Sicily has long captured the imagination of travellers, with Mt Etna the towering guardian of a land that while being very much Italian is deep-rooted in its own identity. The influence of the Greeks dating to 734BC and then the Moors is still very much in evidence.
Baking summer sun, glorious beaches and divine food and wine are the draw for the hordes that pass through Catania airport in the high season, but those perhaps seeking calmer pursuits in slighter cooler climes head to Etna country. The volcanic terrain offers challenges to walkers, beguiling possibilities to winemakers and a sense of the wild for golfers.
Il Picciolo Etna Golf Resort & Spa (from £197, ilpiccioloetnagolfresort.com) has 104 ensuite rooms set in an historic manor, with many facing Etna – if you are lucky enough to have clear blue skies you will get a view of its snowy peak as you draw open the curtains in the morning. The clubhouse too has 15 rooms, a welcoming outdoors terrace for post-round beers and coffees and the recently renovated Il Palmento restaurant for lunch.
The resort also has La Ghiandaia, a large open-plan restaurant offering buffet-style breakfast in the mornings and a la carte Sicilian specialities in the evening such as pasta alla Norma (pasta with aubergine, tomato sauce and salted ricotta) or Caponata (pasta cooked with sardines, fennel, pine kernels and sultanas).
Head to the first-floor terrace of the main hotel building and you will find a lovely outdoor pool, complete with sun loungers and snugs. If you are very unlucky your peace might be disturbed by the sound of ‘fore!’ and a wildly hooked shot bouncing in your midst – the pool sits right next to the approach to the 18th green of the 5,870-metre course.
For an indoors fix of relaxation, the spa centre has a pool with cervical jets and hydromassage, sauna, steam room and a variety of treatments. Lava from Etna even features in the hot stone massages on offer.
Regular golf tourists might be disappointed that Il Picciolo has only has one course but the relatively small land space created an opportunity to create a real thinker’s course. ‘Hit straight’ is the mantra here – fairways are narrow, blind shots are aplenty and dog-legs stop you in your tracks when you instinctively reach for the driver at the tee.
Greens are manicured and true, fairways are well maintained and there is a sense of constant improvement, most notably in a programme of resanding all bunkers which will greatly lift the overall impressions of the. It’s all part of an estimated €16 million revamp of the entire site which only recently has been taken out of years of quite complicated receivership by brothers Francesco and Andrea Scrofani, Sicilian-born but now based more in Switzerland.
When I spoke to Andrea Scrofani over lunch about what they had taken on, he admitted that they were carefully doing this in stages to avoid potentially falling into the same black hole as the previous owners. Rumour has it that they snapped it up for €5m when the expected price had been nearer to €20m. They initially bought just the clubhouse back in December 2020, the golf course in December 2021, the hotel in January 2022 and some villas on the course in March 2023.
Il Picciolo’s rather isolated setting means there are no opportunities within a reasonable distance to try other courses to give your trip more variety but this is a course that you’ll want to play more than once. If an urge to ‘tame the beast’ is what grabs you, you won’t be bored by playing three rounds over a week here, it’s that kind of course.
Away from Il Picciolo, 20 minutes down the hill you are in wine country – many of Sicily’s best wines come from the slopes of Mount Etna, under the Etna DOC. The volcanic terrain has proved to be fertile ground for growing Nerelo Mascarese and Nerelo Cappucino grapes to create magnificent red wines such as the Pistus Etna Rosso from the l Custodi winery, which we visited on an excursion from Il Picciolo.
Our tasting was made all the memorable by the eccentric yet engaging teachings of hospitality manager Maurizio Priolo. One of the more bizarre facts revealed by Maurizio about Etna wines is that Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall invested in a wine project in the area back in 2007.
Sadly we didn’t have time to visit another nearby attraction, the glamorous seaside town of Taormina, its fame greatly enhanced by being the location site for the first series of Netflix’s The White Lotus. If stocking up on Gucci and Prada is your thing, or enjoying a bit of bling watch over a cappuccino, Taormina is your place.
Heading further south of Il Picciolo we had to explore Syracuse, with its rich history and charm. Go across one of three bridges and you enter Ortigia, Syracuse’s old town, before winding through cobbled streets, perhaps with a gelato in hand and marvelling at the architectural variety and browsing wine shops before heading to the 7th century cathedral. If the need to snack is in order, grab an arancini, the famous Sicilian rice ball, filled with ragù, spinach or eggplant.
Syracuse is just 20 minutes from the Monasteri Golf Club at the Borgo di Luce Luxury Resort, which offers a more sedate round on its 6,520m course than Il Picciolo but still enjoyable. The hotel itself, amid palms, citrus groves and olive trees, is a clever mix of old and new - the main part of the hotel is in a Benedictine monastery while many outlying rooms in a modern single-storey extension lead onto a chic poolside area complete with cabanas and cocktail bar.
If your golf fix still isn’t satisfied and you’re prepared for a long drive the Verdura Resort has long been the baby of British hotelier Sir Rocco Forte. For years its 45 holes – two 18-hole courses and a nine-hole layout - have made up the prestige golf offering in Sicily but Sir Rocco’s venture near Sciacca on the south coast flirted with disaster in 2018 when torrential rain and landslides wrecked the coastline, seriously damaging most holes.
Fortunately original designer Kyle Phillips was able to come to the rescue – he created a new-look championship quality East course, which reopened in October 2021, with good judges saying it is significantly better than the original. Every cloud has a silver lining.
