Sicily has been having a moment for about three thousand years.
Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish - everyone wanted it, everyone took it, and every one of them left something behind. Temples. Mosaics. Almonds. Couscous. Baroque towns built on top of earthquakes. A cuisine that isn't quite Italian and isn't quite anything else.
But something has shifted in the last few years. Sicily has gone from the island Italians holiday on to the place everyone wants to go.
So if you're planning a trip to Sicily - or just wondering what the fuss is about - here's what's behind it, what to drink, what to eat, and where to go once you're there.
The White Lotus Effect
After the second season was filmed in Taormina, searches for Sicilian holidays jumped by more than 300%. The hotel it was shot in booked out solidly for six months.
And honestly, Taormina had it coming - in the best possible way.
It was busy long before the cameras arrived, because it is one of the most beautiful towns in the Mediterranean. The Greek theatre with Etna smoking behind it. Streets of jasmine and lemon. The sea a very long way below. We spend an evening there on our trip, and not one guest has ever wanted to leave early.
Photo: Taormina, Sicily
What the show really did was point several million people at an island most of them had never seriously considered.
Which is wonderful. Because the rest of Sicily is even better.
Mount Etna: The Volcano That Makes Great Wine
Start with the volcano, because everyone does.
Mount Etna is Europe's most active volcano - and one of the most exciting places in the world to grow grapes right now.
The reason is simple. Vines grow between roughly 400 and 1,000 metres up the slopes, which means hot days and genuinely cold nights, so the fruit ripens slowly and keeps its freshness. And the soil isn't one soil but hundreds: every eruption over thousands of years laid down a different flow of lava, ash and pumice in a different place.
Many of the oldest vines here aren't trained along wires like most vineyards you've seen. They grow as individual free-standing bushes, each one staked upright on its own, some of them well over a hundred years old. It looks less like a vineyard and more like an orchard of small black trees.
Photo: Bush vines at Terre Nere, Mount Etna
The result is wines that taste nothing like the Sicily of twenty years ago. Where the island once had a reputation for big, sun-baked reds, Etna now produces something closer to the opposite: pale, perfumed, mineral, with real elegance.
If you like Pinot Noir or Nebbiolo, Nerello Mascalese - Etna's signature red grape - will feel like coming home. If you like crisp, saline whites, look for Carricante.
There's one more thing the wine world is quietly obsessed with. The mountain is divided into 133 named vineyard districts, or contrade, and growers have started bottling them separately. Two wines from the same grape, the same year, the same winemaker, grown a few hundred metres apart, taste noticeably different.
People have started calling Etna the Burgundy of the Mediterranean. It's a big claim, and the hierarchy is nowhere near settled - which is exactly what makes it fun. You're watching a great wine region establish itself in real time.
Most visitors see Etna on a day tour from Catania or Taormina. Worth doing - but the wineries on the mountain are where the real interest is, and most of them you need an introduction to.
The People Behind It
What changed on Etna wasn't the geology. It was the people.
Benanti is where the modern story begins. When Giuseppe Benanti founded the estate in 1988, there were only four wineries left on the entire mountain, and most of what they made was bulk wine sold off cheaply. He went looking for the old native grapes and the best sites, backed a region everyone else had written off, and was proved right. His Pietra Marina - a pure Carricante from Milo, on the eastern slope - became the first Etna wine to win Gambero Rosso's top three-glasses award, and the same year Benanti was named Italian winery of the year. His twin sons Antonio and Salvino run it now, and we'll be calling in on them next year.
Alberto Graci left finance in Milan, came home, and built one of the most admired estates on the mountain by essentially getting out of the way - native yeasts, old wood, nothing that stands between the site and the glass.
Tornatore farm the northern slope across several contrade, and bottle them separately so you can taste the difference for yourself.
Vivera work organically on the north-east, and make an Etna Rosso with that very Etna trick of being light and intense at the same time.
Photo: Mount Etna
And then there's our friend Angelo Di Grazia - a winemaker from Licodia Eubea, in the hills south of Catania, and a good example of what's happening across the island. He's the consulting winemaker at Tornatore, but his own project is the interesting one: he's resurrecting native Sicilian grapes that had all but vanished, because they hold acidity and handle heat better than the famous varieties do.
