The best family-friendly hotels in Sicily
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The Sicilians are, by and large, remarkably welcoming of bambini, who are embedded in their psyche as a blessing, not an inconvenience. As such, the best family-friendly hotels in Sicily are also some of the island's most lauded. Expect cooing, overly-expressive signs of affection and a society that is unabashedly pro children being integrated into every facet of life. Even the most elaborate hotels welcome children warmly – perhaps not the sort whose parents turn a blind eye to their darlings smudging pistachio cannoli filling into Zoffany upholstered sofas, but here, first-rate kids clubs buy parents plenty of off-duty time. Time, that is, to enjoy a sun-dappled terrace framed by crumbling columns and palms, a haze of distant blue ring-fencing the green hills braided in olive groves and vineyards, and the irresistible waft of orange blossom and freshly baked arancini washed down with crisp Etna wines. Sicily is a wildly romantic island, layered in history, wrapped in surreal blue waters, caught in the crosshairs of civilisations, and intensely varied in its landscape, cuisine and culture – depending on which region you pootle a few kilometres over to. Wild spirits can run free on the island’s abundant argiturismos, free of the formalities and precariously balanced 17th-century busts of the high-end hotels.
Where you choose to stay depends on your children’s ages, proclivities and really, how you like to holiday. This is our edit of the best family-friendly hotels in Sicily.
Insider tips from a mother who’s explored Sicily with two small children for six weeks.
Small children will struggle outdoors in Sicily in peak summer from about 11am-4pm. Unless they’re aligning with Sicilian siesta law or are under a shaded kids’ club, it would be wise to consider shoulder season for pre-schoolers. What’s more, many of the Baroque Sicilian towns and cities’ ancient cobblestones aren’t designed for prams, so remember to bring a good baby carrier, backpack or hop on one of their sweet family train rides that introduces children to grand Baroque architecture, pointing out the best gelato spots, chocolatiers and the gargoyles peering down from atop their palazzi.
Invest in a wide-brimmed sunhat and long-sleeved, long-legged swimsuits for tinies to save their skin from the fierce Sicilian sun. Always check with your hotel for minimum kids club age, and what time their restaurant opens – what's worse than a 7.45pm restaurant opening time when you’re children are used to eating at 5pm and being tucked up two hours later?
Unless you’re staying solely in Palermo or Catania (where Sicily’s two airports are based), it’s worth hiring a car to explore, though don’t expect the rental company to procure age-specific carseats (even if this has been agreed). I have experienced this hiccup numerous times and on my last trip, invested in two Cybex foldable Solution G2 carseats for peace of mind. Even if you book a smart transfer with hotels, you really have to emphasise the ages of your children and reconfirm to avoid the booster seat for a six month old scenario.
Older children and teenagers will enjoy exploring Siciliy’s maze-like towns and villages, diving into its Slim Aarons-looking pools and aquamarine swimming spots, and hopping on boat trips for uninhabited islands and caves. The beauty of Sicily is that, no matter where your hotel is located, much of the island can be explored via day trips, though families would be forgiven for indulging a little Dolce Far Niente, poolside or under the shade of the citrus trees.
Having travelled to Sicily as a family multiple times, the best formula for a successful 10 days or two-week break is, unquestionably, combining a family-friendly hotel with a villa stay. Hotels provide parents with all the pampering they’re so desperately in need of (the spa facilities, the elevated dining, the kids’ club or babysitting), then a villa serves up all that precious family time and, crucially, the privacy to let children run wild and the room space to ensure everyone’s banking ample sleep. It works particularly well for multi-generational groups and opens up new areas of the island for everyone to explore.
