Things to Do in Sicily in May

May is the month. The upper trails of Etna open like a secret door, winter snow has retreated above 2,900 m (9,514 ft), the secondary craters are reachable with the right jacket, and the cable car station above Nicolosi isn't swarming yet. In the beech forests of Etna Regional Park, between 1,000 and 1,900 m (3,281 and 6,234 ft), fresh green leaves flicker against black lava. The effect is disorienting. Worth it. Higher up, you'll smell sulfur before you see it. Fumaroles at the secondary craters hiss nonstop. On still May mornings the gas pools thick and low over volcanic gravel. Guides licensed in volcanology are mandatory above 2,800 m (9,186 ft). This isn't red tape, routes shift after every eruption. What was open last week may be fenced off today. Leave early from Zafferana Etnea or Nicolosi. Clouds pile over the summit by afternoon, and the Valle del Bove, the collapsed caldera on the eastern flank, 5 km (3.1 miles) wide and 1,000 m (3,281 ft) deep, vanishes in mist after lunch.

Morning light turns the Tempio della Concordia's 34 limestone columns the color of burnt honey between 9 and 11 AM, May is when you'll enjoy it. Agrigento's Valley of the the Temples is the best-preserved Greek complex outside Greece, and that 5th-century BC survivor faces east, so the facade ignites while the air is still a tolerable 25°C (77°F). July and August? You'll need stamina and a hat. May gives you leafy almond trees between the ruins and shade along 4 km (2.5 miles) of paths at a human pace. Next door, the Museo Regionale Archeologico Pietro Grifco keeps the 7.6 m (25 ft) Telamon, an Atlas carved for the Temple of Olympian Zeus, plus Sicily's clearest models of how these buildings once looked. Budget two hours for the museum. The ground is uneven, so bring shoes with real soles.

Skip July. May is when the seven Aeolian Islands, 50 km (31 miles) off Sicily's northeast coast, reveal themselves without the crush. Lipari, the largest and most inhabited, has been lived in since roughly 4000 BC. Its hilltop Castello rises above white cubic houses and delivers a 360-degree payoff: Vulcano's smoking crater to one side, Salina's twin peaks to the other. Stromboli erupts every 15-20 minutes after dark. Boat tours circle the Sciara del Fuoco, the northwest lava channel, at water level. The flash comes first. The sound, a deep percussive thud, arrives a second or two later. In May the water is calm, so the boom carries. Winter chop swallows it. Panarea turns into the Aeolians' social hub in July, expensive cocktails, moored yachts, total scene. In May it is simply itself. Harbor restaurant terraces are open. The prehistoric Bronze Age village at Punta Milazzese, 20 minutes on foot from the harbor, stands accessible and empty. The path through maquis scrub smells of thyme and sun-warmed rock. Hydrofoils from Milazzo reach Lipari in approximately 55 minutes. Day-trip excursions that stop at two or three islands give you enough orientation to decide where to return, and stay.

Skip Sunday. Palermo's three central street markets, Ballarò in the Albergheria quarter, Capo along Via Beati Paoli, and the smaller Vucciria near the Cala harbor, run every other morning. May delivers the spring haul that locks the Sicilian table: artichokes from the Piana degli Albanesi south of the city, the tail end of blood orange season from the Iblean plateau, fava beans sold by the kilo still in their pods, bundles of wild asparagus. The food at Ballarò is immediate and unapologetic. Stigghiola (lamb intestines grilled over charcoal) are sold from carts on Via Ballarò itself, smoke visible from a street away, the vendor fanning the charcoal with a folded cardboard square. The panelle and crocchè (chickpea flour fritters and potato croquettes) arrive in the pani ca meusa, a spleen sandwich that is accurately named and considerably better than that sounds, with a savory interior on a soft sesame-seed bun. The Mercato del Capo runs along Via Porta Carini and sits immediately below some of the best Arab-Norman architecture in the city. The facade of the Chiesa di Sant'Agostino rises directly above the stalls. Food tours with guides who speak the vendors' dialect add substantially to the experience, much of what the vendors call out and the provenance of specific heirloom varieties is context that does not come with signage.

Ortigia, the small island that forms the historic core of Syracuse (Siracusa), is connected to the mainland by two short bridges and contains an unreasonable amount of architectural history in an area roughly 1 km (0.6 miles) wide and 2 km (1.2 miles) long. The Temple of Apollo near the northern bridge is the oldest surviving Doric temple in Sicily, its stone worn smooth and pale after 26 centuries of Mediterranean weather. The Duomo was built directly over and around a 5th-century BC Greek temple dedicated to Athena, the original Doric columns are still visible, incorporated into the cathedral walls, which is one of those architectural facts that sounds abstract until you're standing inside the nave looking at them. The baroque piazza in front of the Duomo is, in the honest assessment of most architects who have written about it, among the finest public spaces in southern Italy. In May, the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico opens its annual season of Greek and Roman drama at the Teatro Greco in the Parco Archeologico della Neapolis on the mainland, about 2 km (1.2 miles) from Ortigia. The theater seats roughly 15,000 people on stone tiers cut into the Temenite Hill. The smell of pine resin and evening air, the hum of an audience that understands it is somewhere old, and the fact that the acoustics were designed for this exact purpose 2,500 years ago, this is the experience that sticks after everything else from a Sicily trip fades. The archaeological park also contains the Latomia del Paradiso, the enormous stone quarry where 7,000 Athenian prisoners were held after the catastrophic 413 BC expedition, and the Ear of Dionysius cave.

The Val di Noto cluster, eight towns rebuilt in the Baroque style after the catastrophic 1693 earthquake and now collectively UNESCO World Heritage-listed, forms the southeastern corner of Sicily and rewards at least two full days. Noto is the most coherent: the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a pedestrian street roughly 600 m (1,969 ft) long, runs between three baroque piazzas anchored by the Cathedral of San Nicolò at its head, and on May evenings when the street lights come on, the honey-colored local limestone takes on a warm glow that is not a trick of photography. The Caffè Sicilia on the Corso (open since 1892) makes granita from seasonal fruit, mulberry (gelso) in May, when available, is the one to order, and the consistency between what the fruit tastes like and what the granita tastes like is what distinguishes a century-old institution from its imitators. The Infiorata festival, held on the third weekend of May, covers the length of Via Corrado Nicolaci, a side street famous for its ornate carved balconies, in an elaborate carpet of flower petals. The carpet designs change each year. The preparation takes place in the small hours of Friday and Saturday nights. By Sunday morning the view down the full street is the most photographed single image in Sicilian tourism. Ragusa Ibla, 30 km (18.6 miles) west, is the more quietly residential of the baroque towns, its streets inhabited rather than managed for visitors. Modica, between Noto and Ragusa, produces cold-process chocolate using a method introduced from Aztec recipes via Spanish colonial contact, ground without dairy or cocoa butter, grainy in texture, intensely flavored with cinnamon or chili, nothing like Swiss chocolate and worth a significant detour.