2024- Sicily – part 2- Cefalu + a day by Trenitalia to Palermo……

We had driven from the south east corner of Sicily, up to Cefalu on the North coast and took most of a day to do it. En route we stopped off at Villa Romana Del Casale the amazing Roman Villa site with extraordinarily preserved mosaic displays. We reached our next stop of Mazzaforno just 2km west along the coast from the old town of Cefalu. The cross country trip took us up across the plateau, farmland all ploughed and ready for its winter cereal crop sowing, the shadow of Mt Etna ever present.

Our first view of Cefalu came from the balcony of our apartment that looked down on the “mistral driven surf” and the beach below, with the Duomo (Cathedral) of Cefalu in the distance, a lovely view to greet us looking through the pine trees. Whilst we could not swim due to the surf on our arrival day, the next day was much calmer and we did get in for a number of lovely warm sea swims from the very clean but slightly rocky beach. Intriguingly many Italian tourists seemed to most enjoy standing in the sea in groups and chatting, rather than taking any exercise – and why not!

This part of the northern coast of Sicily, very green, quite mountainous behind the coast and seemingly more prosperous than the south east. A modern railway network links the main centres – Messina – Cefalu – Palermo – Agrigento – and we will take that to visit the capital of Sicily, Palermo – buying our tickets through our Trainline app – which worked very well.

But back to Cefalu and with the weekend upon us, we headed to the town to explore. Dominated by the Duomo and the Rocca de Cefalu the town with its beach, even when busy with tourists as it was, is just lovely. The Duomo even had a wedding for us to watch the guests, bride and groom arrive for as we ate ice cream and “people watched”. The Duomo is imposingly beautiful, inside and out with the narrow clean surrounding streets fun to wander around. We had a lovely supper overlooking the surrounding Mediterranean, watching the sunset, quite romantic until the waiter tipped Sue’s glass of water over the table – oops!!

Trenitalia to Palermo. With only 4 nights in Mazzaforno/Cefalu, we decided that on one day we needed to check out Palermo and took the Trenitalia train – 50 minutes and Eu 7 tickets each way. Parking at Cefalu railway station – thank you Easypay – a modern but busy train arrived on time, we piled on board and eventually found two seats with a small group of excellent English speaking music students.We enjoyed an excellent journey chatting to them- their great English to our rubbish Italian – grazze mille!!.

From a bit of research there were a number of “tourist sites” well worth seeing in Palermo and the railway station delivered us to the centre of the Port City and capital of Sicily. We emerged into the Piazza Guilio Cesare to a noisy, dirty greeting and so continued our visit there. To its credit a chunk of the centre is largely pedestrianised thus safe from most traffic and very busy with tourists. The Port is a Cruise Ship destination and a couple were in when we visited depositing several thousand customers, eager to sample what Palermo has to offer. It is most probably just a lack of money, but the centre of Palermo with historic buildings like the Quattro Canti – “famous symmetrical square and fountains “, was desperate for a careful waterblasting!!

The Duomo is impressive and one of the few tourist destinations that we saw, that really was looking great. The pics below hopefully show it off well. It was a hot day in Palermo – low 30sC, and we decided that to get around in a bit more comfort we should take a “hop on hop off” bus. With its predetermined circular route – as we were told – we could see a bit of the city in comfort and from height in the double decker. All went well for about 20 mins and we reached the end of a circuit and then waited for the bus to start again .So we and all the passengers got hotter and hotter, as we waited & waited in the sun.

Seeking some clarification on when we might move on, upon descending to the lower deck and asking the tour guide when we were leaving – she said “in less than one minute” – hmm – ten mins later we left and not by the advertised route!! Anyway after some quite angry words with the tour guide, as the bus was going on a very different route to the one displayed, we made them stop the bus and we exited – by chance right back at the railway station, but about 2 hours too early for our train!!. Not a great experience.

Our experience with Trenitalia was just excellent , punctual, clean and when we came back to the railway station at Palermo there was an earlier train available if we could get our tickets changed!! No problem at the ticket office, again excellent English, my phone ticket QR was scanned, our information amended and “ping” an email arrived instantly on my phone with a changed ticket – and no charge!! Brilliant, and none of the “old ticket validation process on the platform” of earlier years.

Anyway, we saw a bit of Palermo, the countryside from Cefalu there and back and the coastline between is lovely. But our time in N Sicily was coming to an end. With a plane to catch from Catania and a 2.5 hour drive to get there, we set off before dawn for the 170km autostrada trip, winding up the gorges and valleys past the Parco Del Madonie mainly on amazingly elevated roadways and lengthy cross valley bridging – vast amounts of concrete!! A few windy tunnels followed , some dual carriageway but others just one lane each way, unlit, quite narrow and challenging when the truck one was following has no rear lights at all!!

But with the rental car returned at Catania Airport, unscathed, luggage and us both all checked in at a very efficient Ryanair – we settled down to excellent coffee and croissants – before our flight back to England via a view of the French Alps and Mont Blanc, a great end to our trip.