Page 483 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

workshop, artist’s studio, craft shop, a couple of bars and a pizzeria-restaurant. With

the lights on and the wind rustling the leaves, it’s a magical place at night, though in
July and August – when every bar table is full and queues develop – you could be
forgiven for wishing for more solitude. Outside high summer, traditional village life is
more to the fore: men playing cards at the tables, people gossiping around the fountain
and neighbours helping out in each other’s fields.

Three kilometres south of Scopello, the lovely bay of Cala Bianca offers some great

swimming; the bus from Castellammare stops here.

Tonnara di Scopello
Always open • Free

Just before Scopello on the road from Castellammare, a right-hand fork will bring you

after a few hundred metres down to the coast and the Tonnara di Scopello, set in its
own tiny cove. This old tuna fishery and its associated outhouses was where the writer
Gavin Maxwell lived and worked in the 1950s, basing his Ten Pains of Death on his
experiences there. It’s almost too picturesque to be true – not least the row of
abandoned buildings on the quayside, fronted by lines of rusting anchors, and the
ruined old watchtowers tottering on knobbly columns of rock above the sea. From the
shore, it’s still precisely as Maxwell described it more than fifty years ago: “a sea of

purple and blue and peacock green, with a jagged cliff coastline and great faraglioni
(rock towers) thrusting up out of the water as pinnacle islands, pale green with the
growth of cactus at their heads”.

The tonnara remained in intermittent use until the 1980s. Although it’s still privately
owned, the gate is always open (beverage machines inside the building) to allow
visitors to wander around the quayside – provided, according to the notice, they don’t
bring with them a whole host of proscribed items (dogs, radios, chairs, umbrellas). An

injunction like this is usually as a red rag is to a bull for your average Sicilian, and the
place is regularly engulfed with all of the above on summer weekends – though more
strictly enforced regulations may yet come into effect. Most visitors come to swim in
the crystal-clear waters off the tiny shingle beach here. Whether or not you indulge in
a dip, it’s a thoroughly photogenic spot (and scenes from the film Ocean’s Twelve

were shot here).

ARRIVAL AND INFORMATION: SCOPELLO

By bus The bus from Castellammare drops you in Scopello’s square; out of season,
four services a day (Mon–Sat) run back to Castellammare, the last at 4.45pm. In
summer, there are four additional services on Sunday; the last returns to

Castellammare at 7pm.