I haven’t done a girls trip in a while. Mostly we used to do trips to Slovenian or Croatian coast when we were younger – like high school younger, but since then everybody is quite careful with their vacation days and things get more difficult to organize every year. But this year in March when my contract at work was ending, I decided to visit Sicily with my friend, ex-coworker and ex-classmate from university, Anja. We decided to do a full-on girls trip with great food, lots of drinks and mostly the stuff our boyfriends would easily get bored of.

We planned everything fairly fast, booked a ticket, a car and accommodation (via Airbnb and Booking) in advance- which we rarely do while traveling with Žiga (if we’re doing longer trips), but this time I wanted to be completely worry-free. Our trip only lasted 6 days so we didn’t have time to look for accommodation spontaneously every day.

We flew into Catania from Venice Treviso with Ryanair, went to Taormina for a short trip, then headed to Siracusa, drove through Noto, Ragusa, and Modica, visited Agrigento with Vale dei Templi and Scale dei Turchi, drove through “Godfather” Corleone and flew back home from Palermo.

We did this in 6 days at the end of March, which means we had to skip Etna due to lots of snow and foggy weather. As March is obviously not a high-season time for Sicily, temperatures, and prices were both a bit lower than they would be a few months later. We paid approximately 50 € for accommodation per day, but we really stayed in places we liked, which almost without exception had breakfast included in the price. We weren’t really careful with our food costs, because everything was too good to skip.

We decided to rent a car since we planned to cover quite a big distance in a short time, but there is also an option of using local transport. Choosing a rent-a-car is not my specialty, so I was really glad Anja handled that. She chose ( Holidaycars)  SicilybyCar, mostly because of price and no hidden expenses. We booked online and got our very new car at Catania Airport. We decided to add extra insurance at the last minute, which gave us a peace of mind when we saw the majority of Sicilian cars driving around. Let’s just say a nice looking car is certainly not a priority in Sicily.

Day 1: Catania, Taormina

On our first evening, we managed to get the car, drive to Catania, park and get to our Airbnb which was in the city center. Our lovely host was waiting for us – probably for a few hours, since everything moves a bit slower in the south of Italy, which you should get used to and fast if you want to enjoy your holiday here. People in Sicily are really hospitable and will try to help you in any way possible. If you know a word or three of Italian, you’ll get by much easier though. After settling at our flat, we decided to do dinner.

What is important to note is that Italians are big on dinner. If you want to go to a specific restaurant, make a reservation. Everything is neatly organized so you can book online and even get special offers through www.thefork.it or call the restaurant. We, of course, didn’t do that. We ended walking in Saltimbocca da Giancarlo. It was the best first dinner we could have had in Sicily. The atmosphere was lovely, everybody seemed to know each other, food was awesome and we got to meet Giancarlo. This was our first glance at how Sicilians do food. I have never seen such love for food, the ritual of dinner and family and friends coming together to the dinner table, or any table no matter the time of day, except maybe in Portugal. I mostly remember trips by food, and there and then I fell in love with Sicily. I felt weirdly at home. This continued next morning when we walked through the city center and stopped for breakfast at Opera Prima at Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.

If you are a fan of eggs for breakfast, you will be disappointed. But there are tons of amazing sweet and salty things you can try here. The first definitely being Arancini and Cannoli in different flavors. Fortunately, Anja and I traveled together before and none of us is big on museums. We walked around a bit, got the vibe of the city, got caught in rain and decided to escape from it to Taormina – a hilltop town, around an hour drive out of Catania.

You pass by Etna on the way there. The town is cute, but even out of high-season it seemed very touristic. It has sort-of a couply vibe, so we didn’t stay too long. Due to bad weather,  we skipped going to the beach with funicular and rather returned to Catania to do our first wine bar – Il Cantiniere.
I have never seen anybody do a wine-bar like they do it here – it is a masterpiece. Going to a wine bar means you not only try the wine, but you get a full experience of cheese, meats, and wine, coupled with amazing atmosphere, lovely setting and possibly live music.

Basically, it is food heaven with unlimited wine options. But they do take their reservations seriously, you will probably not get a table without it. We made ours through TheFork.

Read more in part 2.