Private Sicily Odyssey: Taormina & Villa Romana del Casale

Villa Romana del casale mosaics are very impressive and well worth seeing but this itinerary is way too much for one day. We had essentially no time in Taormina. Our guide was very accommodating, but spoke very little English as stated in program description.

We arranged for Taormina transportation from our rented house near Palermo. Our driver, Danielle, was on time, friendly, and helpful. There were 7 of us in our group and Daniele arrived in an oversized van enough for 8 passengers with the ability to fully stand up in the van. Our first stop was Villa Romana del Casale, which was really worth the detour. It took us two hours from Palermo area (mainly because of construction on the road). The Villa tour took us an hour and then we were back on the road to Taormina, which took another 2 hours. We arrived at Taormina at Porto Catania. We had about 3 hours to tour the city. During that time we ate lunch, visited Teatro Antico and walked the shop filled Via Umberto. At the end we WhatsApp’d Daniele and he picked us up at the same drop off location. He also took us on a quick scenic tour of Taormina by van and let us take pictures at a perfect location above Isola Bella. Of course we wished we could spend more time inTaormina, but, in all, we were all quite happy. We returned back to our house after the 12 hour round trip and we were very happy. I would highly recommend this for a one day full excursion without any worry. We purchased tickets at the Villa there(no lines) and pre purchased our Teatro Antico tickets online (recommend—made it much easier to breeze past the lines).