David Lodge's grand tour

We had long wanted to visit Sicily. Our favoured holiday routine is sight-seeing in the morning, lazing, reading and swimming in the afternoon, and eating well in the evening, and we like to stay comfortably in more than one place. Sicily promised all that - a rich cultural heritage, spectacular landscape, marvellous beaches, fine hotels and good food - but what had deterred us till now was the absence of direct scheduled flights from England, because my wife is a nervous flyer and refuses to make any journey that entails more than one take-off and landing. This year, however, British Airways started a regular service from Gatwick to Catania, so we seized the opportunity.

We had long wanted to visit Sicily. Our favoured holiday routine is sight-seeing in the morning, lazing, reading and swimming in the afternoon, and eating well in the evening, and we like to stay comfortably in more than one place. Sicily promised all that - a rich cultural heritage, spectacular landscape, marvellous beaches, fine hotels and good food - but what had deterred us till now was the absence of direct scheduled flights from England, because my wife is a nervous flyer and refuses to make any journey that entails more than one take-off and landing. This year, however, British Airways started a regular service from Gatwick to Catania, so we seized the opportunity.

As a writer I was very conscious of being at the tail-end of a very long line of literary visitors to the island. Sicily was the terminus and climax of what was known in the 18th century as the Grand Tour, when aristocrats and men of letters from Great Britain and other northern countries would make arduous journeys of many months' duration to southern Europe, acquainting themselves at first hand with the relics of Greek and Roman civilisation, the great art and architecture of Christendom, and the kind of landscapes which Romanticism thought sublime. Italy was especially rich in such things, and Sicily offered them in a concentrated form. Goethe, who wrote a famous account of his own Grand Tour in 1786, said: "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything." Modern Italians living north of Naples would find this sentiment absurd, for they tend to regard Sicily as almost a foreign country, and a rather backward one at that, but Goethe was speaking as a tourist. I took with me, as a kind of astringent corrective to the tourist's perspective, some books (Norman Lewis's In Sicily, Tobias Jones's The Dark Heart of Italy, and Michael Dibdin's thriller Blood Rain) portraying the darker side of modern Sicily - its violent postwar history, its domination by the Mafia, and its infatuation with Berlusconi's shamelessly self-serving regime. (His Forza Italia party was the first ever to win all 61 directly elected parliamentary seats in Sicily.) The books were fascinating and informative, but I had only an occasional glimpse of the Sicily they revealed. After all, we were on holiday, looking for pleasure, of which there was a plentiful supply, not trouble.

We went first to Taormina, an easy drive from Catania, though the entry into the town itself, through steep, narrow and twisting streets, crowded with vehicles and pedestrians, is far from easy for the first-time visitor. I kept thinking we must have taken the wrong turning and I would soon wedge our Fiat Idea irretrievably in some narrow alley, but to my surprise and relief we emerged into the quiet leafy square on which is situated the San Domenico hotel, our base for six days. The San Domenico is one of the great hotels of the world, and deserving of an article to itself. Celebrities from Oscar Wilde and John Pierpont Morgan to Greta Garbo and

Lawrence came to Taormina in March 1920 with Frieda and stayed for nearly two years. "We have quite a lovely villa on the green slope high above the sea, looking east over the blueness, with the hills and the snowy, shallow crest of Calabria on the left across the sea." This was Fonta Vecchia, so called because of the ancient spring in the garden. It then stood alone on the hillside, outside the walls of the town, but is now surrounded by so many other houses that, without the help of a photograph, we were unable to identify it. Giving up the quest we took the cable car and our swimming costumes down to Mazzaro, the little seaside resort immediately below Taormina, where we were able effortlessly to rent loungers, parasol, towels, use of immaculate changing rooms and showers, and enjoy an excellent lunch at the fish restaurant just above the beach. This was the popular beach - later we discovered a more idyllic one in the next bay, facing the Isola Bella, with similar amenities. The sea was still bracingly cold in late May, and subsequently we pampered ourselves in the San Domenico's heated pool.

The showpiece of Taormina is its Greek Theatre, of which Goethe justly said, "One has to admit that no audience in any other theatre ever beheld such a view." Indeed you wonder how they could concentrate on the play with the backdrop of green hills, blue sea and snow-capped Mount Etna to distract them. Etna dominates the whole of eastern Sicily, always changing its aspect according to the light and weather, and always drawing the eye. We drove into its fertile foothills one day, and ventured high enough to find our road blocked by the last eruption of the volcano a few years ago - a solidified river of lava that looked like a churned-up battlefield from the First World War.

We made one other excursion from Taormina - to Syracuse, less than two hours' drive away. This too has a splendid, much larger Greek theatre in a wonderful setting. Unfortunately for us it was being made ready for a season of Greek plays, and the modern seating rather spoiled the antique ambience of the place; but there are other things to see in the "archaeological park" of Syracuse, including a grass-grown Roman amphitheatre and a vast echoing cave known as the Ear of Dionysius which the tyrant of that name is said to have used to detect the distant approach of enemy armies - a kind of archaic radar. He also famously suspended a sword over a courtier called Damocles. Syracuse is steeped in history and literary associations: Pindar, Aeschylus, Plato and Theocritus were all natives or temporary residents. Archimedes probably took his "Eureka!" bath here. The old town is situated on the island of Ortigia, which is more like a promontory separating the Porto Grande from the Porto Piccolo. It's a maze of streets crammed with fine palazzos and churches, many of them undergoing extensive restoration. When it's all finished it will look wonderful, but we felt frustrated by the omnipresent plastic sheeting and wooden hoardings. Old Syracuse, a favoured setting in ancient romance, seemed an enigmatic and spellbound place that quiet Saturday afternoon.

