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The rolling hills of the Belice Valley are planted with wheat – green in winter, gold in summer, and burned black after the harvest – bordered by grape vines and olive trees.

On the road from old to new Poggioreale, a single wheat-covered hill rises up, topped with a lone wild pear tree.

The rugged hills around Segesta, Calatafimi and Alcamo look dry and barren, but resourceful Sicilians plant them with hearty vines, cultivating the hills as high as possible.

The rocky mountains between Trapani, Castellamare del Golfo and San Vito lo Capo are rich in marble, but are slowly being destroyed by huge industrial quarries extracting the stone for office buildings.

The rock towers at Scopello Tonnara jut out of the water, and are circled by seagulls who nest in the rocks’ crevices.

The enormous rocky formations hurled up by the sea include Monte San Giuliano (with Erice on top), Monte Cofano (with spectacular bays and a great view from Erice), and Monte Monaco at San Vito lo Capo.

Near its mouth the wide, fertile Belice Valley is long, low, flat, and very good for farming; it’s covered with a patchwork quilt of wine vineyards, olive groves, melon vines and citrus fruit trees. It is traversed by a typical Sicilian highway, raised on tall stilts.

The Romans deforested Sicily to make way for profitable wheat farms. The result here is treeless earth, parched for much of the year and prone to drastic run-off during rains. When flooded with more water than they can handle, entire hillsides crumble into the sea.

Long sandy beaches line the western coast of Sicily, reaching up to the huge stretch of sand at San Vito Lo Capo. Pebble beaches are found to the northwest, on the coast of the Golfo di Castellammare.

The mountains of the interior flatten as they near the sea toward Mazara, Marsala and up to Trapani on the northwest coast. The flat, sunbaked ground is fertile territory for grapes, olives and the salt pans.