For more inspiration on where to stay, visit:
The best hotels in Sicily
The best villas in Sicily
The best Airbnbs in Sicily
The best family-friendly hotels in Europe
HOTEL PHOTOGRAPHY SRL,Hotel Photography srlVerdura Resorts, Sciacca
The holy grail of Sicily’s family-friendly hotels, Verdura occupies a green sweeping valley on the island’s largely undiscovered West Coast, with views from all its cubic suites and villas of the sea. Manicured golf courses (by far the best in Italy) sit alongside citrus and olive groves, vegetable patches and soft, springy lawns that roll on to meet the beach. The abiding spirit here is one of a clipped country club – a sort of ‘Hurlingham-on-sea’ with golf buggies, robbed guests deliriously floating out of the spa and seafood, terrace lunches in tennis whites or Missoni kaftans. Families flock here for the fantastic kids club Verduland, which is sectioned off into babies and toddlers (0-3), kids (4-12) and teens (13-16). Each group has its own space – the tot area a squishy haven of soft play, tunnels and fancy toys, all of which spills onto a shaded terrace with little ride-on cars and trucks (they’re getting fresh air). The older kids can burn off energy with outdoor sports, get stuck into scientific experiments, cooking classes and a wide array of crafts in the light-filled club space. Teens will want to work their way down the watersports menu, and the hotel is well-known for its professionally-led football academy (5-16), Juventus, (which runs in the school summer holidays) along with their new DJ academy and skateboarding led by Italy’s skateboarding champion.
Rooms and suites are well-equipped for little ones with modern cots, gentle bath products (they even provide toothbrushes and toothpaste for smalls), and blackout curtains. You can request in-room highchairs, bibs and cutlery, though all the restaurants are well-versed in tot accoutrements (the bambino menu refreshingly goes well beyond chicken nuggets). Once parents have fully inspected the cavernous spa and its various thermal pools shaded by palms (and the lunch menu, in peace), there are plenty of family-focused activities at Verdura. Highlights include horse riding along the beach, beekeeping, cycling across the nearby Valley of the Temples at Agrigento with a guide, and learning how to make traditional Sicilian dishes with ingredients plucked from the extensive kitchen gardens a few hours before. The chefs are good fun, the cucina space is wonderfully private (aka not eggshell territory for energetic young children) and families can sit down for a long, sun-doused lunch to savour their own creations.
Villa Sant'Andrea, A Belmond Hotel, Taormina Mare
Once the coastal home of a Cornish engineer, this white-washed, terracotta-roofed villa traces the curve of Taormina’s Bay of Mazzarò and embodies an elegant, old money Mediterrania. Less hotel, the stylish interiors echo its past life as a comfortable family home, with local art lining the walls, upholstered sofas softening the marble floors, and uplit shelves deftly displaying coffee table books, antiques and seaside trinkets. All rooms (cleverly stocked with children’s gifted games and toys) enjoy views of the bay, though parents should book ahead to nab the family suites, with separate rooms for sprogs and terraces decked with sunloungers (to recline on while tots nap). Room decor feels upmarket coastal (the antithesis of the stuffy English sort), with rattan, lobster-basket-esque lamp shades, subdued, milky colours and mahogany dressers sitting alongside mid-century cabinets. There’s a refined nostalgia that weaves its way through all the contemporary touches, and reaches its peak on the pine-shaded terraces, where children can scoff spaghetti and just-caught fish before winding down to the fine shingle beach, armed with a Belmond bucket and spade.
Parents can enjoy some undisturbed beach time, or a tasty beef carpaccio and seafood linguini lunch at Sant’Andrea restaurant while their beloveds are painting pottery in the kids club (age 4-12) or being led down like ducklings to the beach for treasure hunts. There are specific family pool windows to lower shoulders with any excessive splashing, and children will enjoy listening to the jazz band and live singers easing guests into the evening. The hotel’s main restaurant can feel quiet and grown-up in the evening (it doesn't open until at 7.30pm) so it’s worth considering a nearby restaurant or an early tots supper on the terrace at Bar Sant’Andrea’s Brace Grill. Book a babysitter in advance to dive into the hotel’s exquisite menus (hands-free) and experimental wine-list (including Etna’s finest and underwater wines).
