Page 416 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

host who prepares excellent Sicilian dinners on request (€25), using produce from her

estate. Two-person apartment €90

Gran Caffè Romano Corso Umberto I 147 0934 21 402. Best café in town, with an
8m-long counter full of almond mandorle biscuits (the local speciality), cannoli and
other treats, and chunky leather sofas outside on the pavement. Daily 8am–8pm.

Piazza Garibaldi Piazza Garibaldi 11 0934 680 510 or 340 379 5803,

piazzagaribaldi11.it. A first-class B&B in a restored palace opposite the Duomo,
with colourful bedrooms sporting idiosyncratic murals. €60

< Back to Enna and the interior

Piazza Armerina

The small town of PIAZZA ARMERINA lies amid thickly forested hills. A quiet,
unassuming place, it is mainly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in appearance, with
a skyline pierced by towers and houses that huddle together under the joint protection
of decrepit castle and pristine cathedral. Despite the dense traffic that fills its lanes

and thoroughfares, it’s a charming place that deserves a detour and even an overnight
stop, though many visitors bypass it altogether, given the enticement of the mosaics at
the nearby Villa Romana del Casale.

The town’s central core is small enough to cover in a morning’s stroll. Restoration
has pretty much started and stopped in Piazza del Duomo, but the rest of Piazza
Armerina is an endearing jumble of cobbled steps and faded grandeur, dilapidated yet
graceful churches and palazzi, narrow streets and skinny alleys. There are noble

mansions in varying stages of decay along Via Monte, formerly the medieval town’s
main street, while down Via Floresta (to the side of Palazzo Trigona) you soon reach
the closed and tumbledown castello, built at the end of the fourteenth century and
surrounded by once-rich palazzi with broken windows and tattered wooden shutters.