Discovering western Sicily
Sicily in our mind is synonymous of sunny days and very good food, but it’s not only this. Our trip to the western part of the island was perfect to understand why Sicily is really worth a visit.
The first thing that you enjoy when you leave the aircraft is that the air is so clean and mild, also in winter. You smell this air full of flowered aroma, that never fills you. The sky was so blue. It seemed we could touch the clouds. And it wasn’t cold, also by night. It was 20°C and we were there in December.
Our trip was based in a very fascinating place, near Castelvetrano, called Case di Latomie. It is a farm house perfect for relaxing holidays. We stayed there all the 3 nights. We ate a lot of fantastic typical dishes, drunk exquisite red and white wines and tasted one of the best olive oils we ever tried. They pick olives only by hand and they squeeze them within 12 hours to preserve them from acidity. Case di Latomie is a typical Sicilian farm, where there are animals like donkeys or geese, thousands of olive trees – some of them very old, about more than 1000 years – and coloured orange trees.
We started the tour with a great dinner with every kind of good Sicilian food. The morning after we had a little tour inside the property, discovering that Latomie are like old quarries where the “selinuntini” – people who lived into the old Greek city of Selinunte, only 7 km from here – took large blocks of tufa that were perfect for the construction of their city 2,600 years ago. We also saw the old “rabbit hutches”, ancient boundary walls made of dry stone in the middle of this little piece of paradise.
Sicily is wonderful also because it offers a lot of different panoramas completely different one from another just in few kilometers. The first day was dedicated to the hills of the Selinunte area and we discovered:
- the Frederick II Norman Castle in Giuliana;
- the old Saracen district in Sambuca (did you know that there were also Saracens in Sicily?);
- the dom in Castelvetrano.
The second day was dedicated to the nature and the sea. First we went to the Natural Reserve of Torre Salsa, which preserves incredibles white cliffs, and to the Natural Reserve of the mouth of the Platani’s river, with its pinewood and blue sea. In the afternoon we visited the famous archeological site of Selinunte, where we immersed ourselves into the Greek history admiring an incredible sunset over the Mediterranean sea.
On the third day we had a little stop in a place called Vita (i.e ‘life’ in Italian), that was completely destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt just right next to it.
We are going to tell you about this journey in the next days. We wait for you next Tuesday on the blog to continue discovering western Sicily.