Alfio GarozzoZash Country Boutique Hotel and Spa, Etna Zafferana
Fleshing out the hauntingly pretty skeleton of an old palmento (a wine press carved into black lava stone basins with old millstones), Zash Boutique Hotel & Spa’s is a grand peachy house at the foot of Mount Etna, blistered by the sun and lost in a deliciously smelling maze of citrus groves. Its palmento has been beautifully preserved in the bowels of the building, where diners work their way through the Chef Guiseppe Raciti’s Michelin-starred tasting menus alongside original millstone and uplit lava stone. Contemporary rooms are either carved into the light-filled rooms of the main house (with glorious views across the citrus groves to the sea), or scattered throughout the orchards in cubic, minimalist form. While there’s no kids club, and the restaurant has a decidedly grown-up feel past 7.30pm, the cubic suites offer the perfect blend of a private villa and hotel service, with early suppers easily delivered to the suites and an indoor-outdoor set-up with thick hedges ensuring plenty of privacy. Even if you don’t go for the pool villa garden suites, the main, recently refurbished hotel pool has an easy-going, informal feel to it, with chic Italian families plunging into the deep end after board games in the sunshine. Cots, highchairs and baby baths can be provided in the rooms, and, if there’s two of you, it’s worth taking it in turns to wallow in the spa thermal pool following a treatment. This hotel would suit those travelling with a baby (who can park it in the pram as they tuck into the chef’s signature uovo poche craccante and baccala with capers and pistachio, or with children beyond four – its drops, steps and eating times are not best-suited to one to threes.
San Domenico Palace, Taormina, A Four Seasons Hotel
For the well-mannered bambini, or the unruly broods of indifferent tech titans, Four Seasons San Dominica is Sicily’s Dolce Vita crescendo. Famously the filming location for Series 2 of The White Lotus, the hotel and reimagined 18th-century convent is even better looking off-screen, with palm-filled cloisters, grand rooms that twist past Slim Aarons flashes of the coast from its privileged perch and a perfectly symmetrical, parasol-lined pool waited on in style. The pretty gardens and courtyards – a playful maze for tots needing to let off steam – are dappled in sunlight while the pool rooms are a boon for those in need of some privacy, easy access to the water and a dip in the pool while tinies are napping. Children will dart around the breakfast buffet like foxes in a chicken run – expect row upon row of elaborate pastries in hand-painted, traditional Sicilian carts, a kaleidoscopic array of exotic fruits, every cereal imaginable and, as per Sicilian custom, sweet granita with brioche. Parents will struggle to keep their own mitts off the scrumptious bolognese on the children’s menus, as well as the creamy, whipped poolside gelato which tastes transcendentally good. And while there’s no kids’ club, true to Four Seasons form, the hotel has crafted a menu of family activities such as cannoli making classes with the hotel pastry chef, and guided trips into Toarmina. Crucially, there’s enough space at this old convent for children to let off steam and for families to ‘be’, though any park-obsessed smalls can hop in an easy transfer to the Florence Trevelyan Communal Gardens, for the climbing frames and swings-with-a-view.
Alex Filz PhotographyAdler Resort, Torre Salsa
Situated on the fiercely protected Torre Salsa ( the WWF closely monitors endangered birds and nesting loggerhead turtles on this wild stretch of Sicily’s Western coast), Adler Resort is the Dolomiti spa hotel group’s first foray into Sicily. While you’d assume, being a Dolomite group, the hotel would be family-friendly from top to bottom, Adler Sicily have wisely tweaked its family policy to four-plus, as befitting its unique sense of peace, treacherous cliffs and glorious terraced gardens. It was a smart move – the acoustics of the cavernous dining area (overlooking the coast from its clifftop perch) are designed for jolly conversation, not toddler tantrums, and there’s an abiding sense of easy-going calm that is soon shattered by a two year old lobbing fruit at unsuspecting guests snoozing on loungers by the thermal pools. The fours and beyonds are exceptionally well-catered to here with a kids club (they spend the vast majority of club time outdoors, whether shell hunting in the wispy dunes at the beach below or painting in the gardens, with jasmine and salt hanging in the air. Spacious suites mimic the abundant industrial, masculine style of the Dolomite ski or spa hotels, with sound-proofed side rooms to ensure everyone has a solid kip though, sadly, no baths (plenty of outdoor bath-warm pools to wallow in). The food is radially local and surprisingly high-brow for such a laid-back setting, though the hotel’s greatest triumph is ensuring the children’s menu is as nutritious as it is tasty – even the humble breaded chicken is top quality and incredibly moreish. Fussy easters have an extensive breakfast buffet to work through – pancakes, exotic fruit, Sicilian orange and almond cakes, eggs done-any-way, and food intolerances are well catered to, with plenty of vegan or gluten free options. Parents can hunker down in the cliff-edge spa while their broods are wiggling down to the beach with the kids club team, booking in for hot stone massages or simply decompressing in the thermal bath perched high on the clifftop with views far out to sea.
