Splendour of Sicily
Italian island culture at its finest
SICILY — The Piazza Duomo in Syracuse is the place to learn to dunk.
2,700-year-old Syracuse (or Siracusa) was the most important city of Magna Graecia. It defeated mighty Athens in 413.
The very quotable Cicero thought it: “The greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all.”
In the heart of the Citta Vecchia (old city), the Caffe Minerva is run by Tina Santacroce, who studied Behavioural Sciences in Melbourne, Australia, before emigrating 33 years ago with her husband, Tino.
A table outside their café, opposite the 5th century Greek temple which became a cathedral in Byzantine times — is the best place to soak up Syracuse.
And your granita — a sugar rush of almond, strawberry and coffee whipped into a cream shake — is a local energy drink, best eaten via an expertly dunked brioche.
You need fuel to wander Syracuse. You need at least two granitas to walk through the city’s morning market on Via de Benedictus near the Greek Doric Temple of Apollo.
There you’re greeted by piles of saffron-flavoured Piacentinu cheese, basketfuls of fennel (finocchio), amaranth grains and pistachio; as well as cured meats, impossibly large aubergines, ridiculously healthylooking lemons, cassata sweets and prickly pears. There is also slab after slab of fish available. Provola cheese bulbs dangle everywhere.
You dodge barrowboys and give way to porters carrying haunches of meat. You’re pursued by fisarmonica players playing The Godfather theme.
In Sicily, it’s hard to escape Harry Connick Jr. It tests your accordion threshold. Syracuse is a city of catacombs, basilicas, marble, maiolica pavements, polished flagstones, fountains, statues and Baroque pallazios. The Archaeological Park has a Roman amphitheatre, the Ear of Dionysius (a 20-metre arch carved out of the rock face and named by Caravaggio in 1608), the largest Greek theatre in the Greco-Med world and a great sign at the tacky bus station — “Souvenir Toilet Bar.”
Outside of town, you have Euryalus Castle (the largest surviving castle of the Greek period), the Vendicari marshlands and the mosaics of the Roman villa Tellaro. And, of course, a golf course. Il Monasteri lies 12 kilometres inland.
For 3,000 years, Sicily has experienced invasions. The latest invaders are golfers. Mount Etna has the oldest golf course — Il Picciolo opened in 1989.
Putting is a challenge. You have to allow for sudden, often explosive shifts in the Earth’s crust.
The five-star Donnafugata Golf Resort & Spa lies south — 20 minutes from Comiso airport. It offers the best 36 holes out of the 129 “buca” currently available in Sicily.
Donnafugata (“Lady of Flight”) boasts the Gary Player Parkland course, which played host to the 2011 Sicilian Open and the fabulous Links, created by Italian architect Franco Piras.
It’s a good base from which to explore the Val di Noto — the glorious honey-walled showpiece villages of Caltagirone, Militello in Val di Catania, Catania, Modica, Palazzolo Acreide, Ragusa, Scicli and Noto; which gained UNESCO World Heritage status for “representing the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe.”
Two hours up the coast from Syracuse is Mount Etna. You can climb it by foot, 4x4, cable car or train. Or just watch it by the pool.
The best places to stay are 40 minutes away in Taormina — the Belmond Villa Sant’Andrea or Belmond Grand Timeo.
A designated driver is recommended in Taormina. So you must catch an ape. The ape (ap-pay) was launched by scooter company Piaggio in 1948. Feeling either a bit of a celebrity or a bit of a twit, you buzz around in an iconic soft-topped, three-wheeled 1960 Ape Calessino touring the “teatro antico” which still stages concerts and a film festival. Sting played there in 2012.
The tour entails a compulsory almond wine Blandanino cocktail in the Churchill Caffe San Giorgio.
You should stroll the Corso Umberto main street, re-hydrate with glass of Zammu (aniseed water) or maybe an ice cream, making room for a quick one in the Wunderbar in the Piazza IX Aprile.
Allegedly, D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover there and Tennessee Williams drank too much in one corner while writing A Streetcar Named Desire. He described Taormina as “stupendously and overwhelmingly beautiful.” You can’t argue. The three-euro one-way funicular takes you down to the Belmond Villa Sant’Andrea to fulfil your remaining sybaritic fantasies.
The villa was built in 1830 by a Cornish engineer, a student of Brunel, who constructed the Etna railway. Guests sip Spumante on the exclusive beach and dive from the rocks. The hotel was a playground for film stars in the 1950s and 1960s.
Veteran boatman Sebastiano rows you to the local grottoes—dell’ Amore and Azzurra. Then onto Isola Bella, once home to a friend of Queen Victoria and now a nature reserve.
The Villa Sant’Andrea’s Oliveira Restaurant — like its palatial rooms, charming staff, wine list, cheeseboard and breakfast acacia honey made by Etna’s honey farmers — help you love Sicily.
The region helps develop in you a serious and very probably incurable dolce vita habit.