The Most Beautiful Places in Sicily
25 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Sicily are Scala dei Turchi, Ancient Theatre of Taormina and Mount Etna. The list covers 25 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, and nearly every power of the ancient and medieval sea held it in turn: Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans. Each left buildings behind, often on top of one another. Above all of them looms Etna, whose eruptions and fertile slopes have shaped the eastern half of the island, while the Aeolian volcanoes smoke offshore.
Mount Etna is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and on its slopes the Hundred-Horse Chestnut is thought to be the oldest known chestnut tree. Stromboli has erupted almost continuously for centuries, and the Alcantara Gorges cut through columns of basalt left by ancient lava. The Greek past shows in the Temple of Concordia at Agrigento, one of the best-preserved Doric temples anywhere, and in the theatre of Taormina, rebuilt by the Romans with Etna as its backdrop.
Near Syracuse, the Ear of Dionysius is a tall, curving cave cut in an ancient limestone quarry, and Pantalica honeycombs its cliffs with thousands of rock-cut tombs. The Villa Romana del Casale holds some of the finest Roman floor mosaics known, including the famous young women in two-piece costumes. Cefalù keeps its Norman cathedral with a golden mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, while Palermo adds the Teatro Massimo, Italy's largest opera house, and the Capuchin Catacombs with their rows of preserved dead.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scala dei Turchi | Cliff | |
| 2 | Ancient Theatre of Taormina | Roman theatre | |
| 3 | Mount Etna | Volcano | |
| 4 | Cattedrale di Monreale | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 5 | Rabbit beach | Beach | |
| 6 | Temple of Segesta | Archaeological site | |
| 7 | Stromboli | Volcano | ✓ |
| 8 | Cefalù | Most beautiful village | |
| 9 | Ear of Dionysius | Quarry | |
| 10 | Vulcano | Volcano | ✓ |
| 11 | Necropolis of Pantalica | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 12 | Catacombe dei Cappuccini | Catacombs | |
| 13 | Hundred-Horse Chestnut | Remarkable tree | |
| 14 | Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele | Opera house | |
| 15 | Cathedral of Syracuse | Cathedral | |
| 16 | Alcantara Gorges | Canyon | |
| 17 | Villa Romana del Casale | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 18 | Temple of Concordia | Ruins | ✓ |
| 19 | Isola Bella, Taormina | Island | |
| 20 | Grotta dell'Addaura | Cave | |
| 21 | Villa Palagonia | Folly | |
| 22 | Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone | Stairs | |
| 23 | La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo | Church building | ✓ |
| 24 | Palazzo dei Normanni | Palace | ✓ |
| 25 | Cretto di Burri | Sculpture |
01 Scala dei Turchi
Italy37.290° N 13.473° E
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay The Scala dei Turchi is a cliff of pure white marl on the south coast of Sicily, at Realmonte just west of Porto Empedocle, and in strong sunlight it is almost too bright to look at.
Did you know? The International Union of Geological Sciences lists the cliff's Pliocene layering among its geological heritage sites of world importance.
02 Ancient Theatre of Taormina
Teatro antico di Taormina
Italy37.852° N 15.292° E
Image by Grey48 from Pixabay Taormina sits on a terrace high above the Ionian Sea on the east coast of Sicily, and its ancient theatre was built on the best seat in town: the auditorium is scooped out of the rock of a ridge so that the audience looks across the stage to the coastline and, beyond it, to the long flank of Etna.
Did you know? The archaeologist Luigi Bernabò Brea restored the monument in 1958–59, shaping much of what visitors see today.
03 Mount Etna
Etna
Italy · 28.9 km from Catania37.751° N 14.993° E
Image by 19306 from Pixabay Mount Etna rises on the east coast of Sicily between Catania and Messina, a volcano so large that its base measures about 140 km around and covers some 1,190 square kilometres.
Did you know? Ancient writers credited an eruption in 396 BCE with halting a Carthaginian army marching on Syracuse.
04 Cattedrale di Monreale
Duomo di Monreale
Italy · 7 km from Palermo38.082° N 13.292° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by whoefle from Pixabay Monreale Cathedral, on a hillside above Palermo, contains one of the largest mosaic schemes in the medieval world. It was founded in the 1170s by the Norman king William II of Sicily — according to legend, after the Virgin appeared to him in a dream while he slept under a carob tree.
Did you know? After Louis IX's body was moved to Saint-Denis, the French crown gave Monreale a reliquary holding a thorn said to come from the Crown of Thorns.
05 Rabbit beach
Spiaggia dei Conigli
Italy35.513° N 12.558° E
Hein56didden · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the south coast of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, a crescent of white sand curves around a bay of water so clear and shallow that boats seem to float above the seabed. 4 hectares in area. 5 metres deep, and at times a narrow sandbar about 30 metres long has joined the islet to the main island.
