Syracuse is the beating heart of Greek Sicily. Archimedes was born here; Plato famously fell out with the tyrant Dionysius here. Start your first morning on Ortigia — the ancient island at the city’s core — before the crowds arrive. There’s something quietly extraordinary about walking those wet cobblestones at dawn, light beginning to slip between Baroque palaces that stand almost unchanged since the seventeenth century.

The Neapolis Archaeological Park deserves at least half a day. Don’t make the mistake of going in July at midday — the heat bouncing off the stone is no joke. Get there early.

Noto is Baroque, not Greek — I know. But bear with me: a short drive outside town you’ll find Noto Antica, the original city destroyed by the earthquake of 1693, where genuine Greek remains lie buried in woodland. It’s worth an hour on foot through the nature reserve. Then head down into the rebuilt city and let yourself be dazzled by that honey-coloured stone, which shifts shade by shade as the day progresses.

In the afternoon, make for Eloro — a Greek colony on the coast with almost no other tourists, just ruins and scrubland and a few standing columns. This is the kind of “minor” Greek Sicily I love most.

Few things move me as much as seeing the row of temples at Agrigento from below, backlit by the late afternoon sun. It is, without qualification, one of the most beautiful sights in the entire Mediterranean. I always time my arrival for sunset — the golden light on the limestone does something that no photograph has ever managed to capture properly.

Walk the Sacred Way from east to west: the Temple of Juno first, then Concordia (the best-preserved Doric temple in Italy), then the vast ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, where fallen telamon statues — enormous carved figures once used as architectural supports — lie scattered on the ground. Allow at least three hours.

Selinunte will break your heart in the best possible way. This is the largest archaeological park in Europe — 200 acres of collapsed temples, vegetation-swallowed city blocks, and broken columns lying like fallen giants. Nowhere else gives me quite the same feeling of standing inside actual History, unmediated and unvarnished.

Temple E, re-erected in the 1950s, is genuinely impressive standing upright again — but I prefer wandering among the collapsed columns of Temples E, F and G with no particular plan. Give it time. Wear comfortable shoes. Don’t rush.

Segesta is an odd and beautiful place. The temple was never finished — the columns have no fluting, there’s no inner chamber — and yet it’s among the most photographed structures in Sicily. The theatre at the top of the hill commands a valley that, on a clear day, opens all the way to the sea. It’s the kind of place that makes you go quiet.

Worth noting for the historically curious: Segesta wasn’t strictly a Greek city. It belonged to the Elymians — a distinct people whose origins remain debated — and was in fact the long-standing rival of Selinunte. But its architecture is Greek in form, and its entanglement with the Greek world was constant. The complexity is part of what makes it so fascinating.

Palermo isn’t a Greek city, but it brings the journey full circle — because it’s home to the Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum, where the metopes of Selinunte are displayed. These sculpted friezes once decorated the temple facades you walked through on Day 4. Seeing them up close, after visiting the sites in person, changes everything: you suddenly grasp the scale, the colour, the ambition of what the Greeks built here.

On the second day, give yourself a break from ancient stones. Spend the morning at the Ballarò street market — the most authentic in the city — and the afternoon grazing on street food. If you have energy to spare, make the short trip to Solunto, a Greco-Roman site on the headland 12 miles east, with views across the Gulf of Palermo that justify the drive on their own.