Leaving Taormina we drove to Palermo, stopping for lunch at Cefalu, a picturesque old port which, to judge from photographs, looks its best from the sea. It was hard to appreciate the architecture of its narrow streets because of the vehicles surging through them, but this was nothing to what awaited us in Palermo. Palermo traffic has to be experienced to be believed. There is no lane discipline or system of priority. The favoured driving technique is to nudge one corner of your bonnet in front of any other car competing for road space so that it must give way. This manoeuvre is performed with the narrowest of margins for error, which is why most cars in Palermo are dented symmetrically on both front wings. We were relieved to reach our hotel unscathed. This was the Villa Igea, a vast 15th-century palazzo on the edge of the sea under Monte Pellegrino that was restored and decorated in Art Nouveau style at the beginning of the 20th century. Its long and surreally mirrored corridors are hung with photographs of the royalty and heads of state who stayed there. We occupied a delightful junior suite with a little octagonal sitting room overlooking the gardens and pool, a marina and the bay. There is an immense amount to see in Palermo, and much too much to describe here. We gave priority to the Cappella Palatina attached to the Palazzo dei Normanni, more of a church than a chapel in scale, entirely covered in superb mosaics depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Just outside the city is the town of Monreale with its similarly decorated cathedral and exquisitely designed cloisters. These stunning monuments were created by a union of Norman piety and power with Byzantine and Arab artistry. Swabians, Angevins and Spaniards also left their mark on the art and architecture of Palermo and other parts of Sicily. It was a medieval ethnic melting pot and also a key site in the long and complicated struggle between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire - but don't ask me to elaborate: read Steven Runciman's classic, The Sicilian Vespers.

Our next destination - Agrigento, on the south coast, with its famous Valley of the Temples - took us back to BC, but also reminded us of Sicily's modern problems, in the plethora of ugly and "abusive" (ie, illegal) buildings disfiguring the landscape. We stayed at the Hotel Villa Athena, which, for historical reasons, enjoys a uniquely favourable situation amid citrus trees directly facing the Temple of Concord, barely half a mile away. In consequence it gets booked up very quickly and does not need to exert itself to please its guests. Members of the staff watched with mild amusement as Mary scooped dead flies out of the pool with a long-handled net, without offering to help her. But we didn't care. When we opened the shutters of our room in the morning the honey-coloured Temple of Concord, one of the best-preserved structures of its kind, filled the window frame. In fact I preferred to view it from this vantage point rather than at closer quarters, fenced off as it is to protect it from the visiting hordes.

There is no doubt that the great drawback of tourism is the presence of other tourists. On our second day in Agrigento we escaped them by driving westwards out of the city, stopping at Pirandello's birthplace, where ours was the only vehicle in the vast car park, to view its modest collection of photographs and memorabilia; then going on to explore magnificent, virtually empty beaches of the finest sand backed by white limestone cliffs sculpted spectacularly by wind and sea; and ended up at the recently excavated Eraclea Minoa, a small Greek settlement founded about 6BC. Compared with the Valley of the Temples it's an insignificant site, but because we had it to ourselves - the worn, ancient stones, the red and mauve poppies and long grasses waving in the wind, the emerald, turquoise and ultramarine tones of the sea, and the long arc of golden shoreline below - it was one of the most memorable experiences of the whole holiday.

The sightseeing climax of our trip, however, was the Villa Imperiale del Casale. The nearest big town is Caltagirone, famous for its ceramics and well worth exploring, but we stayed in little San Michele di Ganzaria, set in beautiful rolling hill country, and nearer the villa. This is a Unesco World Heritage site, so you have to rise early to get there before the coach parties reach a critical mass, but it's worth the effort: a Roman villa built between the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century - by whom, nobody knows, but he must have been rich, reclusive and a connoisseur of visual art. Every floor is covered with amazing mosaics depicting a variety of scenes - hunts, chariot races, sports, myths and amorous dalliance. The craftsmen were probably North African, and there are astonishing depictions of exotic wild animals such as lions, rhinoceroses and elephants being captured for transportation back to Italy. The style of treatment is surprisingly modern - nowhere more so than in a tableau of young girls exercising, dressed in what look for all the world like bikinis - and the overall effect is of a joyful celebration of life in the interaction of animals, men and gods.

The next day we checked out of the Hotel Pomara (family run and extremely good value) in San Michele and drove to Catania to catch our plane home. The airport was having trouble with its computers and the monitors in the departure lounge all said "Memory Lost". But our memories of Sicily will last a long time.

GIVE ME THE FACTS

How to get there

British Airways (0870-850 9850; www.ba.com) offers return fares from Gatwick to Catania from £175.

Carrental.co.uk (01494-751 600; www.carrental.co.uk) offers one week's car rental from Catania from £135.

Where to stay

David Lodge arranged his own accommodation at the following hotels:

San Domenico Palace in Taormina (00 39 0942 61 31 11; www.sandomenico.thi.it), which offers double rooms from €369 (£244) including breakfast.

The Grand Hotel Villa Igea in Palermo (00 39 091 631 21 11; www.cormorano.net/sgas/villaigiea/home.htm), which offers double rooms from €229 (£164) including breakfast.

Hotel Villa Athena in Agrigento (00 39 0922 59 6288), which offers double rooms starting at €210 (£150) including breakfast.

Hotel Pomara in San Michele di Ganzaria (00 39 0933.976976; www.hotelpomara.com), which offers double rooms from €80 (£57) including breakfast.

Where to get more information

Contact the Italian State Tourist Board (020-7408 1254; www.enit.it).

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