Mini Travel Guides

An hour from Palermo, sits Castel De Tusa. Along the coast (a tiny walk from the train station) is Atelier Sul Mare, the most wonderful hotel I’ve ever had the pleasure of staying in and it has to be one of the best hotels in Sicily. I’m still sad that I ever had to leave. If they’d had wi-fi, I might had just moved in.

This Art Hotel is a little gem in a perfect landscape. The hotel is an art gallery of the very best kind, meaning that your hotel room is a piece of art in itself. And you can’t fail to be impressed by the fact your bathroom has a shower like a carwash, or that you’ve got a giant sculpture in your room. Or the door opens like a drawbridge (that was my favourite). There’s even a room that’s based on a camera shutter, with a balcony all around the outside. It’s utterly wonderful.

You pick the room you’d like to stay in on your first night, and then the next day? You move. And the next, and the next. This stops someone renting out one of the art rooms for their entire stay, and gives you an entirely different experience each night. Of course, you can’t guarantee that every single room will be free (getting an early start will help that), but all of the rooms have something special about them.

Then there’s the restaurant. Overlooking the bay, I literally sat there for hours. Mostly because the beer was cheap and my boyfriend’s flight had been delayed, but honestly, I don’t think I’d have moved anywhere. Warm, peaceful, and utterly beautiful. Why would I want to go anywhere else? That said, unless you’ve hired a car (it was with said boyfriend), you can’t really go anywhere. There’s a very small strip of restaurants, but you either need to hop on the train or drive around.

And you should drive around, because there are about 20 sculptures dotted around the local area as well. You’ll need a few hours and a map to find them all, but it’s a lovely drive and you’ll see some stunning countryside. Make sure you pop into the gallery in the hotel too. Or, find yourself ‘borrowing’ on of their arty plates when your boy sneaks breakfast into the hotel room. Ahem.

The downsides to the hotel? Well, there might be a little beach, but it isn’t sandy. Which is a shame. But it’s yours. And so tiny you’ll probably only have to share with three other people. I learnt to swim in that sea, I didn’t really care about sand. And the hotel is pretty old, so it’s rough around the edges. One of the hotel rooms needed some serious work doing to it. And don’t, whatever you do, go for dinner at the restaurant right at the end of the bay. Not if you want your evening ruined by bad service and awful food. Luckily the service and food and the hotel is excellent.

And as prices for an art room tend to come it less than €100 (and much less if you go off peak), I can forgive them their downfalls. I adore it here. I want to stay in every single room. This is a really special hotel and I don’t think I could take another trip to Sicily without coming back to the Atelier Sul Mare . In fact, I might just go and check out the flight prices to Palermo now.

Atelier Sul Mare, Sicily’s Art Hotel

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