IT wasn’t the first time I had landed up in a cemetery off the tee. I did it on the first on Ballybunion Old in Ireland. My rescue club saved me. But on the sixth hole of the Parkland course at Donnafugata, the necropolis got the better of me. It took me three shots to get out of the sixth-century BC.
- For more on the Donnafugata Golf Resort, go to www.donnafugatagolfresort.com or email nhdonnafugat@nh-hotels.com
- Seven nights at Donnafugata cost £599 per person for seven nights based on two sharing a classic double room, bed and breakfast, and five rounds of golf on the links and parkland courses
- Elegant Golf Resorts (www.elegantgolfresorts.com) offer a wide selection of golf holidays in luxury destinations around the world
- Holidays Please (www.holidaysplease.co.uk) offer luxury holidays to Sicily and destinations worldwide. Their hotels include Belmond Grand Timeo and Belmond Villa SantAndrea
- Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) fly to Comiso from Dublin and Stansted
- Because of flight times, Holiday Express Inn offers day use rooms from 10 am to 5 pm at 60 euros[/breakout]
For 3,000 years Sicily has experienced many invasions. The latest invaders are golfers, and the five-star Donnafugata Golf Resort and Spa Resort, 15 minutes from Comiso airport and 90 from Catania, offers the best 36 holes in Sicily. The island has only 500 playing members.
Palermo has the nine-hole Villa Airoldi while the Sciacca Agrigento region in the north-west has Sir Rocco Forte’s Verdura complex. The Disio Resort in Marsala in the western province of Trapani boasts three holes. There is also Il Monasteri.
Il Picciolo Etna Resort (and ubiquitous spa) is on the slopes of Europe’s tallest active volcano. Running through oak, chestnut and hazel forests in the Nedrodi and Alcanantra river parks, it’s the oldest club in Sicily. It was founded in 1989, and golfers will find that trying to putt on it is a tough test. Standing over a nasty downhill left to righter, you have to allow for sudden and often explosive shifts in the earth’s crust. Magma can ruin your card.
Donnafugata (Lady of Flight) boasts the Gary Player Parkland course (which hosted the 2011 inaugural Sicilian Open) and the fabulous 6,674-yard par-72 course, created by Italian architect Franco Piras.
There is also the new Darren Clarke Academy of Excellence where you can traumatise the pro, Davide Terrinoni, with your grip, take-away, terminal shank and incurable top (and if you have been on the salami and birra Moretti, your breath).
The 202-room, two-swimming pool, three-restaurant Donnafugata is hard to leave, with its spa and almond body scrub, and the restaurants – head chef Damiano Bassano tests the elasticated waist of your golf shorts and slacks with ravioli stuffed with aubergine and mozzarella, suckling pig in bacon crisp with apple potato cake and chocolate and banana semi-freddo ice cream.
In the Il Carruba restaurant, he does things with cherry tomatoes you couldn’t imagine. His desserts and cheeseboard will make you hesitant to go topless on the nearest beach at Punta Secca.
Donnafugata is a good base to explore the Val di Noto – the Baroque showpiece towns of Noto, Ragusa and Modica, destroyed in the 1693 earthquake and gloriously rebuilt.
Inspector Montalbano has done for south-east Sicily what Bergerac did for Jersey.
Built on a limestone hill between two valleys, Ragusa’s architectural highlights are the Cathedral of San Giorgio (1738) and the Church of the Steps (Santa Maria del Scale). I fell in love with the Corinthian columns, the notable Gothic-Catalan portals, the caryatids and the grotesques. But my knees hated the steps.
Two hours up the coast is the 2,700-year-old Syracuse and the
1 sq km island of Ortygia. You can do a seawall (Foro Italano) circuit, turning into alleyways to see old men on their e-cigarettes and ladies taking in and putting out washing on balconies. You pass gelaterias, pizzerias (one named after Archimedes who was born there), hat shops, bread shops, cake shops, pasta shops and hole-in-the-wall trattorias.
Piazza Duomo is the best place to dunk a brioche into a granita, which is an almond, strawberry and coffee whipped cream shake.
Walking through the morning market near the Doric Temple of Apollo, you are greeted by piles of cheeses and basketfuls of unfeasibly large eggplants, cured meats, fennel (finocchio), amaranth grains, cassata sweets and prickly pears (figi d’inda). And slab after slab of fish.
You are pursued everywhere by philharmonia players playing The Godfather theme. In Sicily it’s hard to escape Harry Connick Jnr – Syracuse tests your accordion threshold.
It is a city of catacombs, temples, statues, fountains, marble, rococo courtyards, basilicas, artworks and Baroque pallazios. As well as the 13th-century Maniace castle, the Archaeological Park has a third-century AD amphitheatre, wild garden quarries, the Ear of Dionysius (a giant arch cut into the rockface named by Caravaggio in 1608) and a great sign at the tacky bus station: Souvenir Toilet Bar.
Further up the coast is Etna, and the best places to stay are in Taormina. The neo-classical 1873 Belmond Grand Timeo is the only hotel I have arrived at by cable car and left on the back of a bee and an ape.
The hotel’s literary bar and terrace look out over the Ionian Sea towards Calabria. Mount Etna (from the Phoenician for chimney) is to the side and the bays of Mazzaro and Naxos are below. The bar also has a third-century Greek/Roman amphitheatre in its back garden. It is the most celebrated rubble in Sicily.
While in Taormina you must catch an ape. The ape (ap-pay) was launched by scooter company Piaggio in 1948. Feeling either a bit of celebrity or a bit of a twit, you buzz about in a soft-topped, three-wheel 1960 Ape Calessino touring the teatro antico, which still stages concerts and a film festival.
The tour entails a compulsory Blandanino almond wine cocktail in the Churchill Caffe san Giorgio.
Make room for a quick one, too, in the Wunderbar in the Piazza 1X Aprile. Allegedly D H Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover there and Tennessee Williams drank too much there while writing A Streetcar Named Desire.
The three-euro one-way funicular takes you down to the Belmond Villa Sant’Andrea built by a Cornishman who also built the Etna railway.
The hotel was a playground for film stars in the 1950s and 60s.
Sebastiano rows you to the local grottoes. Then onto Isola Bella, once home of a friend of Queen Victoria and now a nature reserve.
In the Oliveria Restaurant, I developed a serious Dolce Vita habit.
Sicily is hard to metabolise. There is too much to take in – it’s a cultural and gastronomic challenge.
And a golfing one. Thanks to the heather, the lakes and the heat and, of course, the ancient burial sites.
