Catania and Syracuse - Day One

 This blog represents a recap of our recent trip (Feb 2026) to Sicily.  While I had travelled in Italy previously, we had spent most of our time in the traditional places - Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples.  For this trip, we chose to visit Sicily, primarily because of the Montalbano books and TV series.  We found the island, the people, the food and the experiences fantastic.

On our first day we flew into Catania from Istanbul.  Seems an unlikely routing, but Turkish Air had some really good flights from the US to Sicily, and with their stopover program we had the advantage of a free hotel in Istanbul for one night.  I'd recommend anyone thinking of connecting through Istanbul to look into the Turkish Air stopover program.

Catania is one of the larger cities in Istanbul and has a nice airport.  What I did not expect was the view.  Etna rises behind Catania and towers over the city.  It is an extremely beautiful and somewhat menacing experience.  More on Etna in a subsequent post.

We rented a car from Hertz and began our driving vacation in Sicily headed toward Syracuse.  Catania to Syracuse is only about an hour drive, and we felt that our first driving experience should 1) be relatively short on a good road and 2) lead us to a place we wanted to see.  Driving in Sicily is interesting.  The Italian highways and road systems have a plethora of road signs, some of which seem to conflict with each other.  While tourists are warned about obeying speed limits, the Sicilians I saw drove with reckless abandon.  We mostly stayed in the right lane!  Using Google maps primarily, we found our way to most of our destinations with little problem, but I can't imagine driving in Sicily without live mapping.

Syracuse

We chose Syracuse because it's an interesting seaside town, full of history.  Most people don't know (I didn't until we started planning the trip) that it was founded by Greeks and at one time competed with Athens as one of the leading Greek cities.  Syracuse is now divided into two sections, the mainland city, which has most of the business district and where most of the population lives, and the island of Ortygia, which is just a short walk from the mainland and is the older city.  

Syracuse is full of history.  We visited the Neapolis park, which includes both a Greek amphitheater and a Roman coliseum, as well as a number of other ruins.  The park sits in what was a quarry and you can see in the quarry walls the evidence of mining.  The quarry became a prison, and then became a location for large scale events, which led to the amphitheater.  When Rome conquered Sicily, the coliseum was added and the Romans used the existing Greek amphitheater.  

Greek Amphitheater

We also visited a local museum (Paolo Orsi) which was full of items found from the local area, items from the original inhabitants as well as Greek and Roman relics.  Highly recommended.  Just nearby to the museum is an old church, San Giovanni, where there are catacombs.  Unfortunately, it was closed the day we visited.

Sarcophagus in the Orsi museum

We bought some delicious blood oranges from a street vendor, the size of a softball and bursting with flavor.  One thing that stood out in the whole trip was the variety and freshness of so much of the food.  Oranges, lemons, pistachios, almonds, tomatoes and a whole host of other fruits and vegetables were available and of course great seafood.

We stayed in a hotel on the mainland, easy walking to the Neapolis and other mainland sites, called the Caportigia.  It's a very nice boutique hotel, great service, friendly staff and an excellent location, since it's only a few blocks to reach Ortygia.  Our experience at this hotel was very nice, we found the staff very informative and the room and facilities quite nice.

That evening, we walked over to Ortygia, which is a much older city and where a significant portion of the town is given over to walking streets.  In some places the byways aren't streets per say but walking passages.  On Ortygia, you can find ruins from the Greeks and the Romans, interesting shops and markets, a nice waterfront walk, beautiful old churches and some excellent restaurants.

Ortygia street/alley scene

We ate at Seby, on the basis of its online reviews.  Seby is a small restaurant in one of the walking streets, a little off the more touristy street (Via Cavour).  Seby was our first meal in Sicily and it did not disappoint.  It's a small, intimate place, with a few tables and good staff, with an in-house cat that watched our meal carefully.  The food was Sicilian and mostly seafood oriented, delicious and plentiful. I'd highly recommend it if you are in Ortygia.  

Restaurant cat at Seby in Ortygia

The next morning was a Sunday, and we went to view some more sites on the mainland and stumbled into a large open-air market near the Church of Santa Lucia.  Anything and everything was for sale, from live fresh fish and of course fruits and vegetables to used clothing, spices, old DVDs and so on.  We purchased a kilo of sun-dried tomatoes (which I highly recommend you do, they are great for snacks) and a mixed bag of olives.  Both were delicious for lunch.

With our quick tour of Syracuse mostly complete, we went back to our hotel, planned our route to Noto and Ragusa and started deeper into the island.