Sicily trip report
 

Here is a detailed travelogue of our recent trip to Sicily:
http://www.molon.de/travelogues/Italy/2012-13/

Two weeks spent looping around the island, covering some of the major highlights. I still need to process the photos.

Amin,

I started to read your trip report, but wow. It's so negative I couldn't get through more than 3 sections. Sorry you didn't have a better time!

I'm going to Sicily for 3 weeks in mid-April and I just cannot wait!

Wow.. I appreciate the details, both the good and the bad. I look forward to reading it all!!
Thanks for the candidness and for taking the time to provide so much info.

We did have a good time, but ran into problems with the food, mainly due to the high prices of restaurants. What else is negative about the report?

This brings back memories of our trip some years ago. We did not have a car in Palermo, which was much better than having one there. But you really need one outside of the cities.

We had a great time. Sicily--particularly Palermo-- was very different from what we expected--no crime, friendly people, great food. Palermo is a city where I'd like to live.

The only problem we had with food was closing times: most restaurants in Palermo were closed on Sun. afternoon and almost all close for a few hours after lunch (a custom not confined to Sicily). As we are in the habit of eating late lunches and no dinners while traveling, this presented a problem the first few days. However, we dined almost entirely on seafood and felt the prices were reasonable.

Dayle--one meal tip we discovered after we'd left Sicily and moved on to Napoli was that many fish markets and fish dealers put out tables around noon to dispose of what had been caught that morning and not sold, and you can get really fresh fish lunches for relatively inexpensive prices.

Sorry you didn't like the food, I thought it was great. But have you visited other parts of Italy? The set up and prices are no different in Sicily. I handled it by eating panninis for lunch. (And I loved the cannoli!) I can't think where you got the idea that meat was cheap.... Maybe in the US, where the poor beasts are factory farmed.

Here in Munich 1 Kg of pig filet costs around 7 Euro. Same for chicken or turkey fillet. In the European countries where we've travelled to you can have a meat dish with rice or potatoes for 5-8 Euro, but in Sicily you have to shell out 10 Euro or more + 3 Euro for some potatoes. For some reason Sicilian seem to consider meat luxury.

The food in Sicily is not that bad, it's just too expensive most of the time. Eating sandwiches every day is not an option, not if you travel with kids. Cannolis are indeed very sweet and greasy (they are cooked in pig fat as I learned later).

@dwdvagamundo: we had the opposite problem in Palermo: could not find a restaurant open before 7pm (they open at 7:30pm) because Sicilians eat late. However we cannot let our kids eat at 8 or 9pm - it's too late for them.

amin - i don't have time to read all your blog now, but I did read the opening part about food.

firstly, I'm surprised that you are talking about eating two main meals a day - which at the prices you quote would indeed cost between €160 -€200 for a family of 4 for a day. Mostly i would expect to have a snack lunch [or dinner] - or perhaps just pizza for one of those meals, which should reduce the cost considerably.

secondly, I can't comment on the prices you found in Sicily, but i have just got back from Rome, and can say that not that far from the centro storico, we found restaurants offering pizzas for €5-8, pasta dishes for not that more, and reasonable 'menu turistico" for €13-15. [one in Trastevere was €13 for 4 courses and those in our party who had it found they got too much food; wine in the same place was €4 a litre.]

so if you want to go to Italy and want to eat cheaply, go to Rome! [and they open reasonably early, too].

Amin, I liked very much how you wrote the trip report. Very well organized, with a lot of details. I think that it is useful for somebody who want to visit the places, as it is easy to find info regarding different things (what to visit, parking, etc).

When we visited Sicily we had not a car, so we had not the problems that you had (regarding the traffic and parking).

Regarding the food, you know..de gustibus non disputandum! I never will go to a specific restaurant just because somebody tell me he liked the food there. I don't remember that we found the prices to be higher than in other places.

annhig: I know what you mean and when travelling alone, I do not need two meals a day and can live on snack. But with small children it's different. Cookies or junk food shouldn't replace a real meal, and kids cannot just live on breakfast and dinner or skip dinner and only have lunch. They do indeed need three meals a day.
In practice, while travelling in Sicily, we were not always able to give them these three meals (for instance that day in Palermo when restaurants would open after 7:30pm but we could not eat that late on that day, so we had some snack in a bar before 7pm).
It's a difference if you travel alone or with a family.

amin - i have travelled with my kids since they were small, but I'm not sure that I agree that they need 3 full meals a day; certainly mine would happily eat fruit [widely available in Italy] soups, sandwiches, cakes, as one of those meals which helped to make it less expensive. and they had good breakfasts and dinners too.

i'm not suggesting missing any meals, just being a bit more inventive.

certainly in Rome the food available at lunch-time was fun, AND nutritious. I think that you would find it a much easier destination for your family than you found Sicily.