Did you know? Rabbit Island is the only place in Italy where the large psammodromus lizard lives, a species otherwise known from the nearby North African coast.
06 Temple of Segesta
Tempio di Segesta
Italy · 37.8 km from Marsala37.941° N 12.833° E
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple at Segesta stands alone on a hill in western Sicily, a complete Doric colonnade with nothing inside it.
Did you know? Traces of earlier structures on the hill suggest the temple was raised on a site that was already sacred before the 5th century BC.
07 Stromboli
Isola di Stromboli
Italy38.804° N 15.223° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Wolfgang_Hasselmann from Pixabay Stromboli is a volcano you can watch breathing. The island is simply the top of a cone that rises 926 metres above the Tyrrhenian Sea and continues more than two and a half kilometres below it, and it has been erupting almost without pause for somewhere between two and five thousand years.
Did you know? The name comes from the ancient Greek Strongýlē, meaning the round one, after the island's conical outline seen from the sea.
08 Cefalù
Italy38.038° N 14.026° E
- one of the most beautiful villages
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Cefalù sits on a narrow strip of shore beneath a single enormous limestone headland, La Rocca, and the whole town seems to lean back against it.
Did you know? The open book held by the apse Christ Pantocrator shows the verse John 8:12, 'I am the light of the world', written in both Greek and Latin.
09 Ear of Dionysius
Orecchio di Dionisio
Italy · 1.4 km from Syracuse37.076° N 15.276° E
Isiwal · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Ear of Dionysius is a man-made cavern that behaves like a musical instrument. It was cut into the limestone of the Temenites hill in Syracuse, inside the ancient quarry known as the Latomia del Paradiso, just below the Greek Theatre.
Did you know? The French writer Vivant Denon tested the eavesdropping story and found that overlapping echoes made speech from inside unintelligible.
10 Vulcano
Isola di Vulcano
Italy38.404° N 14.966° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0 Vulcano is the island that gave its name to every volcano on earth: the Romans believed it was the chimney of the fire god Vulcan's forge, and the Greeks thought Hephaestus worked here.
11 Necropolis of Pantalica
Pantalica
Italy · 28.1 km from Syracuse37.133° N 14.983° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Danny Krull · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the limestone gorges of southeastern Sicily, thousands of small rectangular openings honeycomb the cliffs like the cells of a vast hive. Each is the mouth of a tomb cut into the rock between roughly the thirteenth and the seventh centuries BC.
Did you know? In 1092 the Norman chronicler Geoffrey Malaterra mentioned an Arab community at a place he called Pantargia, and a papal bull of Urban II named it the next year.
12 Catacombe dei Cappuccini
Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.112° N 13.339° E
Giacomo Palermo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the Capuchin friary in Palermo lies one of Europe's most unsettling burial places: corridors lined with the dressed, dried and upright bodies of Palermitans who died between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Did you know? During epidemics the usual drying was replaced by other methods, with bodies preserved by bathing them in arsenic or in lime water.
13 Hundred-Horse Chestnut
Castagno dei Cento Cavalli
Italy · 28 km from Catania37.749° N 15.132° E
Rabe! · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the eastern slopes of Mount Etna, in the village of Sant'Alfio, stands what is believed to be one of the oldest and largest trees in Europe: the Hundred-Horse Chestnut (Castagno dei Cento Cavalli), a sweet chestnut whose age botanists estimate at between 2,000 and 4,000 years.
Did you know? The protective act of 21 August 1745 was issued by Sicily's Court of Royal Heritage and counts among the island's earliest environmental laws.
14 Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele
Italy · 1.1 km from Palermo38.120° N 13.357° E
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0 Few opera houses announce themselves as loudly as the Teatro Massimo. Set on Piazza Verdi in the heart of Palermo, it rises above a broad flight of steps as a Corinthian temple front with six columns, crowned by a hemispherical dome almost 29 metres across.
Did you know? Several churches and monasteries, including those of the Stigmata and San Giuliano, were demolished to clear the site in the late 19th century.
15 Cathedral of Syracuse
Duomo di Siracusa
Italy · 1.3 km from Syracuse37.059° N 15.294° E
pjt56 --- · CC BY-SA 3.0 Walk along the side of the Cathedral of Syracuse and you are walking past a Greek temple.
Did you know? Each of the ancient Doric column shafts is about 2 metres in diameter.
16 Alcantara Gorges
Gole dell'Alcantara
Italy37.880° N 15.173° E
Image by tulipa_22 from Pixabay Between walls of black basalt up to 25 metres high, the cold, clear water of the Alcantara river squeezes through a channel in places only two metres wide. The rock on either side is broken into thousands of columns — upright like organ pipes, splayed like a fan, curved like a harp, or stacked like a pile of logs.
