A great breakfast this morning - the best in all of Italy (except for on the boat). I had waffles with maple syrup and cream - yum, yum. Thank you Villa Igiea. What a terrible shame I don't get a second breakfast here - leaving the hotel at 5.30am tomorrow for my 8.00am flight to Malta (Thanks Renee!).
 
This morning we took an excursion to the seaside town of Cefalu . The Norman Cathedral, described as one of the finest Norman cathedrals in Sicily, dominates this medieval port town as it's built on the top of a hill, overlooking the town. We were taken to see an old (medieval?) laundry that is feed by a natural spring.

This was a pretty town but very touristy - foreigners and Italians alike. I would not want to be here in the height of their summer. We spent 3 hours in Cefalu just wandering around on our own. I spent most of that time sitting at a cafe in the main piazza (square), drinking coffees and people watching.

Free afternoon. As I didn't want to venture into any part of Palermo (other than the hotel), I spent the afternoon catching up on my reading on Malta.

We had our tour farewell dinner tonight. The food was awful. Palermo stinks of urine.

What a shame the tour ended in Palermo because that's the memory of Sicily I will take with me. If it had been at the beginning of our Sicily section, I would have had all those other unique places and experiences to enable me to forget about Palermo and delegate it to a distant memory.

In general terms, I have found the service (hospitality) in southern Italy, and particularly in Sicily, very poor. The service is slow, the people are rude, and if you're lucky, they'll just ignore you. I don't know if this is because I'm a woman on my own but I found it very unpleasant and extremely frustrating. It didn't happen when there was a few of us sitting down in a café or restaurant. On these occasions there were also men in the group.