"A day in Cefalu" a Cefalú Travel Page by betako3

I must have seen Cefalu first some 14 years ago, in a photo album about Sicily, my school award for good results. I must have flipped through the pages, but at that time Sicily didn't mean anything to me, I'm not sure if I realised that it was part of Italy at all; it was just an exotic place (there were palm trees and cactuses in the pictures!) I never thought I would visit myself. Then last year, I went to Sicily. I hadn't planned it, it just happened and I had just a few days to prepere for the trip. I remembered that photoalbum, all of the sudden the pictures became so real. I started to study it in detail, trying to determine what places I would like to see. And I was struck by a magnificet aerial photo of Cefalu, in which you can see a huge rock dominating the landscape, with a mass of identical, red-roof houses huddled between the rock and the sea, and in that mass, the figure of the cathedral, rising high above the roof level. I fell in love with that place, which was still just a picture in my mind. I decided to see it if only we had a chance. We did. We flew to Palermo and Cafalu is a fairly short distance away. And we did climb la Rocca, that huge rock above the town - it was the highlight of our day and a kind of escape from somewhat claustrophobic streets of Palermo. I haven't got any panoramic view of that rock, like the one I remember from my album, so I will have to make do with a picture presenting a small detail of it.

I was in Cefalu on a day trip from Palermo and it turned out to be the best day I had in my entire stay in Sicily. We had just enough time to climb the rocky hill towering over Cefalu, have a delicious pizza with a bottle of even more delicious Sicilian wine, and -just before we left the town- to paddle in the sea on a deserted beach, lit only by the moon. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I haven't even entered the cathedral which other VTs have written so much about, but I arrived in Palermo straight from Rome, where for a few days I had been dutifully seeing each and every church recommended by my guidebook until I was sick'n'tired of it and could take no more, not even the much admired cathedral in Cefalu. We left as we arrived: by a slow train back to Palermo.