Did you know? The gorge's basalt is poor in silica but rich in iron, magnesium and calcium.
17 Villa Romana del Casale
Villa del Casale
Italy37.365° N 14.335° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ariesa66 from Pixabay Beneath a modern protective roof in the hills of central Sicily lies the largest and most varied ensemble of Roman floor mosaics known to survive: about 3,500 square metres of figured mosaics and inlaid stone floors, still in the rooms for which they were made.
Did you know? The floor of the three-apsed dining hall shows the monsters Hercules defeated in his twelve labours, with giants writhing from his arrows in one apse.
18 Temple of Concordia
Tempio della Concordia
Italy37.290° N 13.592° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Evan Erickson · Public domain The Temple of Concordia is the Greek temple that survived almost whole. It stands on the rocky ridge of the Valley of the Temples below Agrigento, in southern Sicily, and apart from the Parthenon it is often called the best-preserved Doric temple in the world.
Did you know? Its inner chamber, the cella, measures about 28 by 9 metres, and the arches cut into its walls for the church are still visible.
19 Isola Bella, Taormina
Isola Bella
Italy37.850° N 15.300° E
Michal Osmenda from Brussels, Belgium · CC BY-SA 2.0 Isola Bella is a small island tucked into a bay below Taormina on the east coast of Sicily, joined to the beach by a thin strip of pebbles that the sea sometimes covers and sometimes leaves dry, so that it is now an island, now a peninsula.
Did you know? When the island went to auction in 1984 and again in 1985, even at a reduced starting price, not a single bidder appeared.
20 Grotta dell'Addaura
Italy · 6.6 km from Palermo38.186° N 13.353° E
Bjs · CC0 High on the seaward flank of Monte Pellegrino, the limestone headland that closes the bay of Palermo to the north, a group of shallow caves holds one of the most enigmatic scenes in European prehistoric art.
Did you know? Archaeologist Jole Bovio Marconi published the first study of the engravings in 1953.
21 Villa Palagonia
Italy · 15.3 km from Palermo38.080° N 13.511° E
Jpbazard Jean-Pierre Bazard · CC BY-SA 3.0 Along the garden wall of Villa Palagonia sits a crowd of stone creatures: dwarfs, musicians, beasts with human faces and figures that belong to no species at all.
Did you know? A clock was reportedly housed inside a statue whose eyes moved back and forth with the swing of the pendulum.
22 Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone
Scalinata di Santa Maria del Monte
Italy · 39.4 km from Ragusa37.239° N 14.512° E
No machine-readable author provided. Gmelfi assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Caltagirone, a hill town in the interior of south-eastern Sicily, is known above all for its ceramics, and its great stairway is where that craft goes on public display.
Did you know? Preparing the image of lamps on the steps takes around a month of work.
More about Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone →
23 La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo
Chiesa della Martorana
Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.115° N 13.363° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
GiorgioGaleotti · CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1184 the Arab traveller Ibn Jubayr, passing through Palermo, devoted page after page to one church and called it the most beautiful monument in the world.
Did you know? The dome shows Christ ringed by four named archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, with eight Old Testament prophets below.
More about La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo →
24 Palazzo dei Normanni
Italy · 1.8 km from Palermo38.111° N 13.353° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Taken from Pixabay The Palazzo dei Normanni sits on the highest point of old Palermo, where an Arab emir's fortress once stood between two now-vanished rivers, and it has been a seat of power almost continuously for a thousand years.
Did you know? The Cappella Palatina holds the earliest surviving muqarnas ceiling made of wood; every known earlier example was built in brick or stone.
25 Cretto di Burri
Italy37.788° N 12.971° E
Boobax · CC BY-SA 3.0 Seen from the hillside, the Cretto di Burri looks like a vast sheet of white concrete split by a web of narrow channels, as if dried mud had cracked across an entire slope. Those channels are the streets of a town that no longer exists.
Did you know? When funding ran out in 1989, only about a third of the planned work had been completed.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Sicily?
- On our list, Scala dei Turchi ranks first, followed by Ancient Theatre of Taormina and Mount Etna.
- Is Mount Etna still active?
- Yes. Etna is one of the most active volcanoes in the world and erupts frequently, from its summit craters and sometimes from vents on its flanks. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013.
- Why is it called the Ear of Dionysius?
- The name is traditionally credited to the painter Caravaggio, who visited Syracuse in 1608. Legend says the tyrant Dionysius used the cave's acoustics to overhear prisoners held inside.
- What are the 'bikini girls' mosaics?
- They are a fourth-century Roman floor mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina, showing young women exercising in two-piece outfits. The villa's mosaics are among the richest and best preserved of the Roman world.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Sicily?
- In our collection, the places in Sicily are most often archaeological sites (5), volcanoes (3), mountains (2) and islands (2).
- How many places are on this list in Sicily?
- The list covers 25 places.