Best of Sicily and Southern Italy Tour for Seniors

Check-in at your Palermo hotel and listen, as from the balcony comes the sounds of the city with traders calling, bells ringing, and a late-afternoon hum from street-side cafes. Take a short orientation walk, and your first impressions will continue to form as you see Byzantine mosaic, a Benedictine Abbey, local fishers, artisans, and nuns all walking past. This island has been invaded and taken over by a succession of civilizations, each of them creating a little piece of today’s Sicilian culture. Palermo is the crossroads where all of the influences collide, and the best way to experience this is to do nothing at all. Your guide will lead you to Piazza Bellini, and there you can sit back and watch how the island unfolds.

Yesterday evening was a calm introduction to this morning as you will take a walk through the tangled streets of Il Capo, Palermo’s outdoor market. Fishmongers shout above enormous swordfish, oranges and lemons tumble from their stores, and mountains of olives and grapes sit beside pungent cheeses. Join the locals by walking around very slowly, taking the time to nod hello, and really inspect the produce. Traditional markets are a highlight of Italy, and Palermo’s is one of the very best. You can taste and sample as you go and enjoy capers, zucchini, ricotta, pecorino, squid, octopus, and much more.

Stop for coffee on Piazza Praetoria nearby, a cappuccino before midday, espresso after, if you want to be local that is. Animal heads adorn Renaissance nudes in the piazza’s center for quite a bizarre sight to take in. Not far away, you will find Baroque design and a 15th-century palazzo, or palace. There is an Arab-Norman church and Palermo’s ultimate highlight, the Royal Mountain. A single glance at the golden mosaics and you will know that this is not an ordinary cathedral. Standing for 800 years, it is an ode to the collaboration between Arab and Christian artisans, and one of those sights where you take a thousand photos, and they all look good.

As with every day on this tour, your guides will minimize walking time and customize timing based on your energy and preferences. It was the best of Palermo yesterday, and now you can travel back into ancient Greece today. Stop in Segesta, where a Doric temple is a testimony to the Greek explorers of 2,800 years ago. Drive next to Erice, entering the cliffside town through a Carthaginian gate. Your hotel is almost half a mile above the sea, and the vistas are soothing, as are the local desserts. Erice is near where the Arabs landed, and they brought sugary deserts that would become Sicilian delicacies. One of them is gelato, and your guide will know exactly where you should go to try it.

Segesta and Selinunte were great Greek rivals, and the latter won the war and was once home to 100,000 residents. The rapid development of the city was unlike anything the world had ever witnessed, and the ruins are amongst the finest in Europe. Selinunte is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and that makes it even more special because there are not any hoards of tourists interrupting your experience. Take your time with the ancient Greek world, and then continue to Agrigento, stopping for a trattoria village lunch on route. Five temples are raised above the ground in Agrigento, and each has a story to tell. Surrounding them lays rugged rock and crumbling remains, a city in evocative ruin.

If you tend to wake early on vacation, your guide can take you back into the Agrigento ruins this morning, and it is beautiful to watch the temples come out of the shadow. Even just having a coffee with an Agrigento view can be a memorable and moving experience. Leaving the ancient Greeks, you will drive 14 centuries forward to a Roman villa where Imperial reception rooms and lavish baths showcase a Diocletian style here. The mosaics are baffling, with ladies in bikinis performing aerobics and strange scenes from Greco-Roman mythology.

Spend the afternoon in Enna, perhaps the coziest of all the Sicilian villages you stay in. Join the locals at small cafes, where everybody seems to pass the time of day with a coffee, a chat, and perhaps a lottery ticket. They also serve up little snippets of food and small beers, as well as acting as a post office, Internet cafe, clubhouse, and more. These little places help keep the culture alive, creating meeting places for entire communities. They are old-fashioned, and you will likely be amongst the youngest present. You will indeed be warmly welcomed, in spite of any language barrier.

Lush valleys of fruit and vines can be found beneath Mount Etna as the fertile slope creates a garden of organic produce. Driving to the east of the volcano, you can stop at a farmhouse and taste what is cultivated, including Sicilian wine. From here, venture next to Siracusa, a city with two different experiences as there is the archaeological park, with temples and ruins excavated from Etna’s ash. Then the narrow streets of old Siracusa, a nice place to walk slowly and feast on local tradition some more. Like Enna, Siracusa is compact and good for senior travelers, even those with limited mobility as you can see a lot without having to take too many steps.

