Why hire a car in Palermo
Palermo is one of the Mediterranean's most underrated cities — layers of Norman, Arab, Byzantine and Baroque architecture crammed into a chaotic, vital centre. The Palazzo dei Normanni, the Cappella Palatina and the street food stalls of the Ballarò market are best explored on foot. But Sicily is a large island with distances that quickly exceed what buses can reasonably connect, and the region's highlights are scattered from one end to the other.
The Valley of the Temples at Agrigento — one of the finest Greek archaeological sites outside Greece — is 130 km south-east. The salt pans and windmills west of Trapani glow orange at sunset and are 100 km from Palermo. Selinunte, the ancient Greek city on the south-west coast, is one of the largest archaeological parks in the world and rarely crowded even in high season. Taormina and Mount Etna are at the other end of the island, a three-hour drive east along the north coast — the A20 Palermo–Messina motorway is one of Sicily's great drives, tunnelling through headlands above the Tyrrhenian Sea. A hire car from PMO is the only practical way to cover the island properly.
