Sicily has one of the most extensive and most varied systems of protected natural areas in Italy reflecting the extraordinary ecological diversity of an island positioned at the intersection of the African and European biogeographical zones, with habitats ranging from active volcanic slopes to Mediterranean coastal scrubland, limestone karst canyons,

The Sicilian agriturismo the farm estate that offers accommodation and meals alongside its primary agricultural activity is the most rewarding slow travel experience available on the island. The morning at the olive pressing in October, the dinner with the estate’s own olive oil, wine and vegetables, the breakfast with the

Sicily’s endemic species are the living proof of the island’s geological and evolutionary isolation the organisms that evolved in the specific conditions of the Sicilian landscape over thousands of years and that are found nowhere else on Earth. The Etna birch that grows only on the volcanic slopes of Europe’s

Sicily’s musical heritage is among the richest of any Italian region the product of the same layered cultural synthesis that produced the architecture, the art and the literature. The Arab musical traditions that shaped the Sicilian folk music (the specific modal scales, the melismatic ornamentation, the percussion instruments that distinguish

Sicily’s visual art tradition spans 3,000 years from the prehistoric rock engravings of the Aeolian Islands and the painted Siculan pottery of the Bronze Age to the Norman mosaic programme of the 12th century, the Renaissance master Antonello da Messina, Caravaggio’s three Sicilian paintings of 1608 to 1609, the Baroque

Sicily is the most written-about island in the Mediterranean and the region of Italy that has produced the greatest concentration of significant literary work per square kilometre from Giovanni Verga’s brutal naturalist chronicles of the Catania fishing community in the 1880s to Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano detective novels of the 1990s