Top Things to Do in Catania

Francis Ford Coppola chose the baroque hill towns east of Etna for the Sicilian sequences of The Godfather not because they were convenient but because they looked exactly like what he needed: cobbled streets too narrow for two cars, churches with sun-bleached facades leaning slightly with age, and terraces with views over the Ionian that seem to belong to a different century. Bar Vitelli in Savoca, where Michael Corleone asked for Apollonia's hand over granita and espresso, still operates under the same low stone ceiling with the same hand-lettered sign above the door.

The forty-minute coastal drive between Catania's airport and Taormina is a useful introduction to eastern Sicily's geographical register. The industrial periphery of Catania gives way to citrus groves and then to open coastline, the Ionian appearing to the right in abrupt flashes of blue between the trees, Etna's profile growing in the left-side mirror as the vehicle swings northward along the coastal road. A private transfer makes this sequence effortless, bags loaded at the arrivals door, route managed, the first blast of Sicilian heat met from inside an air-conditioned vehicle rather than from the exposed pavement of a bus stop.

The Cesarine network connects travelers with actual home cooks, not cooking-school graduates performing a curriculum. But Catanian women who learned their technique from their mothers in the same kitchen where the class takes place. The pasta here is not restaurant pasta: expect the shapes and sauces that appear only on family tables, the kind of rigatoni al ragù that has been going since morning and coats the pasta with a dark, meaty depth, or a pasta alla Norma where the eggplant has been properly blackened and the ricotta salata is sharp enough to make the back of your jaw ache.

This experience occupies the specific intersection where Etna's geology, its viticulture, and its table meet: a tour of the volcano's upper terrain resolves into a wine tasting and lunch eaten inside an actual lava-stone cellar, where the temperature remains cool even in August and barrels of Nerello Mascalese sit in the shadows against walls built from volcanic rock. The transfer from Catania is included, making the day a complete arc from the city's basalt streets to the mountain's upper craters and back to a cellar table set with linen and local produce.

This tour combines two of eastern Sicily's most compelling draws in a single private day: the baroque hill towns of Savoca and Forza d'Agrò, where Coppola filmed the Sicilian sequences of The Godfather, and the clifftop theater-and-town of Taormina, where the ancient Greek stage still frames Etna and the Ionian in the same view it has offered for two and a half millennia. The luxury van is appropriate not just for comfort but for the road conditions, the climb to Savoca involves switchbacks on narrow mountain roads where a larger group transport would be awkward.