For foodies
Where to eat well in Sicily
26 towns
Towns holding at least one place a guide put its name to. The ones several guides agree on come first.
Ragusa
Province: Ragusa · 502 m
Two cities split by a ravine on a Hyblean plateau at 502 meters, both rebuilt after 1693 and both UNESCO Baroque.
Lipari
Province: Messina · 44 m
The largest Aeolian island and the only municipality that administers six of the seven, with a clifftop castle citadel rising above two harbors.
Taormina
Province: Messina · 204 m
A terrace on Monte Tauro above the Ionian, with Etna on the southern horizon.
Catania
Province: Catania · 7 m
Sicily's second city and the cultural anchor of the Ionian coast, a UNESCO late-Baroque centro storico rebuilt in lava-black stone after the 1693 earthquake, sitting at the foot of Etna with a 17th-century elephant fountain (U Liotru) as its civic symbol.
Siracusa
Province: Siracusa · 17 m
Ortigia island, wrapped in honey-coloured Baroque stone, sits at the heart of the city Cicero called the most beautiful in the world, on the eastern Sicilian coast south of Catania.
Palazzolo Acreide
Province: Siracusa · 670 m
An 8,000-resident hilltop town on the Iblei plateau at 670m, rebuilt entirely in late Baroque after the 1693 earthquake and founded over the Greek Akrai colony in 664 BC, with a Greek theatre and a cluster of rock carvings unlike anything else nearby.
Menfi
Province: Agrigento · 119 m
Sicily's triple-signal western coast town: 11,800 residents on a low ridge above 9 km of protected sand at Porto Palo, backed by cellars and olive groves that between them carry Italy's three major small-town quality marks.
Castelbuono
Province: Palermo · 423 m
A Madonie town at 423 meters around the Ventimiglia castle, where manna is still tapped from ash trees and Fiasconaro bakes the panettone.
Giarre
Province: Catania · 81 m
An Etna town that split from Mascali in 1815 and built a neoclassical duomo, with two bell towers framing the volcano behind it.
Randazzo
Province: Catania · 750 m
A medieval town in black lava stone at 750 meters on Etna's north foot, with three quarter churches for Latins, Greeks and Lombards.
Cefalù
Province: Palermo · 16 m
A Norman cathedral at the foot of a 270-meter rock on the Tyrrhenian coast, founded in 1131.
Modica
Province: Ragusa · 296 m
A vertical Baroque city in the Hyblean Mountains, rebuilt from the 1693 earthquake and home to a chocolate recipe brought from Aztec Mexico.
Noto
Province: Siracusa · 152 m
The capital of Sicilian Baroque, rebuilt entirely in golden limestone after 1693.
Pantelleria
Province: Trapani · 8 m
A volcanic island closer to Tunisia than Sicily, where dry-stone dammusi sit among bush-trained Zibibbo vines listed by UNESCO.
Riposto
Province: Catania · 6 m
The Ionian port whose name comes from the Sicilian for cellar, where the wine of Mascali and Giarre was stored before shipping.
Monreale
Province: Palermo · 310 m
Above the Conca d'Oro at 310 meters, the cathedral William II built between 1174 and 1182 holds 6,340 square meters of Norman mosaics.
San Vito Lo Capo
Province: Trapani · 5 m
A three-kilometer white-sand beach at Sicily's northwest tip, the town that turned cous cous into a September festival.
Sciacca
Province: Agrigento · 60 m
A terraced fishing harbor on Sicily's southwestern coast, built on a spa town of the fifth century BC and a ceramics center since the fourteenth.
Aci Castello
Province: Catania · 15 m
A coastal town just north of Catania on the Riviera dei Ciclopi, where the basalt headland holds the 1076 Norman Castello d'Aci and the seven volcanic Faraglioni dei Ciclopi rise from the sea, the rocks the Cyclops threw at Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
Nicosia
Province: Enna · 720 m
A Byzantine-Norman royal city at 720 meters on four hills, one of Sicily's principal Gallo-Italic centres where the Lombard dialect nkoukkà still survives.
Castiglione di Sicilia
Province: Catania · 621 m
A hill town on the north flank of Etna at 621 meters, base camp for the Alcantara valley and the volcano's most serious red wines.
Lampedusa e Linosa
Province: Agrigento · 25 m
Italy's southernmost comune, three islands on the African continental shelf, closer to Tunisia than to Sicily.
Pachino
Province: Siracusa · 65 m
Sicily's southernmost town, on the Capo Passero promontory, and the name behind the Pomodoro di Pachino PGI cherry tomato.
Favignana
Province: Trapani · 6 m
The largest of the Egadi Islands off western Sicily, ringed by calcarenite cliffs and flooded quarries in place of beaches, with a 19th-century tuna fishery at its center.
Marsala
Province: Trapani · 3 m
Sicily's westernmost city, born from the Phoenician refugees of Mozia, where Garibaldi landed in 1860 and English merchants invented Marsala wine.
San Marco d'Alunzio
Province: Messina · 540 m
A hilltop borgo at 540 meters in pink Aluntina marble, founded by the Greeks and later Robert Guiscard's first Sicilian base.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Arquà Petrarca
Province: Padova
The Euganean Hills village where Francesco Petrarca spent his last four years and died in 1374, renamed in his honor in 1868.
Samugheo
Province: Oristano
Sardinia's textile-weaving capital: a 2,757-resident Mandrolisai borgo where the MURATS regional textile museum, the Tessingiu woven-art biennale, and an active community of weavers on traditional looms keep a knot-stitch tradition alive.
Salò
Province: Brescia
On the deepest gulf of the lake, with the longest waterfront promenade and the cathedral of the Riviera di Salò.
Matelica
Province: Macerata
A Verdicchio town at 354 meters in the upper Esino valley, with a Roman marble globe in its archaeological museum.
Montecarlo
Province: Lucca
A walled hill village at 163 meters above the Lucca plain, founded by Emperor Charles IV in 1333 and named for him, surrounded by twenty wineries.