Sicily

The island is dominated by its volcano, Etna, snow-capped for part of the year and facing both the Ionian Sea and the interior. Its black slopes, covered in cooled lava flows, carry vines planted in ash and villages built of dark volcanic stone that stand in sharp contrast to the pale limestone found elsewhere on the island. Sicily has no single ground: in the north, the Tyrrhenian coast narrows between sea and mountain; in the east, the Ionian coast stretches out at the foot of Etna; in the south, wide plains open up, covered in almond and olive trees, reaching white cliffs that drop to the sea. The interior, mountainous and far less visited, keeps hill villages that most travellers only glimpse in passing. What stands out in Sicily is the layering of cultures that settled here one after another. Greek colonists left temples still standing, some rising alone in open fields with no town left around them. The Arabs brought citrus groves, irrigation channels and a taste for walled gardens. The Normans built cathedrals that mix Gothic vaulting with gilded mosaics and Arab-inspired domes, especially in Palermo, where all three influences sometimes appear within a single building. Later, earthquakes led to the rebuilding of a whole stretch of the south-east in a late baroque style, generous with curves and carved balconies, found today in Noto or Ragusa. The stone changes with the cultures: golden limestone in the baroque towns, black basalt around Etna, pale tuff in places along the coast. Country houses, often low and closed around an inner courtyard, shelter from the sun rather than open onto the view; large windows are not the rule here. In town, façades play a bigger part, with wrought-iron balconies and carved pediments that still carry the marks of each building period. A stay in Sicily asks you to pick a base rather than try to see everything: the Ionian coast and Etna for those who want sea and volcano together, the baroque south-east for towns of golden stone, the west for salt flats and a different, flatter light. The interior is best crossed slowly, on roads that climb and turn between wheat fields and hilltop villages. People stay as readily in an old townhouse, with high ceilings and shutters closed against the heat, as in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by almond trees. Sicily is not a uniform island: it is a land of contrasts, between the black of the volcano and the white of the baroque, between a busy coastline and an interior that is almost empty. What people come looking for is that historical depth, visible in every village, and a coastline that alternates beaches, cliffs and fishing harbours without ever repeating itself for long.