Filming locations in Cefalù

Visiting Cefalù: a set-jetting guide. This golden-stone Sicilian seaside town beneath a great rock pairs naturally with an inland village an hour and a half away, and together they hold the warm heart of Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore's love letter to the movies. The square of Palazzo Adriano hosted the film's open-air cinema, while Cefalù's own lanes, beach and Norman cathedral feature too. Both are easy day trips from Palermo, and they reward a slow, unhurried pace.

Begin in Palazzo Adriano, the sleepy mountain village whose Piazza Umberto I, with its fountain and twin churches, was the site of the open-air cinema at the film's centre. The square is free to wander and rarely busy, and a small Cinema Paradiso exhibition in the village fills in the story of the shoot. It sits about ninety minutes inland from the coast, best reached on a leisurely drive up through the Sicani hills.

Cefalù itself is the seaside half of the pairing, a walkable old town crowded beneath an enormous rock, La Rocca, that rises straight behind it. The lanes, the beach and the cathedral all appear in the film, and none of it costs anything to enjoy: the old town is free to roam, the great Norman cathedral is free to enter, and the beach is right there at the foot of the streets. An easy train ride east of Palermo brings you in.

Make Cefalù your base for the coastal comforts and treat Palazzo Adriano as the inland excursion that completes the story. Climb La Rocca above town for the long view back over the rooftops and the sea, and linger inside the cathedral for its remarkable Byzantine mosaics. The contrast between the two, breezy shoreline and hushed mountain square, is exactly the gentle, nostalgic Sicily the film set out to capture.