I’ve changed a lot, but after 20 years Sicily is just as I remember

Two decades on from my carefree jaunt, a very different trip to the Mediterranean’s largest island with an old friend rolled back the clock

Our Return Journeys series explores the joy of a nostalgic trip back to a destination from one’s past – whether a childhood camping holiday or a formative first job abroad. This week, Susie Rushton makes a repeat visit to Sicily
November, 2004. The trip was carelessly arranged. After all, it had been a last-minute decision to go to Sicily – we were supposed to fly to Egypt, but a terrorist attack put paid to that. After changing our tickets we flew instead to Palermo, with just a guidebook and the first night booked in a little hotel in the capital.
By this point, Martin and I, five years friends after meeting at art college, had a fixed arrangement. Every couple of months, he would suggest a destination, idly dropping it into conversation: ‘We should go to… Tangiers?’ I would somehow find the money for a flight.
We’d depart, a few weeks later, without much thought or preparation. We were in our 20s, both single, both apparently unable to find a man – with starter jobs and no responsibilities. I might now wish that I had set aside money for a pension, or invested in Google shares, but I didn’t. Instead, several times a year, I road-and-rail tripped with my friend around Morocco and Sri Lanka, Rome and Tel Aviv, Japan and Devon.
In 2004 the internet was driving a boom in cheap and accessible travel via new flight-booking sites. The first click was easy. Yet, there were no smartphones, so once on the ground, we made it up as we went along, using maps and Rough Guides, staying one or two nights in each place – just as thoughtless young people had been doing for generations before us.
That fortnight in Sicily was typical of our style of travel. We ticked off the main stops: frantic Palermo, with its elegant, marble-paved streets; Baroque Syracuse and Noto; hilltop Enna; the port of Messina and beach resort Cefalù. We dangled over Etna’s slopes in a cable car, the lava streams smoking. Mostly, though, we rose late and drank coffee. We gazed longingly at handsome Sicilian men (who wore thick down jackets to stave off the November chill; it was 20C). Martin, an Austrian native, drove the hire car, as tiny trucks piled high with mattresses or citrus crates overtook us on lethal clifftop bends. I didn’t even have a licence.
Because we made so few plans, we stayed in sketchy places – by November, Sicily is definitely low season – and found ourselves in dead ends. Halfway through the trip we left Sicily completely, catching a ferry from Messina across the straits to Italy. We’d had the idea that Calabria, the ankle of the mainland, might be worth a detour of several hundred miles – a decision that was made on the basis of Martin having a friend who lived on that coastline (who turned out to be away). Perhaps it was more fun – even therapeutic – to tour with no itinerary in place? We made mistakes but then, we felt like we had so much time.
Twenty years on, Martin and I only have five days to circumnavigate the island. We have squeezed the short trip in, with difficulty, guiltily, between our respective obligations. Husband and children have been bribed with promises of quid pro quo (me). Work trips have been carefully rescheduled (Martin). We are careworn, more careful. There is a very tight plan. Every hour is accounted for.
We look and feel a little different, but how about Sicily? How much can an island with a history that takes in the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs – not to mention the Mafia, modern lemon production, Dolce & Gabbana, and Visconti’s The Leopard – actually alter in a mere two decades?
It’s certainly easier to get to Sicily now: there are four international airports, the budget carriers keeping every corner of the island supplied with tourists. We meet at Catania airport (best for EasyJet, worst for shutdowns every time Etna exhales a puff of smoke), in a packed arrivals hall. Now living in different countries, my friend and I haven’t spent more than a couple of hours together for 15 years. I feel overly fussy, not quite the same breezy globetrotter as when we last did this. He has much smarter luggage. Will our middle-aged selves get along?
Well, that’s the best part of the whole holiday. His presence – he who was there constantly in my most miserable, wobbly, formative years – makes everything feel lighter. The sound of his laugh, the sandpaper-dry Viennese humour, his unruffled pace. As we emerge into the crushing heat of a July lunchtime to collect our car (a Fiat 500 Cabrio, selected after detailed discussion on WhatsApp), the intervening years evaporate.
Some things have changed. I can drive. Not well, admittedly. ‘I get the impression that you don’t look in the mirrors,’ Martin remarks as I ease the Fiat on to a motorway from the slip road. Still, we get to Taormina – an hour away along a perfectly maintained toll road up the coast – in time to catch the sunset over the famous Greco-Roman amphitheatre, Etna silhouetted in the distance.
Taormina, a town that seems to almost tip off a slope into aquamarine seas below, was already a honeymoon hub when we first came to Sicily. Travelling as an unromantic couple, we didn’t stay long. This time around we experience the resort’s full charisma, booking into a creamy-coloured marble hotel – built in the 1960s and exuding that era – that begs for a Claudia Cardinale to glide along its corridors.
But it is the more recent memory of Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya McQuoid in the second season of White Lotus that lingers in Taormina. The town is still cashing in on the ridiculous success of that TV show from 2022 and there are Americans in every side street, gelateria and breakfast room. The £1,000-a-night hotel that provided the show’s famous location, the San Domenico Palace, is booked up until the next Ice Age.
Yet the influx doesn’t seem to rankle islanders, far from it. Anti-tourist protests in Spain and Greece haven’t spread here. Sicilians are coping with record-breaking drought: the farmlands are cracking for lack of rain this year, native species of goats are dying out. The highest-ever European temperature was recorded in Syracuse, in the south of the island, in 2021: 48.8C. But perhaps more than any other terrifying symptom of this heat, the authorities are afraid tourists might be scared away. Water is being rationed in some regions, but not for hotels or resorts.