I can't see why kids can't eat sandwiches for lunch, possibly with fruit. A ham and cheese pannini cost me 2 to 3 euro in Sicily. It also seems that you did zero research on places to eat. If you walk into a random restaurant in a tourist area anywhere you are very likely to wind up paying too much for inferior food. And I certainly wouldn't expect to get good Chinese at a random restaurant in Italy.

If you think Sicily is expensive you'd better stay out of Venice.

I don't think it's a good idea to replace a dinner with a piece of cake or skip lunch or dinner altogether.

This may not a problem for an adult, but a kid should have decent food and not live on cookies or junk food. Breakfast, lunch and dinner should not be considered a luxury.

Had soup been available in Sicily in inexpensive places, we would have ordered that, but it wasn't.

In one occasion we went to a mall in Acireale (hoping to find a food court) and we couldn't find any decent food. There were no restaurants in that mall, only bars. After some searching around we ended up giving the kids Nutella pancakes and icecream for dinner, which is certainly not healthy.

A ham and cheese sandwich with a piece of fruit is not junk food - and certainly more nutritious than a pancake and ice cream. There are alimentari all over Sicily where you can buy those cheaply. There are also excellent markets (not supermarkets) where you can pick up the fixings for picnics. Your problem seems to lie with an insistence on eating in sit down restaurants.

Your lack of research seems to extend to routes. It is always a mistake to rely exclusively on GPS rather than also consulting maps, and minimal reading of TRs here would have told you that driving in Catania and Palermo is a bad idea. And I haven't figured out why you would stay in Acireale.

I don't think it's a good idea to replace a dinner with a piece of cake or skip lunch or dinner altogether. >>

no-one is saying that, amin. Thursdaysd has put it well, i think. one meal a day which is fruit and a sandwich or soup is not going to be a disaster. OTOH trying to find somewhere to have a sit down meal twice a day which suits everybody and when you are on a strict budget can take up a lot of time, not to say money, as you found. and it's a shame if because of your insistence on that style of travel, you are ruling out further visits to Italy.

I read your trip review, my husband and I visited Sicily about 3 years ago. I guess I don't remember food being so expensive. What I really remember is the crazy driving (in Palermo especially!) We were using a GPS too which took us on a rather harrowing route through some alleyways and such. When we told the woman at our B&B about it, she said, No,no,no GPS - use a map!

For sure it's not a good idea to feed a kid with ham and cheese sandwiches. You can do it every now and then, but not every day. These things are neither healthy nor easy to digest. A dish of noodles or rice with vegetables is much better.

Regarding the issue of sitting down somewhere to eat something (with which you seem to have a problem), that makes sense if you have small kids who get tired quickly. It's a good way of breaking the day, and with small kids you can't rush around anyway. Sitting down in a restaurant has never been a problem in all other countries where we have travelled to, but Sicily seems to be special in this respect.

You need to understand that there is a difference between travelling as an individual, sightseeing from morning to late night, living on sandwiches and travelling with a family. In the latter case the pace of travel is much slower and you need to make sure that the kids get enough sleep and the right food.

We do not care about rushing around, optimising every minute of the day, seeing as much as possible. We are trying to move around at a slow and comfortable pace. And anyway, the most interesting things in a trip very often are not those which are listed in a guidebook. It's those unexpected little things which make a trip worthwhile and enjoyable.

Regarding the remark about the lack of research: we did research the entire trip very thoroughly, and had a detailed day-by-day plan, with accurate estimates how long it would take to get from A to B.
Driving in Catania itself was not a big problem (the streets in Catania city are not that bad), it was driving in Acireale and in the Etna region which proved to be more complicated than we had imagined. More research here wouldn't have helped (you can't plan every single km of the trip) and you can't get on top of Mt Etna with a train or bus. In addition, having your own car makes sense if you travel with kids and plan to be in rural areas where there poor public transportation.

For pete's sake nobody said give the kid a daily ham and cheese sandwich. You are really a big complainer.

"For sure it's not a good idea to feed a kid with ham and cheese sandwiches. You can do it every now and then, but not every day. These things are neither healthy nor easy to digest. A dish of noodles or rice with vegetables is much better. "

I couldn't disagree more. Unless the pasta (not noodles in Italy) is whole wheat and the rice is brown the kids are much better off with protein rather than bad carbs. If I had tried to feed my American step-kids on pasta or rice and veggies instead of a sandwich there would have been a riot. (No, they did not get overweight, and they had no trouble digesting sandwiches!)