Boutique Hotels in Sicily

Boutique hotels in Sicily divide between two Sicilies that travellers often see as one and shouldn't. The island is the largest in the Mediterranean — closer to Tunis than to Rome, settled in succession by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans and Bourbons, each leaving their architectural and culinary mark. The result is less a single destination than a federation of regional cultures sharing a coastline. The east, around Mount Etna, runs to Greek temples, Baroque towns and the dark soil of volcanic agriculture. The interior runs to wheat fields, pasture, monastic ruins and the slower rhythm of the Madonie and Nebrodi mountains. Goethe, after his nine months on the island in 1787, wrote: "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all." Ah, to be quoting Goethe and not one particular film trilogy, you know you're in an erudite collection here.

The Sicily most tourists see is the coast — Taormina, Cefalù, the resort hotels along the eastern shore. The Sicily most worth the long journey is inland, and south.

The Madonie — central Sicily's pastoral interior
The Madonie mountains rise behind the northern coast, ninety minutes south of Palermo, into a landscape of wheat fields and stone farmsteads — Sicily's agricultural heartland and the source of much of the island's grain, olive oil and pasture. The villages here are medieval, the roads narrow, the tourist traffic minimal.

Susafa is a converted family masseria above Polizzi Generosa in the Madonie, in the hands of the same family for five generations. Eighteen rooms in a stone farmhouse complex restored by the brothers Manfredi and Tommaso over eight years before opening in 2008, with seven thousand square metres of kitchen gardens, the property's own olive groves, on-site wheat fields supplying the bread baked daily, and meals served in the converted granary. Eighty per cent of the food on the menu was grown within the estate boundary.

The Val di Noto — Sicilian Baroque country
The south-eastern corner of the island — Noto, Modica, Ragusa, Scicli — was levelled by a 1693 earthquake and rebuilt in a single intense generation of late-Baroque architecture, the eight resulting towns now collectively UNESCO-listed as the Val di Noto. The honey-coloured limestone, the curved façades, the elaborate cathedral fronts are concentrated here more densely than anywhere else in Europe.

Q92 Noto occupies a 1696 palazzo in the centre of Noto, on Corso Vittorio Emanuele directly opposite the Cathedral of San Nicolò — the most photographed Baroque façade in Sicily. Ten rooms restored and reopened in 2021 by the Quartucci family, with the original stone architecture preserved alongside contemporary interiors, a small garden terrace with lemon trees and a plunge pool. Five minutes' walk to Noto train station; an hour from Catania airport.

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