The best towns worth staying overnight that have a serious restaurant in Sicily

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 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.

St. George by Heinz Beck (MICHELIN and La Liste), La Capinera (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Vineria Modì (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 11 more places are listed in food guides.

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

Menfi

Why visit Menfi

Menfi is an 11,814-resident town on the western Agrigento coast, and its geography frames everything else about it. The town sits at 119 meters on a low limestone ridge between the Belice and Carboj rivers, four kilometers inland from the coast, where a nine-kilometre arc of fine sandy beach runs at Porto Palo di Menfi, backed by a protected dune system of 1,100 hectares, the most important loggerhead turtle nesting site on the southern Sicilian coast.

That gap between ridge and shore is the shape of the whole place: the historic centro on the high ground, the beach and reserve down below, the vineyard and olive plateaux spreading out behind and above the town. The town itself was founded in 1638 by the Tagliavia d'Aragona Pignatelli family on the site of an earlier castello belonging to Federico II.

Nothing from that medieval phase survived the re-foundation except a single surviving tower, the only structure left from before the seventeenth-century rebuilding. Above the town, the plateaux produce the two products that give Menfi the rest of its quality-mark trifecta alongside the beach: a cooperative cellar founded in 1958 that draws on 2,000 grower-members farming 6,000 hectares to produce 50 million bottles a year, the volume that makes it one of Sicily's largest wine cooperatives, and an olive oil, Valle del Belice DOP, pressed from the Nocellara del Belice, the same olive sold whole as the Castelvetrano table olive.

That range of production is what earns the town its Città del Vino status alongside its oil and its beach. Beyond the town, Selinunte's Greek temple site lies 25 km west and the Scala dei Turchi limestone cliff sits 50 km east toward Agrigento, the two standard day trips.

The food is Sicilian-coastal: pasta con le sarde, busiate with Trapani-style pesto, bluefin tuna from one of the last traditional fisheries on the island, couscous showing the same Trapani influence reaching this far along the coast, cassata and cannoli, and the local Grillo or Nero d'Avola poured alongside all of it. What holds the place together is that ridge-to-shore, town-to-plateau layout: a working wine and olive town that happens to sit a short drive from its own protected beach, rather than a beach resort with agriculture as an afterthought.

La Foresteria (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Salisà (Gambero Rosso) and Il Vigneto (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Menfi

• Porto Palo di Menfi (Bandiera Blu). Fine sandy beach below the town, backed by dune wetland where loggerhead turtles nest. The sand runs long enough that the crowd thins fast once you walk past the first stretch.
• Cantine Settesoli + Mandrarossa. Visits and tastings at the cooperative cellar in town: Nero d'Avola, Grillo, Inzolia, Syrah poured where they are made rather than at a distributor's counter.
• Valle del Belice DOP olive oil. The local olive oil, pressed from the Nocellara del Belice, the olive also sold whole as the Castelvetrano table olive. Several small frantoi in town offer tastings, worth setting alongside the wine visit rather than instead of it.

How to get to Menfi

Palermo is about 1 h 23 min away by road.

Everything we know about Menfi

Lipari

Why visit Lipari

Lipari sits forty kilometers off Sicily's Tyrrhenian coast, the largest of the seven Aeolian islands and the only commune that administers six of them: Vulcano, Panarea, Stromboli, Filicudi, Alicudi and Lipari itself. Humans have lived here since 5000 BC, drawn by deposits of obsidian, the volcanic glass that made Neolithic Lipari a Mediterranean trading center.

The Rocche Rosse obsidian flow on the north of the island dates to the last eruption in 729 CE. The Spanish rebuilt the castle walls after Hayreddin Barbarossa sacked the town and enslaved the population in 1544; the citadel above Marina Corta now holds the Museo Archeologico Eoliano, one of the most important archaeological collections in the Mediterranean.

The archipelago joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000 for its volcanism. Around 12,500 people live here year-round.

In summer the population doubles. Ferries from Milazzo arrive every two hours.

I Tenerumi (MICHELIN and La Liste), Il Cappero (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Filippino (MICHELIN and Locali Storici) and 6 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Lipari

• Castello di Lipari. Fortified citadel on a volcanic rock fifty meters above the sea, rebuilt by the Spanish under Charles V after the 1544 Barbarossa sack.
• Museo Archeologico Regionale Eoliano. Six-section museum founded by Bernabò Brea and Cavalier in the 1950s, with prehistoric, classical, epigraphic and volcanological collections from the archipelago.
• Cattedrale di San Bartolomeo. Cathedral on the castle plateau, ninth-century foundation rebuilt several times, dedicated to the patron saint whose relics were moved to Benevento in 839.

Everything we know about Lipari

Cefalù

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.

