Under one roof in Sicily's heart spreads the most extraordinary complex of Roman mosaics to survive anywhere: the Villa del Casale, UNESCO-listed since 1997, carpets its rooms with some 3,500 square metres of scenes — the sixty-metre Great Hunt, the famous "bikini girls" at their gymnastics, an entire empire told in tesserae.
The villa was a fourth-century magnate's residence; the mud that buried it saved it. Above, Piazza Armerina is a Baroque hill town with a green-domed cathedral; in August the Palio dei Normanni re-enacts Count Roger's arrival.
Near Piazza Armerina
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
