The 6 best towns inside a nature park that you can reach by train in Sicily

1. Castiglione di Sicilia

Best for olive oil. It belongs to the national association of olive oil towns.

49 min from Catania · homes €370 to €550 a m² in the center · 2,859 people

Why visit Castiglione di Sicilia

The town looks down the Alcantara river valley between Randazzo and Taormina, its position fixed by Norman count Roger I, who documented it in 1092 as Castrileonis, the great castle. That name still fits the territory more than the town itself: the commune's boundary runs uphill from the historic center all the way to the summit of Etna, taking in the north-east crater, so the same municipality holds a huddle of streets at 621 meters and a stretch of active volcano above it.

The hills below the center are the heart of the Etna DOC. Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappuccio grow on the volcanic soils around the village, with Carricante carrying the whites, and bottles from Cottanera, Passopisciaro, Tenuta delle Terre Nere and the Alcantara producers all ship from here.

Twenty minutes downhill the Alcantara has cut its gorges through the same lava that feeds those vineyards, basalt walls shaped by water where the fields above are shaped by the grape. Town, castle, vineyard and gorge read as one continuous volcanic system, worked over centuries into a fortress, a wine region and a river cut.

What to see in Castiglione di Sicilia

• Castello di Lauria. The fortress stands on its basalt outcrop above the town, its walls carrying the weight of two rebuildings by Ruggero di Lauria's crews. The rooms now hold the Enoteca Regionale for eastern Sicily, so the same stone that once watched for approach up the valley now stores the bottles made from the vines below it.
• Cuba Bizantina di Santa Domenica. Small Byzantine cube-shaped church, seventh to ninth century, in the rural outskirts of the commune, one of the oldest surviving structures in the Etna area.
• Gole dell'Alcantara. Basalt gorges carved by the Alcantara river through prismatic lava columns, around twenty minutes downhill from the centro storico.

How to get to Castiglione di Sicilia

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 49 min away by road.

Everything we know about Castiglione di Sicilia

2. Cammarata

1 h 28 min from Palermo · homes €400 to €600 a m² in the center · 5,841 people

Why visit Cammarata

The town sits at 700 meters on the northeastern flank of the mountain, and the name comes from the Greek kàmara, vaulted room, after the limestone caves that perforate the slopes. That geology sits under a settlement built up the incline in stepped lanes, so the town and the peak above it read as one continuous rise rather than two separate things.

King Roger I laid siege in 1087 and gave the conquered town to his relative Lucy of Hauteville, who took the title Lucia di Cammarata. The Chiesa Madre, rebuilt in the seventeenth century on twelfth-century foundations, holds a Madonna della Catena by Pietro D'Asaro and a sixteenth-century organ, and the mountain itself carries a regional nature reserve of downy oak and holm oak forest, golden eagles, and ridge trails to the summit.

Cammarata is paired physically with San Giovanni Gemini next door. The two towns share the mountain as a watershed, a saint, and a working economy of grain, oil and sheep, which means the peak is not scenery at the edge of town but the shared resource that organizes both places, their water, their pasture, and their names.

What to see in Cammarata

• Chiesa Madre di San Nicolò di Bari. Seventeenth-century mother church on twelfth-century foundations, with a Madonna della Catena by Pietro D'Asaro and a sixteenth-century organ.
• Monte Cammarata. Downy oak and holm oak cover the slopes below the summit, with ridge trails running up through the reserve and views over the Sicani range.
• Ruderi del Castello. Remains of the medieval fortification on the rock above the centro storico, taken by Roger I in 1087.

How to get to Cammarata

It has its own railway station. Palermo is about 1 h 28 min away by road. The full route from Palermo.

Everything we know about Cammarata

3. Randazzo

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

1 h from Catania · homes €450 to €670 a m² in the center · 10,038 people

Why visit Randazzo

Randazzo sits at 750 meters on the northern foot of Etna, seventy kilometers northwest of Catania along the Alcantara valley. Byzantine in origin, Swabian and medieval in character, the town has three great churches that mark its three historic quarters, once inhabited by communities that spoke different tongues: the Latins in Santa Maria, the Greeks in San Nicolò, and the Lombards in San Martino.

In 1210 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and his young wife Constance of Aragon sheltered here from the plague in Palermo; Randazzo became, after Palermo and Messina, one of the most populous towns on the island. The architecture is lava: Santa Maria Assunta, begun in the thirteenth century, has a façade entirely in black volcanic stone with three polygonal apses shaped as towers and Catalan-Gothic side portals.

The forty-one-meter bell tower of San Martino, called one of the most beautiful in Sicily, has stood since the thirteenth century.

What to see in Randazzo

• Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta. Thirteenth-century basilica in black lava stone with three polygonal apses shaped as towers and fifteenth-century Catalan-Gothic side portals.
• Chiesa di San Martino. Church of Swabian origin from the thirteenth century with a forty-one-meter bell tower in four storeys, anchor of the Lombard quarter.
• Chiesa di San Nicolò. Largest of the three quarter churches, repeatedly rebuilt; the fourteenth-century bell tower fell in the 1693 earthquake.

How to get to Randazzo

It has its own railway station. Catania is about 1 h away by road.

Everything we know about Randazzo

4. 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 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

5. Cefalù

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

1 h 3 min from Palermo · homes €2,500 to €3,700 a m² in the center · 13,874 people

Why visit Cefalù

Cefalù sits 70 kilometers east of Palermo where the Madonie meet the Tyrrhenian, the old town built on a strip of land between the sea and the headland that gave the place its name. The Greeks called it Kephaloidion in the fourth century BC.

Roger II refounded the town at the foot of the rock in 1131 and began the cathedral the same year; tradition holds he vowed to build it after surviving a storm offshore. Its mosaics were executed by masters he brought from Constantinople.

The old town keeps the cathedral, the museum, and the working port within the same short walk, the stone lanes running straight down from the Duomo's square to the sea and the lavatoio fed by its own spring along the way. The beach runs below on one side, the rock rises behind on the other, and the harbor still works at the foot of it.

A small coastal town, built once by the Greeks and refounded by a Norman king against the same rock, still reads as one place rather than several eras stacked on top of each other.

What to see in Cefalù

• Duomo di Cefalù. Twin-towered cathedral built by Roger II, its west front facing a narrow square hemmed by the old town. Inside, the mosaic apse is reached down a nave still laid out to Norman proportions, the Arab-Norman UNESCO listing covering both the fabric and the decoration.
• La Rocca. The trail switchbacks up bare limestone above the roofs, past the megalithic sanctuary walls before reaching the castle ruins, where the town, the harbor, and the coastline in both directions open out below.
• Museo Mandralisca. Private nineteenth-century collection in an eighteenth-century palazzo, holding the Portrait of an Unknown Sailor and Greek vases from Lipari.

How to get to Cefalù

It has its own railway station. Palermo is about 1 h 3 min away by road. The full route from Palermo.

Everything we know about Cefalù

6. Giarre

Best for a day out from Catania. It is 26 min by car.

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