gentle pace | 9 nights | from $2,180 per person
Sicily Vacation Package: 9 Nights at a Gentle Pace
Three towns, nine nights, and a driver who moves you and your luggage between them. Nobody marches you anywhere.
What the days ask of you
This trip is filed as gentle. Everything below is measured, not adjectives.
- Walking on an average day
- two to three miles across a whole day, spread over a morning and an evening
- Longest stretch without a seat
- forty minutes, and there is somewhere to sit at the end of each one
- What is under your feet
- cobbles in all three towns, uneven, and one stone stair with no rail
- Climbing
- one hill town is on a hill and there is no way around that
- Altitude
- sea level to about two thousand feet
- Heat
- pleasant in spring and autumn, hard in July and August
- Times you move
- two, both by car, with your bags carried at both ends
- Who this is not for
- if stairs without a handrail are a problem, tell us and we will change the middle hotel
What is included
- Nine nights in three small hotels, three nights in each, all with a lift
- Breakfast every morning, and two dinners at the middle hotel
- A car and driver for the two moves between towns, luggage handled at both ends
- A half day with a local guide in each of the three towns, on foot but short
- Airport transfers at Catania on arrival and departure
- A telephone number that reaches somebody in Sicily, not a message service
What is not included
- Flights, which we quote separately once your dates are fixed
- Lunches and the other six dinners, which is deliberate: the eating is the point here
- Entrance fees to the archaeological sites, which are modest and paid at the gate
- Any car for your own use, which we can add but which we usually talk people out of
- Gratuities
- The boat trip along the coast, which is weather dependent and better bought there
What it costs
from $2,180 per person, on two people sharing.
That is the lowest figure we have actually placed this trip at in the last season. It moves with the month, the room or cabin grade, whether you travel alone and how far ahead you book. Flights are not in it unless this page says they are. The figure is confirmed in writing, with the operator named, before you commit to anything.
When this is worth doing, and when it is not
April, May, late September and October. The island is at its most pleasant then and the hill towns are not full. July and August are genuinely hot, and the gentle pace stops being gentle when it is thirty eight degrees on a stone staircase.
If your idea of Sicily is one beach and a sun lounger, this is the wrong shape of trip. It moves three times and the hotels are chosen for their position in a town rather than for a pool.
What gets settled when you confirm
Which of the three towns you spend the middle three nights in, because that decides the driving. The hotel category, since the published figure is for the smallest room in the lowest of the three grades we work with. Whether you want the guided half days in the morning or the late afternoon. And whether anyone in the party has trouble with stairs, because two of these hotels have three floors and one small lift.