Sicily is one of Europe’s few destinations that can genuinely claim to offer something for everyone including skiers, volcanologists - and, for anyone in search of the bizarre - the catacombs of Palermo where clothed corpses pose in various positions.

Sicily’s popular reputation, untouched by mass tourism and charter flights, is left to films like The Godfather and news items about corruption.

Citrus blossom rather than corruption scented the air when I visited for the first time this April. Sweet blood oranges were part of breakfast taken beside the sea at Mazzaro Sea Palace hotel near Taormina on a picturesque bay along the east coast (read the Tripadvisor review).

The bay’s dazzling blue sea and rock pools overlooked by a handful of picturesque pensions and villas conjures up images of the Mediterranean in the 1950s.

Forget Sicilian hotels, try a holiday apartment

Three days in a Sicilian pied-à-terre and Brian Schofield is living like a local - even the baker gives him extra biscotti

Rick Stein's tour of Sicily

What did I expect to find in Corleone? Certainly not a pasta-maker with a following to rival the Godfather

BACKGROUND

• Sicily's mafia lands turned over to tourism

• The wild west of Sicily

• Spaced out Sicily in September

• Can I have a five-star holiday in Sicily?

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• Forget Sicilian hotels, try a holiday apartment

Not that there’s anything retro about Sicily’s water sports – every May the island hosts its annual international, week-long beach event at Palermo with kite surfing, golf, jazz, paragliding, skydiving and volleyball.

We were too early for the beach event. After a gargantuan breakfast served by courteous and friendly staff, we drove for an hour through olive and citrus groves and past hill town stalls piled high with artichokes, spinach, beef tomatoes and citrus, to the lower slopes of Mount Etna.

When the chestnut forests gave way to barren sweeps of black larva we swapped vehicles for one of the high-axel, four-wheel drives which takes visitors into the blasted landscape left when Etna erupted a few years ago.

As we climbed, the snow thickened. Clefts through the snow revealed thick white layers iced with black stripes of ash from the volcano.

The apex of a ski hotel roof, and a few battered remains of the ski lift, poked through lava. Today, instead of skiing down the slopes, visitors come to see the latest steaming craters, the white skeletons of post-erruption trees on either side of the larva trails and the pockets of heat which puff out of volcanic mud while the icy wind screams overhead.

We’d left the coast dotted with people sunbathing and swimming. Here the temperature teetered around minus 3 although the wind chill made life outside our four wheel drive unbearable.

We shoved hands deep in pockets and scuttled back to the truck as soon as we’d taken a few pictures. The truck bumped us down to a ‘rifugio’ or Alpine style chalet for lunch. A log fire blazed, snow ploughs sat about outside and guests walks around in ski suits. We could have been in St Anton in January.

In search of a hotter experience, physically at least, we’d spent the day before at Laghetto di Fanghi’s hot mud baths on Vulcano, one of the Aeolian Islands just off Sicily’s coast.

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