Tour manager Davide Iosia is blunt on the first day of my Collette tour in Palermo. Sicily, he says, is a place where you find many treasures alongside horrible things.
He doesn’t say what those horrible things are, but I envisage volcanic eruptions, pickpockets, Mafia bosses and unexpected calamities. In Palermo’s dishevelled back alleys, I could be knocked out by a plummeting plaster putto. Or, distracted by the ripe bosoms and buttocks flaunted on fountains, I might trip over a marble flagstone and crack my head.
The Sicilians have a fondness for disaster. No church on this island is without a saint who came to a sticky end. Votive offerings record miraculous escapes from pestilence and shipwreck.
Iosia has confidence, however. He’s not a man to let 2000 years of horrible history put him off. He’s been easing visitors around for years and, while he works his dark material for entertainment value, he delivers all the great and good about Sicily, of which there’s plenty.
Still, I’m glad to be here on an escorted journey. It brings clarity to this complicated yet utterly wonderful destination, and here’s how.
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The convenience
A long time ago I drove around Sicily and was terrified by the motorway speed, winding mountain roads and maze of old-town streets. It’s a relief this time to be sitting in a coach, Iosia’s amusing patter in my ear, Sicily’s splendid scenery in my gaze.
The island has acquired fine new motorways, but not always in the right places for tourists. Public transport is slow and inconvenient and key sights are spread out. Anyone with limited time will find an escorted tour carefully planned to get you around in the most efficient way.
Detractors say you only get a single day in each place, but is that any different for most individual travellers? Besides, half the day isn’t consumed by the logistics and hassle that comes with getting yourself about.
No queuing for tickets to Monreale Cathedral or the ferry to Salina on this tour. No finding hotels and parking spaces. I might have only one day, but it’s all mine.
A great tour manager
A good tour manager enriches your experience, and this Collette tour provides. Iosia is from Messina, has a degree in political science, has worked in half the cities in Europe, and is now back home.
He appears to know everything about Sicily’s history, which is no mean feat given its convoluted past, during which it was controlled by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans and Spanish.
I could get all that online, but online doesn’t make pronouncements such as “Italians are like babies, we have to eat every two hours otherwise we start crying”. Online doesn’t chat about daily Sicilian life and personal family relationships. It never will.
The value of human experience will never be bettered by Google, AI or robots. Iosia is no robot. He is like many of the best guides – and best travellers – a misfit and eccentric and magpie of facts. He knows his stuff.
A tour manager isn’t a tour controller. Plenty of free time is built into this tour and Iosia is full of advice as he lets us loose. He directs me towards Palermo’s best museum and Cefalu’s best gelato, and isn’t perturbed at my darts into independent exploration.
The chance to meet locals
The first time I was in Sicily my main interactions were with hotel receptionists, waiters and the odd passerby, and yet critics of escorted tours complain about their bubble-like experience. Although it seems counterintuitive, you have greater interaction with locals on a cleverly planned tour that isn’t just about sights.
On every day in every destination on this 13-day itinerary we get a local guide willing to share their story and answer questions. We’re introduced to unusual people too, such as a caper farmer on the island of Salina.
Would I otherwise have stopped in Alcamo at the winery of the Tonnino family? Maybe, if I’d ever found it. But I wouldn’t have got involved in making bucatini pasta and having lunch with winemaker Francesca Tonnino and half her family.
Certainly, on another day, I’d never have met organic olive farmer Nicola Clemenza. He has 5000 olive trees on Sicily’s west coast and campaigns against the Mafia’s influence on agritourism. His house has been burned down. You just don’t have access to that type of insight unless you’re on a tour.
Detours to unusual things
Of course, we see the big things: Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, Mount Etna and the chic cliff-perched resort town of Taormina are all on this tour. Yet, a well-designed itinerary should present you with the unusual or quirky, and needs to get away from the busy tourist destinations for a more nuanced experience.
This Collette tour strays to the island’s less-visited east coast, explored from our base in Marsala, which will never be guidebook starred, but never swamped by tourists either. Marsala is an agreeable town of squawking schoolchildren and perambulating locals. Instead of souvenir shops, it has tobacconists and barber shops.
From Marsala, we head to the salt pans of Stagnone Lagoon, which have been worked since Phoenician times. Then to Favignana, a tiny island that most people would blink and miss. In the Garden of the Impossible, more than 300 species of Mediterranean plants have been coaxed from old quarries. It only gets 2000 visitors a year: who says Italy is over-touristed?
A good overview
The cliche trotted out by smug travellers is that you need three months or 10 years to appreciate a place. Useful advice if you have a trust fund. For the rest of us, not so much. The perennial traveller’s dilemma is whether to see lots of places, or only a few places in depth. While Sicily is fabulous, I don’t want to spend 10 years here. I’m happy enough with my two-week jaunt.
Have we missed things on this tour? Yes, even a few big things like baroque town Noto and ancient coastal city Siracusa. But I feel as if I’ve had a good overview. I’ve seen Greek ruins and Norman cathedrals and buzzing, revitalised Palermo. Key sights have been balanced by little islands and small towns.
What a show Sicily has been. It has striking mountain landscapes, tremendous monuments and neglected grandeur. It has giggling angels that float across pink ceilings, food-filled markets, crypts full of embalmed corpses and windmills against salt pans in which flamingos wade.
But there’s more to the world than Sicily, and already I’m planning my next tour.
THE DETAILS
TOUR
Collette’s 13-day small-group Sicily & Its Isles itinerary costs $7949 a person twin share with multiple departures until October 2026. It includes Monreale Cathedral and other highlights such as Palermo, Agrigento’s Greek temples, Taormina, Mount Etna and the island of Salina. See gocollette.com
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visitsicily.info
The writer travelled as a guest of Collette.
Brian Johnston seemed destined to become a travel writer: he is an Irishman born in Nigeria and raised in Switzerland, who has lived in Britain and China and now calls Australia home.From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
