Southern Italy Tour

Highlights

• PALERMO
  this Mediterranean capital, manages to enchant the traveller willing to ignore its reputation as a chaotic and dirty city. In its millenary history, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Normans, French and Spanish have left an artistic and cultural heritage that spills over not only into impressive buildings, squares, alleys and monuments of great beauty but also into fabulous cuisine based on rice, olives, fish and ice cream.
• NOTO
  After the devastating earthquake that the island suffered in 1693, the city of Noto remained only in ruins. The Spanish viceroy launched an ambitious reconstruction program. According to the new urban guidelines, a talented group of architects and urban planners decided to rebuild it to make it an ideal city. When the traveller enters Noto, the feeling one has is to join a refined and orderly world. There is no place here for the usual network of narrow medieval alleys and facing facades that rub against each other. Noto is one of the epicenters of the Sicilian Baroque, a monumental city harmoniously planned around a central axis that has all the air of an imperial road.
• TAORMINA
  The Greeks were right with the superb location of this city and its theater. After a very long eclipse, at the end of the 18th century, it began to be praised by every traveller who came to its coast. And so it was that it became an exclusive resort for the wealthiest, most powerful and most glamorous Europeans of its time. Despite being one of the most visited places in Sicily, Taormina has not lost its distinction.
• AMALFI COAST
  Overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Amalfi Coast is a balcony suspended between the cobalt blue sea and the slopes of the Lattari Mountains, in a succession of valleys and headlands dotted with coves, beaches and terraces cultivated with citrus, grapevines and olive trees. The cities and towns on the coast are all different, each with its traditions and peculiarities that make them unique.
• ROME
  is a unique and unrepeatable case in the history of urban planning: a city that – although profoundly transformed – can still claim its continuity with a millennial past. Few cities on the planet possess such greatness, and you have to have been there to understand how its seven hills can harmoniously amalgamate three millennia of Western civilization: ruins from the time of the Caesars, Renaissance palaces, Baroque churches and fountains, nineteenth-century avenues and a modern city built on the left bank of the Tiber. Glamorous and dirty, Catholic and heretical, frantic and hypnotic. All adjectives fit. The “dolce vita” of the second postwar period has long since concluded.