Sicily

Sicily has the better Greek temples. Agrigento's Valley of the Temples, on the south coast, holds the most-preserved Doric architecture in the ancient Greek world: half a dozen temples standing more or less complete on a ridge above the sea, built in the centuries when Sicily was a Greek colony and a centre of the wider Greek world. The site has been UNESCO-listed since 1997. Above all of it, Mount Etna rises 3,403 metres, Europe's most active volcano, listed by UNESCO in 2013, and visible from most of the eastern Sicilian coast.

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, so big that a yacht week struggles to cover even half of it. Most charters pick a coast. Taormina and Catania to the east for Etna, the Greek theatre with the bay of the same name laid out below it, and the bay anchorages around Isola Bella, the small islet just off the Taormina shore. Palermo and the western coast take you to the Arab-Norman cathedrals at Palermo, Cefalù and Monreale (which earned a UNESCO listing in their own right in 2015), plus the Egadi Islands of Favignana, Levanzo and Marettimo just off the western tip. Ortigia, the small historic island that holds the old core of Syracuse, is its own day, as is the seafront town of Cefalù.

The season is long, April to November. A week covers one coast properly, and the choice between east and west usually comes down to whether you'd rather see Etna or the Arab-Norman cathedrals. Charters pick up in Palermo, Messina, or directly in a Taormina anchorage, depending on which way the trip is going.