Page 454 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

dirt road to the beach inaccessible by car, though if you don’t mind a muddy walk, you

could park once the going gets too tough for your car, and continue to the beach on
foot; just follow signs for the Ingresso Pantano. If you want to drive all the way to the
beach you will need to enter via the Agriturismo Torre Salsa, which charges €3
entrance per person. Both are well signposted from the SS115.

ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE: TORRE SALSA

By car Torre Salsa is off the SS115 between Agrigento and Sciacca; turn off at the
junction marked Montallegro/Bovo Marina /Torre Salsa.

ACCOMMODATION

Agriturismo Torre Salsa Torre Salsa 336 945 967, torresalsa.it. German-run
agriturismo with several rooms and apartments as well as parking places on the
beach for campers. The motto is mente sana in corpo sano (“a healthy mind in a
healthy body”), and there’s an emphasis on energetic healthy pursuits such as Nordic
walking and mountain biking, with several marked trails. There is a restaurant, and

home-cultivated organic vegetables are on sale for self-caterers. Rooms €116

Palma di Montechiaro

Shabby PALMA DI MONTECHIARO, half an hour’s dive southeast of Agrigento,
was once the seat of the Lampedusa family, the last of whom – Giuseppe Tomasi di

Lampedusa – wrote the acclaimed novel, The Leopard. He died in 1957 (The
Leopard was published a year later), but the palace in Palma had lain derelict for a
long time before that. Indeed, far more resonant for Leopard fans are the ruins in the
western Sicilian town of Santa Margherita di Belice. Today, the only echoes of the
great feudal family recorded in the novel are to be found in Palma’s imposing

seventeenth-century Chiesa Matrice, built by one of Lampedusa’s ancestors and
approached by a wide flight of crumbling steps, and the ruined site of the Castello di
Palma, a few kilometres west of town at the end of a small track.

Naro

The medieval hill-town of NARO makes a good destination for a scenic drive inland.
The finest of the buildings are the Chiaramonte castello at Naro’s highest point, and
the nearby ruins of the old cathedral; other churches in this walled and battlemented
town are emphatically Baroque. Architecturally harmonious though Naro is, the real

attraction is not so much the end destination as the drive itself from Palma, which is
rewarded by extensive sweeping views down to the coast.

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