The best coastal towns within an hour of Catania

1. Forza d'Agrò

Best for a small town. 930 people live here.

53 min from Catania · homes €1,000 to €1,350 a m² in the center · 930 people

Why visit Forza d'Agrò

The first record of the settlement, vicum Agrillae, is in a 1117 decree of Roger II. It names a lower site, the one the residents eventually abandoned when they moved uphill to the rock and renamed the place Fortilicium d'Agrò, the fortress of Agrò, a name the ruin on the peak still carries.

The move from lower ground to the high rock explains the layout that remains: the fortress and its silhouette at the top, the mother church rebuilt after the 1648 and 1693 earthquakes lower down, and the Trinità with its convent of Sant'Agostino set apart from both, reached by its own staircase. The village looks north to Calabria across the strait and sits ten kilometers from Taormina, close enough to the coast to be seen from it but built with its back to the sea.

What the earthquakes and the rebuilding left behind is a village whose churches carry more damage and repair in their walls than its ruined castle does, a place shaped as much by disaster and recovery as by the Norman name on the summit.

What to see in Forza d'Agrò

• Castello Normanno. The ruin still crowns the highest point of the village, visible from the coast road below as the shape that names the place.
• Duomo di Maria Santissima Annunziata e Assunta. Mother church built 1400, damaged by the 1648 and 1693 earthquakes, rebuilt with a Spanish Baroque façade and spiral volutes.
• Chiesa della Santissima Trinità. The church sits above its own staircase, attached to the convent of Sant'Agostino, a quieter approach than the steps below suggest.

How to get to Forza d'Agrò

Catania is about 53 min away by road.

Everything we know about Forza d'Agrò

2. Savoca

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

58 min from Catania · homes €560 to €820 a m² in the center · 1,756 people

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 seventeen 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

Catania is about 58 min away by road.

Everything we know about Savoca

3. Taormina

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

45 min from Catania · homes €3,700 to €5,500 a m² in the center · 10,480 people

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 Castelmola, a comune of its own, hangs at 529 meters, both looking down on the same stretch of coast the theater 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 a Blue Flag, the international award a comune has to win back every year on water quality, beach management and safety.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €5,500 a m².

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

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 45 min away by road.

Everything we know about Taormina

4. Riposto

Best for a day out from Catania. It is 29 min by car.

29 min from Catania · homes €590 to €870 a m² in the center · 13,947 people

Why visit Riposto

Riposto sits on the Ionian coast twenty-five kilometers 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 harbor.

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 center 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 harbor 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

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 29 min away by road.

Everything we know about Riposto

5. Aci Castello

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

12 min from Catania · homes €1,400 to €2,000 a m² in the center · 17,713 people

Why visit Aci Castello

Aci Castello sits ten kilometers 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), first built by the Byzantines around the 7th century and fortified under the Normans, on a basalt headland of underwater Etna lava about 500,000 years old; 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. Byzantine-founded castle, a Norman stronghold by 1092, on a basalt headland of underwater Etna lava about 500,000 years old. 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 harbor and Casa del Nespolo museum trace the literary setting.

How to get to Aci Castello

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 12 min away by road.

Everything we know about Aci Castello

6. Giarre

Best for a long lunch. Food guides list two tables here.

26 min from Catania · homes €420 to €630 a m² in the center · 26,557 people

Why visit Giarre

Giarre sits on the lower eastern slope of Etna at eighty meters, thirty kilometers 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 center 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 center 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 toward Riposto and the sea.

How to get to Giarre

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 26 min away by road.

Everything we know about Giarre

7. Siracusa

Best for everyday life on foot. Nine of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

54 min from Catania · homes €950 to €2,750 a m² in the center · 115,776 people

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 center 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 theater, 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 theater 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 center 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 theater carved into the limestone hillside, still in use every summer for the INDA classical drama festival. The largest surviving Greek theater 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.

How to get to Siracusa

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 54 min away by road.

Everything we know about Siracusa

8. Catania

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

homes €1,000 to €1,950 a m² in the center · 298,054 people

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.

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 center with Vaccarini's 1735 elephant fountain (U Liotru, a Roman-era basalt elephant supporting an Egyptian obelisk) as the city's symbol.

The historic center 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 meters, 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

It has its own railway station.

Everything we know about Catania