There is one room in Palermo that explains the whole city, and most people give it forty minutes. The Cappella Palatina is a royal chapel inside the Palazzo dei Normanni, and it was built by Roger II after his coronation…
Supporting Guide
Getting to Syracuse and the Best Day Trips
Syracuse is easier to reach than its position on the map suggests, and the single most useful thing to know is that the bus beats the train. That is unusual in Italy and it is true here because there is…
The Best Photo Spots in Syracuse
Syracuse is made of pale honey limestone, and pale honey limestone does something at the end of the day that no amount of planning can improve on. That is most of what you need to know. The town photographs well…
The Best Time to Visit Syracuse
May, June, September and early October. That is the answer, and if you stop reading here you will not go far wrong. Syracuse is on the south east corner of Sicily, which means it is hot for longer than most…
The Best Beaches Near Syracuse
Syracuse is not a beach town, and it is fifteen minutes from some very good beaches. The coast running south from the city gives you two quite different things: broad pale sand with shallow water, which is the family option,…
Where to Eat in Syracuse
Syracuse eats better than towns twice its size, and the reason is sitting in the middle of Ortigia six mornings a week. The market here is not a spectacle laid on for visitors. It is where the restaurants shop and…
Where to Stay in Syracuse
There is one decision to make here and everything else follows from it. Stay on Ortigia. The island is where the cathedral square is, where the market is, where almost every restaurant worth eating in is, and where the town…
A Syracuse Itinerary: 1 to 3 Days
Syracuse rewards the person who sleeps here and punishes the person who does not. That is the single organising fact of any itinerary for this city. The archaeological park is a morning. The cathedral is twenty minutes. Everything else that…
The Neapolis Archaeological Park in Syracuse
The archaeological park is the reason Syracuse is on most itineraries, and it is not the reason to stay. That is not a complaint. It is a serious site, twenty four hectares of it, holding a Greek theatre cut into…
The Best Things to Do in Syracuse
Syracuse is a small city with one enormous ancient site, one extraordinary building, and an island old town that quietly does most of the work. Here is what to actually do, in the order I would do it. The wider…
The Cathedral of Syracuse: a Church Inside a Greek Temple
From the square it looks like a very fine Sicilian Baroque cathedral and nothing more. That is a façade in both senses. Behind it stands a Doric temple to Athena, built in the fifth century BC, and the temple was…
Ortigia: the Island Old Town of Syracuse
Ortigia is about a kilometre long and four hundred metres across, and it is the reason people fall for Syracuse. It is an island, joined to the mainland by two short bridges, and it has been lived in continuously for…
