Itinerary of 12 days, 11 nights

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's book Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) has become a seductive guidebook to Sicily, its glamour and despair; the sensual revelling in extraordinary palaces, dramatic landscapes studded with temples, sugary pasticceria (Lampedusa spent a lot of time in cake shops) and the magnificent ball in a gilded Palermo salon that is so gloriously visualised in Visconti's 1963 film of the book, make you breathe Sicily.
We’ll follow the Prince’s steps at the discovery of Leopards’s historical, emotional and visual backgrounds, some of the keys for interpreting the new image of the Island.
In Palermo, we’ll be welcomed and introduced to this travel by the direct heir of Tomasi di Lampedusa and have the chance to visit the private aristocratic palazzis, dining with the last Leopards and tasting the Sicilian cuisine at its best.
We’ll walk along the narrow and colourful street of the Palermo, getting its multicultural and millennial atmosphere.
We’ll experience the result of the fusion of the different people who ruled, lived and merged in Sicily – Phoenician, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, French, Spaniards, Germans, Austrians, English -, all reflected in the island’s monuments, cuisine, attitudes, arts and crafts.
Selinunte, Segesta and Syracuse, with their extraordinary temples and ruins witness of the most glorious past of the antiquity, together with the Phoenician island of Motya.
At Palermo, Cefalù and Monreale we’ll find the Normans, who conquered the island at the same time as they secured England, fused Islamic, Byzantine and Western Romanesque traditions in a unique group of monuments, distinguished, above all, by their superb Byzantine mosaics.
The exuberance and eccentric taste of the Baroque is to be met at any corner of the private palazzis, villas, churches and monuments.
Following the Prince’s track, our tour looks at all these distinctive elements, as well as exploring the countryside, with its contrasts: the Belice Valley, with its celebrated vineyards; the northern side of Sicily; the Mediterranean vegetation sloping down to the golden southern beaches, where the Moors first landed; the white salt pans of Marsala.
Searching for the true character of this land of contrasts, we’ll visit the picturesque hilltop towns like Erice and Taormina but we’ll also discover the dramatic end of some of the villages that were the background of Lampedusa’s novel.

All the way through the best of Sicily, arriving in Palermo and leaving from Catania.