Ten days in Sicily: Greek, Arab and Norman long before it was Italian

Palermo is a shock on arrival and then quickly becomes readable. The old city is quartered by two straight streets that cross at a junction of four curved baroque facades, and almost everything you want is within a few minutes of that point.

The cathedral is the whole history of the island in one wall. It was a basilica, then a mosque, then rebuilt as a cathedral in 1185, then given an eighteenth century dome that fits nothing else. One column of the south porch still carries a verse of the Koran, carved when this was a mosque and never taken down.

Eat in the street on the first night. It is cheap, it is the best food in the city, and it settles you in faster than a restaurant would.

Get to the palace at the top of the old town early. It has been the seat of government here since the Arab emirs and now houses the Sicilian parliament, and the reason to come is a single room on the first floor.

Roger II finished it around 1140. Byzantine Greeks laid the mosaics, gold from floor to vault. Arab carpenters built the wooden honeycomb ceiling above them and painted it with hunters, dancers and drinkers. Norman patron, Greek craftsmen, Muslim ceiling, one commission. Nothing anywhere else in Europe combines the three like this.

The afternoon is Palermo's other face. Under a monastery on the western edge of the centre, eight thousand bodies hang in corridors and lie in cases, dressed in the clothes their families chose, sorted by profession and by sex. The practice ran from the sixteenth century into the 1920s.

Take the bus or drive the eight kilometres up to the village on the hill behind Palermo. A Norman king founded a cathedral here in 1174, partly from piety and mostly to annoy the archbishop in the city below, and lined it with something over six thousand square metres of gold mosaic.

It is the largest surviving programme of Byzantine mosaic anywhere: the whole Bible down both walls of the nave, and a Christ in the apse whose face fills the east end. The cloister next door has two hundred and twenty-eight twin columns, no two capitals the same.

Come back down in the afternoon and spend the rest of the day at street level: a market, a granita, and an early night before the drive.

Two hours across the middle of the island, through wheat country and low hills that empty out completely once you are past the Palermo suburbs. There is nothing to stop for and that is fine; this is the drive where Sicily stops being a city and becomes a landscape.

Agrigento's modern town is unremarkable and its old centre is not: a single pedestrian street along the ridge with churches and palaces hanging off it, and views down to the temples and the sea.

Arrive, park once, and walk. The temples are for tomorrow, unless you want them at sunset tonight instead, which is a very good idea in summer.

It is not a valley, it is a ridge, and the temples stand along the top of it facing the sea a couple of kilometres away. There are the remains of about seven, in a landscape of almond and olive trees, and it is the largest archaeological site of its kind anywhere.

One of them is complete. The Temple of Concordia is standing because a bishop turned it into a church in the sixth century, walled in the colonnade and kept the roof on, and it is one of the two or three best preserved Greek temples in the world. Next to it, a temple to Olympian Zeus was so enormous it was never finished, and the giant stone figures that were meant to hold the roof up now lie on their backs in the grass.

Go at opening, take water and a hat, and walk the ridge path from one end to the other rather than driving between car parks. Then the museum, which has the original of one of those giants standing indoors.

The longest drive of the trip, about three hours along the southern coast and then inland, through the baroque towns of the south east if you take the slower road. Ragusa, Modica and Noto are all more or less on the way and any one of them makes a good stop for lunch: they were flattened by an earthquake in 1693 and rebuilt in one style and one golden stone.

Arrive on Ortigia in the late afternoon, park outside the island or in the underground car park at the bridge, and walk in.

Everything on Ortigia is within ten minutes. The first evening is for the cathedral square and the spring, and for dinner, which here is a step up from everywhere else on this trip.

The whole Greek city is in one park on the mainland, ten minutes from the island, and it is best done before nine because it is white rock with no shade.

The theatre is cut straight into the hillside, fifty-nine rows of it, one of the largest in the Greek world, and Aeschylus put on plays here. Below it are the quarries the city dug its stone from and then used as prisons, most notoriously for the seven thousand Athenians captured in 413 BC and left in them to die. They are now sunken gardens of lemon and oleander, which is a strange thing to know while you are walking through one.

In the afternoon go back to the island and do nothing much: the market in the morning if you got up early enough, the castle on the point, and a walk round the sea wall.

An hour and a half north with Etna on your left the whole way, growing steadily until it fills the windscreen. The motorway runs along the coast and the last stretch climbs three hundred metres of hairpins to the town, so leave the car in one of the multi-storey car parks below and take the lift or the cable car up.

Taormina is one main street with everything hanging off it, and it is crowded from mid morning to early evening. Arriving in the afternoon and walking it once is the right introduction.

The gardens at the far end are where to end up: laid out by an Englishwoman who came here after a scandal at home and built follies out of brick and lava, with the sea straight down below.

Be at the theatre when it opens. Greek colonists cut it into the top of the hill, the Romans rebuilt it in brick for gladiators, and the back wall of the stage collapsed at some point, which turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to it: through the gap you get the coastline and Etna. Concerts and film screenings still happen here in summer.

By half past ten it is full, so come out and go down. A cable car drops from the town to the beach in five minutes, and at the bottom there is a spit of shingle joining the shore to a tiny island that is now a nature reserve.

Swim, eat, and come back up in the evening. That is the correct use of a day in Taormina.

The airport is fifty minutes down the motorway and the car goes back there, so the last morning is unhurried. Walk the main street once more before the day trippers arrive, which they start doing at about ten.

Buy almond paste, pistachio cream or a bottle of Etna wine, all of which are made within sight of here and all of which travel.

Then down the hairpins to the coast road with the volcano ahead of you, which is a good last image of the island.