We see the parched fields and hillsides of the interior while crossing to the north Tyrrhenian coast, our red Fiat now spattered the same colour by sirocco winds from the Sahara Desert. Because the stilted motorways that cross the island are so superior, we can make Cefalù, a beach resort preferred by Sicilians, in a morning. By lunchtime we’re eating bucatini con le sardi (a fibrous speciality of sardines, fennel tops, breadcrumbs) in an esplanade café. The sand is packed with bronzed Italians starting their summer break; last time we were here, I remember a spray whipping from dramatic waves and an empty beach.
In the blazing afternoon, Cefalù cathedral is a refuge. Begun by the Normans who arrived on the island in the 11th century, it was topped up with Baroque and Arab architecture. Our guide – hired to crunch a thousand years of multi-ethnic history into an hour – gallops through the centuries, each era helpfully marked by new updates to this colossal, hotpotch church.
Above us on a clifftop is the megalithic Temple of Diana, a few hundred effortful steps upwards; before, we made it to the summit. Now we’re happy to be able to amble back along the shaded narrow streets where touristy shops sell arancini, lemon granita, pizza slices, and beach bags, dresses and fridge magnets printed with lemons – the emoji of Sicily.
Twenty years ago, we stayed in the old town of Cefalù and ate cassata – the island’s famous ricotta-and-marzipan dessert, bright with candied peel. (A Viennese travel companion means there is always a special attention to pastry.) Today we flee the heat and drive up into the mountainous Madonie regional park. (Also, cassata is out of season, according to our guide; the desserts made with fresh cheese are liable to curdle in the heat, so are better eaten in autumn and winter.)
In this mountainous interior just a few kilometres away – reached via twisting roads – the air is fresher and scented with pine trees. Vines cover the steeper hillsides, including the dark-skinned nero d’avola grape, a variety native to Sicily. It was fairly obscure at home, back in 2004, and I remember struggling to find it on any off-licence shelves back in Britain; the plummy red is now ubiquitous in our supermarkets. We overnight in a remote winery, a former 12th-century abbey overlooking the vineyards – and find that there are in fact several pages on the wine list devoted to an array of native grapes, sparkling white, grappa…
None of which is helpful prep for a drive into Palermo the next morning. The capital city has been built, stage by stage, by invaders from across Europe and Africa, classical civilisation and modern bohemians. Its ornamental Baroque avenues lead into a glamorous, crumbling port, but first, I have to drive without fear through intersections where no usual traffic rules apply; ‘Just, go,’ deadpans my passenger. This time we do have a sat nav, but no technology can help you avoid collision with a queue of impatient Sicilian truckers.
I’ve actually been to Palermo twice before, but it may as well be my first visit. Nothing is where I thought it was. Sometimes that happens when you retrace your steps (sometimes, lately, even in my own home). I had remembered 20-something versions of ourselves, reclining on the steps of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo in the pale autumn sunshine, having walked exhaustively around the city’s Baroque palaces and churches. But is that even possible? The city seems to sprawl in a way that can’t easily be covered on foot, and on the way to visit a palazzo art gallery we have to stop twice for strong espresso (standing at the counter; at least they now reluctantly take card payments).
The Sicilian capital has become a playpit for European art lovers – hosting the Manifesta biennale in 2018 – and the extraordinary Palazzo Butera is the ultimate expression of that love-in: an aristocratic palace with subtropical courtyard gardens, it was bought in 2016 by a super-rich Italian couple, Massimo and Francesca Valsecchi. It now houses their art collection. We wander the exquisitely restored salons. The contemporary artworks are less interesting to me than the blowsy 17th-century ceiling frescoes and, outside on the terrace, a rambling blue jasmine in bloom.
Barely 12 hours later, we are back on the scrappy streets of outer Palermo, our topless Cinquecento affording a full day of on-the-road tanning. Cutting off the entire western region of Sicily on this truncated trip – last time we meandered as far as Marsala – we land, rather uncertainly, in the southern fishing port of Sciacca for lunch. This coast of Sicily was not a successful stretch of our first holiday (I recall getting lost on a walk out to a remote beach, and extreme wind). At first sight Sciacca – pronounced sha-ka – looks a little drab and deserted. Empty trawlers crowd the port. But it transpires that everyone is inside eating. In one of those seamless moments that usually only exist on TV ads for mobile phone companies, I google and find a top-reviewed restaurant that’s open for another 10 minutes, the kind of place that looks like nothing from the outside, everything you’d dream of inside (large groups of Sicilian families lunching from vast platters, twists of Sicilian busiate pasta with swordfish and lemon, air-conditioning). Twenty years ago, we’d have needed a bit of luck to find that.
I don’t make it into the sea on the southern coast – which is agony, as it’s a startling jade – because time is running out. Mount Etna provides a slight reprieve by delaying all flights on our final day, so we quickly revisit the hilltop fortress city of Enna, right in the rural centre of the island. A thousand metres up, the medieval castle and terraces seem to repel anyone who dares to approach. Once into its steep streets, the relative calm of the place, the shade from its 14th-century churches, feel more like a provincial town in mainland Italy than anywhere else on Sicily.
In 2004, we made a detour here to meet up with friends who had just got engaged after a romantic break in Taormina: as a foursome, we celebrated their ridiculously adult commitment in a subterranean restaurant in Enna. Now we walk along its fortified walls searching for a familiar vista, squinting at street corners, gawping down at the faraway landscape, stretching out the last few hours of time together, gossiping and laughing. From up here, it appears nothing of real importance has changed at all.
AG Boutique Journey can recreate this tour or similar in Sicily, as well as putting together a selection of bespoke tours and experiences throughout Italy, starting at £2,500 per person on a double-room basis; agboutiquejourney.it