Taormina epitomizes Sicily’s cultural contrasts as a Greco-Roman amphitheater is back-dropped by Etna’s perfect cone. The main palace is a mix of Norman, Arab and Catalan styles from the 15thcentury, and down at the harbor, you can feel the bustle of early 20th-century Sicily, while the fountains have borrowed from Florentine Renaissance and Roman Baroque. What a mix! And what a place to have a good guide alongside you who knows which way to turn and the stories behind it all. Taormina is your final destination in Sicily, and your hotel looks across the strait to the mainland.

You will find so many strange places with strange stories, with so much to take in when you explore Southern Italy in depth. Take Paestum as an example, as the Doric Greek temples are majestic, exemplars of both time and place, as good as any anywhere, including Athens. For 2,000 years they were completely untouched. When the Romans deforested the hills the landscape turned to swamp, turning a thriving town into a malarial nightmare, followed by syphilitic pirates, and things got even messier, and this is just the start of the story. Today is relaxed, with just a short ferry journey to mainland Italy and then an afternoon in Paestum, with its cute little cafes and restaurants.

Naples is misunderstood, just as Sicily often is. Relax on its waterfront, surrounded by faded grandeur, and watch its people walk by, all chic and suave in their southern style. Dependent on your energy level, you can set out on a walking tour of Naples, but even without much exploring, you will get a feel for what makes the city tick. Of course, you will eat pizza here, the real pizza from the place where pizza was invented. This should give you some energy to make the most of Pompeii, a vast archaeological site that is still being excavated after 200 years after being buried by Mount Vesuvius, and it is completely different from the other sites you will have seen so far. Elsewhere you will have encountered grand monuments, especially temples, but Pompeii provides an impression of an everyday Roman city, from the vernacular to the villas.

Amalfi and Sorrento are not always great overnight stops for senior travelers, as the hills and the steps can become a little too much. However, they are beautiful destinations, and your guide will customize a day tour to your preferences. Superb vistas can be enjoyed without having to walk, and village charms can be absorbed without continually getting lost on mazy stairs. Spend a day exploring this renowned peninsula and then return to Pompeii, where you can sleep beneath the splendor of the old Roman city.

The Montecassino story is more recent than most in Southern Italy, as this was where the Benedictine movement was founded, and the Abbey is a replica of the original. Unfortunately, that original, home of incredible art and ancient literature were bombed to destruction during World War II when it served as a Nazi base. As always, your guide will know all of the stories and will add context to the mosaics, columns, galleries, and chapels. From here, you will travel north to Rome. Prime hotel location is critical in the Eternal City, and you will have easy public transport access, but also be within the old urban core, so reaching restaurants and piazzas will not require a complicated journey.

Rome was built a long time before cars, and understandably, driving here is a nightmare. While it may not seem believable now, it is far easier to get around on public transport when exploring the central sights. Rome for senior travelers means hopping between Imperial legacies and Baroque art without getting clogged up in endless traffic queues. The Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, a Borromini church, and the Pantheon are four stops that showcase the best of the Italian capital. It is likely that you will be tired after all four, and there is no better place to rest and reenergize than Piazza Navona, perhaps the grandest of all Italian squares.

Perhaps the grandest of all piazzas, St Peter’s Square is also on another level, and its atmosphere is entirely different. Most of today is left free before you visit the Vatican in the late afternoon, giving you time to admire all of the columns of Piazza San Marco as they twist around St Peter’s Basilica. You will enjoy an after-hours tour of the Vatican Museums for a chance to experience Michelangelo and other greats without the crowds. Wander past Roman sculptures and Flemish tapestries, and enter spellbinding chapels where every inch of the wall is painted. Stand beneath the Sistine Chapel ceiling and appreciate how the paint has blurred into the wall, the Renaissance fresco style still unrivaled in world art. End the day with a stop in Piazza St Pietro to indulge in one last Italian dinner.

There could be some time to see a little more of Rome this morning, although you might want to take it easy and rest up before the flight. You will be transferred to the airport and wave goodbye to your Roman guide, departing Italy with 3,000 years of memories.