Ask most people to picture Italy and they’ll describe something from the north or centre: the canals of Venice, the Duomo in Florence, the Colosseum, the Amalfi Coast. These are extraordinary places — but they are not the whole story, and increasingly they are not the best story either.
Italy’s south and its two great islands — Sicily and Sardinia — offer something the more-toured north simply cannot: a rawer, older, slower version of Italian life that feels genuinely discovered rather than curated for visitors. The food is different. The landscape is different. The pace is different. And the prices, for now, are meaningfully lower.
For Australian travellers who want to move beyond the tourist trail without leaving their comfort zone, southern Italy and the islands represent the best value in the country. Here’s why.
Puglia: Italy’s Best-Kept Secret Is Getting Out
Puglia is the heel of Italy’s boot — a long, sun-baked peninsula stretching between the Adriatic and Ionian seas. For much of the 20th century, it was overlooked by international tourists who rushed through on the way to somewhere else. That began to change in the early 2000s, and the pace of that change has accelerated sharply.
What people find when they come:
The Landscape
Puglia is unlike anywhere else in Italy. The interior is a vast, flat tableland — the Tavoliere delle Puglie — covered with ancient olive groves, dry-stone walls, and brilliant red soil. The coastline alternates between dramatic white limestone cliffs and shallow turquoise water that genuinely rivals the Maldives for clarity. The light here is extraordinary: hard and bright in summer, golden and warm in spring and autumn.
The Architecture
Puglia’s villages range from the familiar — whitewashed hilltowns like Ostuni and Locorotondo — to the utterly singular. The trulli of the Itria Valley are stone houses with conical limestone roofs, built without mortar using an ancient technique. Alberobello’s trulli district is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Italy’s most photographed places. Lecce, meanwhile, is known as the “Florence of the South” — a city of extraordinary baroque architecture built in the local golden sandstone, so richly carved it looks like lacework.
The Food
Puglian food is elemental. The region produces more olive oil than any other in Italy — most of the world’s supply passes through here — and it underpins everything. Orecchiette pasta with turnip greens (cime di rapa), burrata made from the morning’s milk, taralli biscuits baked in olive oil, focaccia barese sold in bakeries since before dawn — this is food that tastes of the land it came from. Our culinary tours spend significant time in Puglia for exactly this reason.
The People
Southern hospitality is a genuine phenomenon. Pugliesi are proudly, specifically Puglian — not simply “Italian” — and this sense of identity translates into a generosity toward visitors that feels earned rather than performed. Many of the masserie (farmhouses) where Italy Touring stays are family-run properties where the owners still cook and eat with their guests.
Italy Touring offers multiple ways into Puglia, from our popular Puglia tours to multi-region southern Italy itineraries. If you’re new to the region, the Southern Italy overview is a useful starting point.
Sicily: The Mediterranean in Miniature
Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, and arguably its most complex. Three thousand years of conquest — Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, Norman, Spanish — have left an island that doesn’t belong to any single tradition. It belongs to all of them, and to itself.
What Makes Sicily Different
The Greeks arrived in Sicily in the 8th century BCE and built temples that rival anything in Greece itself. The Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, the ancient theatre at Taormina, the ruins of Selinunte — these are among Europe’s most significant archaeological sites, and they receive a fraction of the attention they deserve. Stand in the theatre at Taormina with Etna smoking behind you and the Ionian Sea glittering below, and you’ll understand why travellers return.
The Arab influence, arriving in the 9th century, transformed Sicilian culture permanently. It’s visible in the architecture — particularly in Palermo’s markets and the extraordinary Palatine Chapel — and deeply embedded in the food. Sicilian cuisine is the most diverse in Italy: couscous on the western coast, saffron-infused dishes in Palermo, the Arabic-derived sweets (cannoli, cassata, granita) that have become globally famous.
The Aeolian Islands
North of Sicily, the Aeolian Islands are a volcanic archipelago of seven islands, each with a distinct character. Stromboli is permanently active, with nightly lava flows visible from the water. Panarea is tiny and fashionable. Lipari is the largest, with good beaches and a significant Greek and Roman history. Our Sicily and islands tours combine the main island with Aeolian itineraries for a complete picture of this extraordinary part of Italy.
The Season
Sicily is best visited in spring (April–June) or autumn (September–October). July and August are oppressively hot, and the beaches are crowded with Italian holiday-makers. The shoulder seasons offer perfect weather, manageable visitor numbers, and the best food — spring brings fresh artichokes, broad beans, and strawberries; autumn brings almonds, capers, figs, and the new olive oil harvest.
Sardinia: Europe’s Last Frontier
Sardinia is, in many respects, the most mysterious place in Italy. Its nuraghe — ancient stone towers built by a Bronze Age civilisation that left no written records — dot the island by the thousands, and nobody fully understands them. The Sardinian language is considered the closest living relative to Latin. The island’s interior, the Barbagia, remains one of the most isolated places in Western Europe, where ancient pastoral traditions survive essentially unchanged.
For most visitors, Sardinia means the coast — and the coast is extraordinary. The Costa Smeralda in the north-east offers some of Europe’s most celebrated beaches: water so clear and so turquoise that photographs of it regularly circulate as “fake” because it looks more like the South Pacific than Europe. But Sardinia’s beaches are not the whole island, and the most interesting journeys combine the coast with the interior.
The Food and Wine
Sardinian food is shepherd’s food, slow-cooked and deeply flavoured: roast suckling pig (porceddu), culurgiones (a stuffed pasta unique to the island), spit-roasted lamb, pane carasau (the crisp, paper-thin flatbread that keeps for weeks without refrigerating, a legacy of long seasons in the mountains). The wines — Cannonau, Vermentino, Vernaccia — are powerful, characterful, and largely unknown outside the island.
Sardinia’s combination of natural beauty, archaeological mystery, and culinary distinctiveness makes it genuinely unlike anywhere else in Europe. Italy Touring runs dedicated Sardinia tours for travellers who want to go beyond the beach.
Combining the South and Islands
Many of our most popular itineraries combine two or three of these destinations. Sicily and Malta pair naturally, given their proximity and complementary histories. Puglia pairs beautifully with Basilicata and Matera — the cave city, now a UNESCO site. Sardinia and Sicily offer a two-island journey that covers extraordinary ground in a focused timeframe.
If you’re drawn to southern Italy and the islands but unsure where to begin, the best starting point is a conversation with our team. We’ve been designing southern Italy tours for Australian travellers for years, and we know which combinations work, which seasons to choose, and which corners are worth the detour.
Browse our current southern Italy and island tours →
Or get in touch to start planning — we’ll help you build the right trip for how you travel.