Locanda del Marinaio (MICHELIN), Cortile Pepe (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Cala Luna (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

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

Noto

Why visit Noto

Noto stands at 152 meters on a Hyblean foothill ten kilometers inland from the Ionian. The medieval town of Netum, on Monte Alveria eight kilometers north, was abandoned after the 1693 earthquake and rebuilt down the slope as Noto Nuova on a single orthogonal grid, the plan that anchors the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto inscribed by UNESCO in 2002.

The cathedral sits at the top of its stairs on Piazza Municipio, facing the civic cluster of Palazzo Ducezio across the square. Behind it, the ground rises again into Via Nicolaci, defined by the palace built in 1731 and covered each May, since the early 1980s, in petal mosaics for three days.

Further along Corso Vittorio Emanuele the Jesuit church adds its own bell tower and a view back over the rooftops. Fifteen kilometers south the coast turns to salt marsh and reserve, a different register of the same limestone country.

The local stone itself, a soft tufaceous limestone, turns gold in late light, which is the thread running under the grid, the staircases and the carved balconies alike: a single rebuilding, in a single material, read at every scale from a town plan down to a corbel.

Crocifisso (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Principe di Belludia (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Orti Villadorata (MICHELIN) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in Noto

• Cattedrale di San Nicolò. The staircase it commands is wide enough to hold the whole width of Piazza Municipio in front of it, so the facade reads as the square's far wall as much as a building in its own right.
• Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata. The balconies along the street are carried on carved corbels of grotesques and animals, stone figures that project out over the passersby below.
• Piazza Municipio and Palazzo Ducezio. Civic square facing the cathedral, with Palazzo Ducezio, the eighteenth-century town hall designed by Vincenzo Sinatra after the rebuild.

How to get to Noto

It has its own railway station. Siracusa is about 42 min away by road.

Everything we know about Noto

Sciacca

Why visit Sciacca

Sciacca sits on terraces above its harbor on the southwestern coast of Sicily, between Selinunte and Agrigento. The mountain that rises 386 meters behind the town still vents steam into rock chambers used as a spa from antiquity until the regional spa closed in 2015.

The Arabs renamed the town Xacca, water; the present name comes from that. Sciacca is the second-largest commune in the Agrigento province after the capital, with about 39,000 inhabitants, and one of the great fishing harbors of southern Sicily.

The town's layout still carries its origins: a medieval core divided between fishermen's and artisans' quarters, terraced on the cliff, with the harbor below and the mountain and its steam caves behind. Two industries have grown out of that position, one drawing on the clay and craft tradition of the province, the other filling the calendar each year with a Carnival whose roots reach back to Roman festival.

What the springs began as a cure, the town turned into an identity: water gave Sciacca its name, its baths, and eventually the industries that keep it going.

Hostaria del Vicolo (MICHELIN) and La Lampara (Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Sciacca

• Palazzo Steripinto. 1501 palazzo with a diamond-pointed ashlar façade, one of the finest examples of Gothic-Renaissance Plateresque art in Sicily.
• Stufe di San Calogero. Natural steam caves on Monte Kronio with temperatures of 40-45 degrees, reached through rock chambers that still vent into the cave walls.
• Castello Incantato. Open-air museum on the outskirts with hundreds of stone heads carved into the rock by the artist Filippo Bentivegna in the early twentieth century.

How to get to Sciacca

Palermo is about 1 h 39 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sciacca

Ragusa

Why visit Ragusa

The town sits on a Hyblean plateau at 502 meters, sixty kilometers southwest of Siracusa, on a ridge cut by two deep ravines. The 1693 earthquake killed five thousand of its eleven thousand residents and erased the medieval town that stood there.

What followed split the place in two. One faction rebuilt on the old site and kept the ancient name attached to the lower town; the other built a new orthogonal grid on the higher ridge to the west and became Ragusa Superiore.

Both halves were inscribed together in 2002 as part of the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto. The two cathedrals face each other across the divide, one anchoring each half, evidence that the split was never resolved so much as built into stone twice over.

What the earthquake broke, the rebuilding fixed into a permanent argument between two street plans on the same ridge: one curled and medieval in outline, the other laid out square.

I Banchi (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Cucina e Vino (Slow Food), Duomo (L'Espresso and La Liste) and 7 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Ragusa

• Duomo di San Giorgio. Built 1739-1775, three-tier convex façade above a wide staircase that formed the opening shot of the Montalbano titles.
• Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista. Eighteenth-century Baroque cathedral on the principal piazza of Ragusa Superiore, balancing the other cathedral in Ragusa Ibla.
• Valle dei Ponti. Deep ravine south of the historic center of Ragusa Superiore, crossed by bridges including the 1843 Ponte dei Cappuccini and the modern Ponte Nuovo.

How to get to Ragusa

It has its own railway station. Siracusa is about 1 h 30 min away by road.

Everything we know about Ragusa

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 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.

Cortile Spirito Santo (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Don Camillo (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Ostaria (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 5 more places are listed in food guides.

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.

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.

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.

Coria (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Sapio (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Me Cumpari Turiddu (MICHELIN and Slow Food) and 7 more places are listed in food guides.

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