Erice sits at the top of a mountain above Trapani, in western Sicily, at around 750 metres, which means it spends a good part of its life inside a cloud. We took the cable car up from the coast on a clear morning, and somewhere around the halfway point we entered the cloud base and the world below vanished — Trapani, the salt pans, the sea, all swallowed in white. We stepped out at the top into cool grey mist drifting through a perfectly preserved medieval town, and Lia, who is not given to exclamations, said “oh” very quietly. It was that kind of arrival.
Lanes in the Mist
The town is tiny and built entirely of grey stone, laid out in a triangle inside its old walls, and the streets are paved with a particular interlocking cobble polished by centuries of feet into something close to marble. In the mist, with the lamps lit and the lanes empty, it is almost absurdly atmospheric — you keep expecting to turn a corner into a different century. The mist comes and goes within minutes; one moment you’re wrapped in cloud and the next a window opens in it and all of western Sicily is laid out two thousand feet below, the salt pans of Trapani gleaming like broken mirrors.
We wandered without a map, which is the only sensible way to do Erice, since the town is small enough that you can’t truly get lost and confusing enough that you will anyway. Stone courtyards open off the lanes, full of geraniums and cats. The Norman castle, the Castello di Venere, sits on the cliff edge where a temple to the goddess Venus Erycina once stood — sailors used to navigate by it. I stood on its rampart while a cloud rolled straight through the courtyard, and felt the temperature drop ten degrees in the time it took to take a photograph.
The Pastries of Maria Grammatico
You do not leave Erice without visiting Maria Grammatico’s pastry shop. She learned the recipes as a girl in the town’s San Carlo orphanage, run by cloistered nuns who made almond sweets to sell and guarded their methods fiercely; she memorised them in secret and built her life on them. The story is famous enough to have its own book. The pastries are better than the story.
We bought genovesi — warm little shortcrust cushions filled with lemon custard, dusted with sugar — and ate them standing in the shop because waiting was not an option. Then almond paste fruits so realistic they look fake, and a bag of belli e brutti, “beautiful and ugly,” almond-and-hazelnut clusters that earn the name. Lia declared the genovese the single best thing she ate in Sicily. I had three, on principle, to verify her finding. Confirmed.
The trick with Erice is to stay long enough for the day-trippers to leave. By late afternoon the cable car empties out, the mist thickens, and the town becomes the private medieval dream it clearly wants to be. We had supper of busiate pasta with Trapanese pesto — almonds, tomato, basil, garlic — in a stone-vaulted room, then walked the empty lanes one more time in the dark, the cobbles shining wet, no sound but our own footsteps and the dripping of cloud off the eaves.
When to go: May, June, September, and October for mild air and frequent atmospheric mist without summer’s heat. Erice can be cold and wet even when the coast below is baking, so bring a layer no matter the month. Take the cable car up from Trapani rather than driving the hairpins, and stay into the evening once the crowds thin.