuchin convent below it at the lower edge of the village and the castle ruin above at the highest point, the two anchoring the village from bottom to top.

The convent's crypt holds thirty-seven mummified bodies of notables from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preserved in a colatoio that desiccated the corpses with vinegar and salt. In the summer of 1971, Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo arrived to film the Sicilian scenes of The Godfather here, after the original Corleone in Palermo province was judged too modern for the camera.

The village's shape, a compact ridge with a church at one end and a bar in the lower piazza, gave the film both its wedding location and its courtship scene without need for another set. What draws people now is largely what drew Coppola then: a village small enough to read in a single walk, old enough to need no dressing.

What to see in Savoca

• Chiesa di San Nicolò. Thirteenth-century church suspended on a rock promontory at the top of the village. The Godfather's wedding scene between Michael and Apollonia was filmed here.
• Bar Vitelli. Eighteenth-century palazzo and family bar in the lower piazza, still operating as it did when it stood in for Apollonia's father's bar in The Godfather.
• Cripta dei Frati Cappuccini. Crypt of the Capuchin convent below the centro storico, its ventilated chamber holding the mummified bodies of local notables.

How to get to Savoca

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Messina is roughly 39 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Savoca

Taormina

Why visit Taormina

The town sits at 204 meters on the rock above the coast, on the Ionian shore halfway between Messina and Catania. The Siculi welcomed the survivors of the Greek colony of Naxos in 358 BC after Dionysius of Syracuse destroyed it, and Andromachus refounded them as Tauromenium on the height above.

Augustus later made it a Roman colony, deporting much of the population and resettling it with Roman families. The centro sits below the fortress and above the sea: the Arab-Norman stronghold occupies the rock at 397 meters, while further up the hillside the frazione of Castelmola hangs at 884, both looking down on the same stretch of coast the theatre faces.

The small island reserve lies at the opposite end of that vertical arrangement, at sea level below the cliff, reached by cable car or path from the town above. A place built in tiers, from the beach at the base to the fortress on the rock to the village above that, all of it oriented toward the same view of the volcano and the water that made a nineteenth-century travel writer's description enough to start a tourist route still followed today.

The beach here holds the national bathing award, which a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.

What to see in Taormina

• Teatro Antico. The stone rows face south, so the audience looks past the stage wall to Etna rather than toward it. 109 meters in diameter, the remodelling under Roman rule widened the space for spectacle beyond Greek drama.
• Palazzo Corvaja. Fourteenth-century Sicilian-Gothic palace at the entrance to Corso Umberto, on the site of the Roman forum and the Arab cube of the citadel.
• Castello di Monte Tauro. Arab-Norman fortress at 397 meters on the rock above the centro, reached on foot from Via Circonvallazione.

How to get to Taormina

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Catania is roughly 45 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Taormina

Riposto

Why visit Riposto

Riposto sits on the Ionian coast twenty-five kilometres north of Catania, at the eastern foot of Etna and the southern edge of the Giarre-Riposto conurbation. The name is commercial: u ripostu in Sicilian, the cellar, because the wine produced in the surrounding county of Mascali was stored here before being loaded onto ships.

The town was the commercial port of Mascali from the sixteenth century onwards, won full administrative autonomy in the eighteenth, and was merged with neighbouring Giarre under the name Jonia from 1939 until 1945, when the two split again. Today the Porto dell'Etna, also called Marina di Riposto, runs as a combined tourist marina, fishing port and small commercial harbour.

Locals still call the town the port of the volcano. Etna fills the western skyline, the railway runs to Catania along the coast, and the historic centre threads between churches built when the wine trade still paid for them.

What to see in Riposto

• Porto dell'Etna. The combined tourist marina, fishing and commercial port, the largest pleasure harbour between Catania and Messina.
• Chiesa Madre San Pietro. The mother church on the main square, rebuilt in the eighteenth century when Riposto's wine trade financed new construction.
• Centro storico. Grid of streets parallel to the seafront, with palazzi and warehouses built during the eighteenth and nineteenth century wine boom.

How to get to Riposto

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Catania is roughly 29 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Riposto

Aci Castello

Why visit Aci Castello

Aci Castello sits ten kilometres north of Catania on the Riviera dei Ciclopi, where the lava-black basalt coast meets the Ionian Sea. The town's anchor is the Castello Normanno (Castello d'Aci), built in 1076 by Roger I of Sicily on a basalt sea-stack thrown up by an underwater Etna eruption around 25,000 BC; the Aragonese expanded it in the 14th century and it now houses the Civic Museum of Aci Castello.

Just offshore stand the Isole dei Ciclopi — the seven basalt sea-stacks that Homer identified as the rocks Polyphemus the Cyclops hurled at Odysseus's ship in Book IX of the Odyssey, and which are now a protected marine reserve. The frazione of Aci Trezza (the larger fishing village south of the castle) is where Giovanni Verga set I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881), the founding novel of Italian verismo.

The coastline between Castello and Trezza is a single black-pebble swimming front, with the dramatic profile of Etna rising behind.

