The Sicilian Sea
Coves you reach only on foot or by boat, islands where time slows down, the most beautiful beach in the world. The Sicilian sea is not one sea: it is ten different seas — and we drive you to the right pier.
Coves you reach only on foot or by boat, islands where time slows down, the most beautiful beach in the world. The Sicilian sea is not one sea: it is ten different seas — and we drive you to the right pier.
Seven kilometres of coast where cars never arrived: Sicily’s first nature reserve, born in 1981 from a protest march that stopped a road already under construction. You walk it cove by cove — Cala Capreria, Cala dell’Uzzo, Cala Marinella — or admire it from the sea, by boat from San Vito or Scopello, past sea stacks and old tuna fisheries. Transparent water, broom flowers, and the silence roads have never known.
The largest of the Egadi islands is shaped like a butterfly resting on the water. Its tuff quarries, carved for centuries, became unreal coves: at Cala Rossa and Bue Marino you swim between golden man-cut walls and a sea shifting from turquoise to deep blue. You get around by bicycle, eat tuna from the old Florio tonnara — today a beautiful museum — and in the evening the harbour smells of granita and sea salt.
The smallest of the Egadi is a handful of white houses with blue shutters around a pier. No cars, a single bar on the little square, and the Grotta del Genovese guarding engravings twelve thousand years old: deer, tuna and dancing figures carved when Sicily was still joined to the island. The Faraglione, ten minutes on foot, offers the finest swim; the rest of the day is decided by the sea.
The farthest and wildest of the Egadi: a limestone mountain rising from the water, four hundred sea caves carved all around, trails climbing through pines and goats to the old signal station. The village belongs to fishermen, and it shows: boats leave at dawn and the catch is sold on the pier on their return. The boat tour of the island — cave after cave, the water turning emerald — is worth the trip alone.
An extinct volcano an hour from Palermo, black with lava and green with prickly pears, its village houses painted with murals. Beneath the surface, Italy’s first Marine Protected Area (1986): seabeds divers from all over the world know by heart, the Blue Grotto, groupers as tame as house cats. Those who don’t dive take the boat tour, stop at the natural pools and dine on Ustica lentils, tiny and famous.
Closer to Africa than to Sicily, black and windswept, with no sandy beaches — and precisely for this, authentic. You sleep in dammusi, Arab houses with domed roofs; you bathe in the Specchio di Venere, a turquoise lake inside a crater, and take a sauna in the natural cave of Benikulà. In the Pantescan gardens, circular stone walls shelter a single citrus tree from the wind: from those winds also comes Passito, the sweet wine that here is religion.
Italy’s last land, farther south than Tunis: a limestone plateau ringed by a sea that doesn’t look Mediterranean — it looks like an atoll. Rabbit Beach is reached on foot down a trail, the water so clear that boats seem suspended in air, and in summer Caretta caretta turtles come to lay their eggs on the protected sand. Isola dei Conigli, Cala Pulcino, Tabaccara: names that those who have been pronounce with longing. Far from everything — and unforgettable precisely for that.
Our job begins at the pier: we drive you to the right departure port — Trapani, Palermo, Porto Empedocle, San Vito — at the right time, and on your return someone is already waiting. Crossings and boats we book for you with local partners.
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