Vacation Highlight Reel: Sicily

Eating and exploring across Ortigia, Noto, Etna, and more

Greetings eaters and readers…and explorers! As promised, here are a few more details about my visit to Sicily in May. The trip was a collaboration with cookbook author Elizabeth Minchilli who runs many wonderful Week in Italy Food Tours; this basically means that she made all the plans, and I just had to show up with a dozen of the most delightful readers of this newsletter (shown above, in front of Ortigia’s majestic Baroque cathedral) to wander seventh-century-BC streets and visit family-run farms and olive groves and vineyards, learning from the people who produce the almonds, olive oil, and wine that the region is famous for. By learning, I of course mean wine-drenched, multi-course lunching. Boy we lunched — and dinnered and espresso’d and granita’d and Negroni’d, too, don’t worry. The trip was officially guided by Palermo native, Gianluca D’Alia, and all along the way, there were special guides teaching us about the history and rich agricultural traditions of the island. Here’s …