What to see in Aci Castello

• Castello Normanno di Aci. 1076 Norman castle on a basalt sea-stack thrown up by an underwater Etna eruption c. 25,000 BC. Aragonese expansion 14th c. Houses the Civic Museum with the stratigraphic and natural-history collections.
• Isole dei Ciclopi. Seven basalt sea-stacks offshore — Homer's Cyclopean rocks from Odyssey Book IX. Now a protected marine reserve (AMP Isole Ciclopi), with snorkelling tours from Aci Trezza.
• Aci Trezza — terra di Verga. Fishing-village frazione where Giovanni Verga set I Malavoglia (1881), the founding novel of Italian verismo. The old harbour and Casa del Nespolo museum trace the literary setting.

How to get to Aci Castello

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Catania is roughly 12 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Aci Castello

Giarre

Why visit Giarre

Giarre sits on the lower eastern slope of Etna at eighty metres, thirty kilometres north of Catania and three from the sea at Riposto. From the late sixteenth century until 1815 it was a village of the county of Mascali; it separated after the abolition of feudalism and built itself a town centre in the decades that followed.

The Duomo di Sant'Isidoro Agricola, begun in 1794 and opened for worship in 1818, is the result: a neoclassical mother church in white stone, with a large central nave, two lateral naves, a transept, and a dome with lantern. The two bell towers, designed by the Neapolitan architect Pietro Valente, were begun in 1859 and finished only in 1890.

Inside, the church holds one of the most substantial collections of sacred silverware in eastern Sicily. From 1939 to 1945 Giarre was merged with Riposto under the fascist name Jonia.

The two towns still form a single conurbation along the coast.

What to see in Giarre

• Duomo di Sant'Isidoro Agricola. Neoclassical mother church begun in 1794, two bell towers by Pietro Valente, and one of eastern Sicily's largest collections of sacred silverware.
• Piazza Duomo. The main square at the centre of the historic grid, with the duomo facing the foothill of Etna to the west.
• Corso Italia. The principal axis of the town, running between the duomo and the open country towards Riposto and the sea.

How to get to Giarre

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Catania is roughly 26 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Giarre

Siracusa

Why visit Siracusa

The city was founded in 734 BC by Corinthian Greeks and became the most populous Greek city in the Mediterranean under the tyrant Dionysius I in the 4th century BC. The historic centre sits on Ortigia, the small island linked to the mainland by three bridges, where the Cathedral of Santa Maria delle Colonne, the freshwater spring, and the Piazza Duomo's late-Baroque palazzi, rebuilt after 1693, all stand on the same ground the Greeks first built on.

Across on the mainland, the Parco Archeologico della Neapolis preserves the theatre, the limestone cave, a Roman amphitheatre, and the Ara di Ierone sacrificial altar, so the ancient city reads as two halves: an island core wrapped by the sea and a mainland quarry and theatre district set into the hillside behind it. The Necropolis of Pantalica lies inland from both, joined to the city on the same UNESCO listing, and the city was later named a candidate for European Capital of Culture in 2019.

What Cicero praised as the greatest and most beautiful of Greek cities was in effect two settlements working as one, the island for living and worship, the mainland for spectacle and quarrying, a division still legible in how the ruins are separated by water and distance today.

What to see in Siracusa

• Ortigia + Duomo (Tempio di Atena). Island historic centre with the cathedral built directly into a 5th-c. BC Doric temple of Athena, the original columns visible in the walls. Honey-coloured Baroque palazzi on Greek foundations.
• Teatro Greco (Parco della Neapolis). 5th-century BC Greek theatre carved into the limestone hillside, still in use every summer for the INDA classical drama festival. The largest surviving Greek theatre in Sicily.
• Fonte Aretusa. Freshwater spring at the western tip of Ortigia, the mythological setting of Arethusa's transformation. Pools at the seafront with papyrus growing, the only papyrus colony on European soil.

How to get to Siracusa

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Siracusa is roughly 0 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Siracusa

Catania

Why visit Catania

Catania is Sicily's second-largest city and the capital of the Ionian coast: 300,000 residents at the foot of Etna, with the volcano visible from every street that opens north. The current city is the third built on the same site — Greek Katánē (729 BC), Roman Catina, and the medieval town all in turn — and the version visible today was built almost entirely in the half-century after the 1693 Val di Noto earthquake destroyed 75% of the buildings and killed two-thirds of the population.

The reconstruction was led by Giovanni Battista Vaccarini, who gave Catania its distinctive late-Baroque profile: wide regular streets paved with lava basalt, palazzi faced in the same black stone with white limestone trim, and the Piazza del Duomo at the centre with Vaccarini's 1735 elephant fountain (U Liotru, a Roman-era basalt elephant supporting an Egyptian obelisk) as the city's symbol. The historic centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2002 as one of the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto.

Beyond the Baroque: Bellini was born here, the Roman amphitheatre is the second-largest in Sicily, the Pescheria fish market runs every weekday morning, and the Etna cable car from Rifugio Sapienza is reachable in an hour for the high-altitude lava fields.

What to see in Catania

• Piazza del Duomo + U Liotru. Vaccarini's 1735 elephant fountain in the central square — a Roman basalt elephant supporting an Egyptian obelisk. The cathedral of Sant'Agata anchors the south side. Both rebuilt post-1693 in lava-and-limestone Baroque.
• Via dei Crociferi. Pedestrian Baroque street with four churches in 200 metres — the densest stretch of post-1693 reconstruction. UNESCO World Heritage protected.
• Etna. Europe's largest active volcano (3,357 m), an hour from the city by cable car + jeep from Rifugio Sapienza. UNESCO World Heritage in its own right since 2013.

How to get to Catania

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Catania is roughly 14 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Catania