Dimora Delle Balze, Val di Noto
Despite this 18th-century fortified Massera’s flawless, earthy design, its serene limestone courtyards dotted with cacti and daybeds, and its glassy pool overlooking a valley of gorges and wild countryside, Dimora Delle Balze is surprisingly family-friendly. What it lacks in playparks, waterslides and milkbars, it makes up for in its beauty and its space. Children can stomp around the hotel’s own organic farm via pathways, roll on its lawns and burn off energy in the pool (during family windows).
Occupying a privileged spot atop a ridge, overlooking a valley of gorges and wild, scrubby countryside, Dimora Delle Balze is an 18th-century fortified Masseria, respun into a tasteful realm of limestone courtyards and earthy, linen-draped rooms. The grey, freckled walls of the old masseria are smothered in bougainvillaea, and its rooms appear to exhale onto courtyards dappled in sunlight and dotted with cacti and wrought iron daybeds. Everything flows, from the farmhouse breakfast table heaving with Sicilian citrus cakes, cheeses and fresh orchard jams to the terrace, lined with gnarled stone columns, and the courtyards funnel guests towards a good-looking pool, around which a boardwalk leads to cabanas with valley views. Noto’s Baroque cathedral palazzi are within easy reach, as are the blonde beaches with lidos and plenty of shade for the smalls, though you’d be forgiven for staying put and scoffing the Sicilian classics worked from organic garden bounty or wallowing in the pool with a Negroni Spagliato.
Cots and high chairs are provided, and children’s beds (4+) are charged at an extra EUR 80 per night. While children are welcomed here with the same warmth as owners of a stylish Val Di Noto villa having a young family to stay, the hotel is designed for grown ups, or parents reluctant to let go of the boutique hotel lifestyle, and perceptive enough to call it when a vocal toddler is sabotaging honeymooners’ poolside siestas for the third time that day.
Braccialieri, Val di Noto
Quite the antithesis to Sicily’s recent bout of earthy, subdued hotels, Braccialieri is painted in bright, cheery strokes, with wallpaper and fabric patterns echoing Val di Noto’s bountiful harvests and wildflower-carpeted hills. The crimson chequered main pool references Sicily’s vibrantly-painted traditional carts and ceramics through a retro prism, while the cafe’s iridescent bar tiles and just-so bistro chairs are a touch Wes Anderson for these otherwise rustic, proudly bucolic stretches. Indeed, these pops of colour are wrapped in verdant countryside, combed by olive groves, citrus trees and ringfenced by the Avola hills, softened by golden Sicilian sunshine. The joy of this elevated farmstay for families is its suites and villas, all of which vary greatly in style and character. The green-inclined can hunker down in the wooden Eco Villas, which feel closer to nature than the suites with their copper outdoor baths, yet still manage a pocket-sized kitchen (a boon for those prepping their own milk or snacks for smalls) and enough space for an added cot or toddler bed (upon request). For villa level privacy with all the hotel service trimmings, the Pool Suite Amare is the best format for a young family, with its own pool for excessive splashing, tastefully restored traditional kitchen and dining space for family lunches. Along with a double room, there’s a separate room with a sofa bed, or space for cots and requested toddler beds, as well as a lounger-dotted creamy stoned terrace for parents to chill on while sprogs siesta. Older families with teens can book into the main farm house with its adjacent suites (though not interconnecting). The farm’s organic food directs the Dodici Zappe restaurant, where contemporary furniture and moody lighting compliments the shell of a 19th century millstone. Nutritionally-astute families can look forward to scrumptious, organic grub that will offset all the cannoli and gelato in town (filmset-worthy Marzamemi is only a half hour drive away). Any excess can be worked off on bike rides (complimentary), wiggling through this organic farm and into Sicily’s agricultural soul.