"You need to look to the past to shape the future," he says. In a warming climate, that isn't nostalgia. It's strategy.
Four More Corners of Sicily Worth Knowing
Etna sits on the east coast, under Taormina. But the island is big - about the size of Tasmania - and four other corners of it make wine worth crossing it for.
The south-east, around Noto and Ragusa
Flat, hot, golden-stoned baroque country behind a beautiful coastline. The wine to know here is Cerasuolo di Vittoria, named after the town it comes from - a blend of two local red grapes, Nero d'Avola and Frappato, and the only wine on the whole island with Italy's top DOCG classification. Cherry, blood orange, dried herbs. Lovely with everything.
Nero d'Avola on its own is Sicily's most widely planted red grape, and the one you're most likely to have drunk without realising it. Done well, it's dark-fruited and savoury rather than jammy.
The west, around Marsala and Trapani
Marsala is two things, which is where the confusion comes from. It's a seaside city in the far west of the island - and it's also the fortified wine that made Sicily's name in the eighteenth century, because the wine is named after the city it was shipped from. Marsala the wine went badly out of fashion after decades of sweet industrial versions, and a small group of producers are now bringing back the dry, nutty, savoury style that deserves to sit alongside Sherry.
The west is also where most of Sicily's best Grillo is grown - crisp, citrusy, faintly salty, and the island's answer to a good Vermentino. Drink it with anything that came out of the sea.
Pantelleria
A small volcanic island off the west coast, closer to Tunisia than to Sicily, where the wind is so relentless that vines are grown in hollows scooped out of the ground to shelter them. The grapes dry in the sun and become Passito di Pantelleria, one of the great sweet wines of the world.
Salina and the Aeolian Islands
Off the north coast sits a cluster of volcanic islands that happen to be a wine region almost nobody has heard of, largely because there is so little of it. The Aeolians make Malvasia delle Lipari, one of the smallest appellations in all of Italy, and roughly four-fifths of it comes from Salina alone.
The grapes are dried in the sun on open cane racks before pressing, which concentrates everything. What you get is amber in the glass, with candied citrus, apricot and honey, and a line of salt running underneath that stops it ever being cloying.
Hauner and Caravaglio are the names to look for. We've been to Hauner on Salina ourselves, and it's the sort of visit that explains a wine better than any tasting note can. Tasca d'Almerita also make one at Capofaro, their estate on the island.
Photo: The view from a winery on Lipari, Aeolian Islands
Salina is also where the best capers in Italy grow, and it's where we base ourselves for the island leg of our trip. The two facts are connected: it's a small, green, steep place that grows a few things exceptionally well and doesn't bother with much else.
You'll find the lot in our Sicilian wine collection - or go straight to Sicilian reds and Sicilian whites.
Sicilian Food: What to Eat, and Where
Our honest position: Sicily might be the best place to eat in Italy. Not the most refined - the most interesting. It's the one cuisine in the country that is openly North African, Greek, Spanish and Italian all at once, and nobody ever tried to tidy it up.
It also changes completely as you move around the island, so what to eat depends on where you are.
Palermo and the west
- Panelle - chickpea fritters, in a roll, eaten standing up
- Sfincione - thick, soft, oniony Sicilian pizza
- Couscous with fish, in Trapani and San Vito Lo Capo
- Busiate with pesto alla trapanese - hand-twisted pasta with almonds and tomato instead of pine nuts and basil
- Raw red prawns from Mazara del Vallo, with nothing but oil and lemon
Catania and the east
- Pasta alla Norma - fried aubergine, tomato, basil, salted ricotta. Named after the Bellini opera, because Catania is a city that names its pasta after operas.
- Pistachios from Bronte, grown on lava, sold by the gram and worth it
The south-east, around Modica and Ragusa
- Modica chocolate, worked cold so the sugar stays granular and the cocoa actually tastes of cocoa
- Pachino tomatoes and Noto almonds, which ruin all other tomatoes and almonds for you
The Aeolian Islands
- Capers from Salina - fat and floral, nothing like the jarred ones
- Pane cunzato - a slab of bread loaded with tomato, anchovy, capers and cheese
- Swordfish, tuna, and whatever came in that morning
And the sweets, where Sicily simply wins
- Cannoli, filled to order so the shell still cracks
- Cassata - the ricotta and marzipan cake that came from Arab Palermo
- Granita with a brioche to dip in it, eaten for breakfast. If you do one thing in Sicily, do this one.
Photo: Cannoli with Bronte pistachio
Where to Go in Sicily: The Places We Keep Going Back To
The problem with things to do in Sicily isn't finding them. It's that there are too many, spread across an island most people badly underestimate the size of. These are the ones we'd never skip.
Ortigia, the little island at the heart of Siracusa, where the cathedral is a Greek temple with a church built around it - the columns are still there, holding up the walls. If you only have time for one town, make it this one.
Photo: Piazza Duomo, Ortigia, Siracusa
The Val di Noto - Noto, Modica, Ragusa Ibla. An earthquake flattened this corner in 1693 and the survivors rebuilt everything at once, in the same style, from the same golden stone. The result is UNESCO-listed and faintly unreal.
The Greek and Roman sites, which are better than most of the ones in Greece. The Valley of the Temples at Agrigento. The Greek theatre at Taormina, with the volcano behind it. The theatre at Siracusa, still used for performances. Segesta, standing alone on a hill with nothing around it.
Palermo, which isn't pretty and isn't trying to be. The Arab-Norman churches, the gold mosaics at Monreale just outside town, and markets closer to Marrakech than Milan.
The west coast - Erice on its mountain, the tuna fishery at Scopello, San Vito Lo Capo, and Favignana off the coast.
Cefalu, with a Norman cathedral, a crescent of beach and a rock behind it.
And the Aeolian Islands - Salina green and quiet, Panarea tiny and glamorous, Lipari busy and useful, and Stromboli erupting all night, which you can watch from a boat with a glass in your hand.
And the mountain above all of it, occasionally smoking.
It is an absurd amount of beauty for one island. Nobody sees all of it in a week, so the real skill is choosing well.
Why We Chose Sicily for 2027
The problem with Sicily is always the same: there's too much of it, and the best of it is hard to reach.
The winery with one long table over the vines doesn't take bookings from strangers. The restaurant worth changing your plans for has thirty seats and no website. The boat that gets you close to Stromboli at night isn't the one the ferry company sells you. And the island is properly big, so a week spent working out logistics is a week not spent at the table.
Which is why we built the trip the way we did.
Our Sicily small group tour is one week in Sicily - 19 to 26 June 2027 - for a maximum of fourteen guests, hosted by the two of us the whole way.
Seven nights. The baroque south-east and Ortigia. A performance at the ancient Greek Theatre in Syracuse. Chocolate in Modica. An evening in Taormina. Winery lunches on the slopes of Mount Etna and a Sicilian cooking class. Then the Aeolian Islands - a private boat out past Panarea to Stromboli with dinner on board, a caper farm on Salina, and a Michelin-starred farewell dinner.
Photo: The Aeolian Islands
Every breakfast, lunch and dinner. Wine at every one of them. All transport, ferries and transfers included.
It isn't a sightseeing tour with a tasting bolted on, and it isn't a coach trip with forty strangers. It's the week we'd design for ourselves - and have, several times over.
If you'd rather the other coast, our Amalfi Coast & Ischia trip runs two weeks later, or you'll find both of our Italy small group tours here.
The Final Pour
Sicily is going to keep getting more popular, and it has earned every bit of it.
But the island worth your attention is bigger than the search results suggest.
It's a winemaker on the side of a volcano bottling two fields separately because they taste different and he thinks you should know. It's granita for breakfast. Capers that taste like flowers. A cathedral still propped up by the Greek temple it was built inside.
Sicily isn't having a moment.
Sicily is finally being noticed.
Pour something volcanic - or better still, come and drink it where it was made.
Fourteen places. Never more.