Mediterranean Islands Itinerary: Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica

Four islands, four very different histories, and one sea that has connected them for three thousand years — that is the premise behind a well-built Mediterranean islands itinerary. Malta’s Baroque capital, Sicily’s Greek and Arab-Norman layers, Sardinia’s Bronze Age towers and Corsica’s mountain villages rarely appear in the same trip, because getting between them independently means a patchwork of ferries, regional flights and hotel bookings. Odyssey Traveller’s 25-day small group tour solves that logistics problem by sequencing the four islands in an order that respects both geography and history, so each stop builds on the one before it. This guide sets out that route, why it runs in this order, and how to think about pacing across nearly four weeks of touring.

Why the Route Runs Malta → Sicily → Sardinia → Corsica

The order of a four-island Mediterranean trip matters more than it first appears. Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica sit roughly east to west and then south to north across the western Mediterranean, and travelling between them in sequence rather than backtracking keeps ferry and flight connections sensible. It also builds historical context in layers: Malta introduces the Knights of St John and a small, dense island shaped entirely by its harbours; Sicily then broadens that picture into the Greek, Roman and Arab civilisations and the Norman kingdom that also touched Malta; Sardinia shifts the focus further back, into a Bronze Age culture that predates all of it; and Corsica closes the loop with a more recent, French and Genoese story capped by Napoleon. Rather than four disconnected destinations, the islands read as chapters of the same Mediterranean story, told roughly in the order their influence appears in the historical record.

On Odyssey’s small group tour, this sequence is fixed: five days based in Malta, with a day on Gozo, six nights across Sicily’s east and west coasts, seven nights in Sardinia, and the final week working north through Corsica to Bastia. A tour leader and local guides manage the transfers, flights and ferries between islands, which removes what is otherwise the most complex part of planning this kind of trip independently. For the specific ferry and flight connections behind these transfers, our guide to getting between Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica sets out the routes in full — and for a closer, side-by-side look at how the four islands actually compare on landscape, pace and cost, see our guide to choosing between the islands.

Malta: Where the Itinerary Begins

The tour opens with five days in Malta and Gozo, based at a hotel on the waterfront. Early days focus on prehistoric sites around Paola, home of the megalithic Tarxien Temples, and Birzebugga before the itinerary moves into Valletta itself — the Grandmaster’s Palace, St John’s Co-Cathedral, and the Museum of Archaeology all feature on a guided walking day through the UNESCO-listed capital. A full day is also set aside for the walled city of Mdina and Rabat, including St Paul’s Catacombs, before a final day-trip by ferry to Gozo to see the Ġgantija temples, among the oldest free-standing structures on earth.

Malta’s five days are deliberately unhurried by design of the route, since this compact island rewards slow, walkable exploration rather than long coach transfers. For a closer look at how those five days are sequenced day by day, our Malta itinerary guide breaks down the Valletta, Three Cities, Mdina and Gozo route in full.

Sicily: The Cultural Hinge of the Trip

From Malta, the tour crosses by ferry to Sicily, and this is where the itinerary’s pace changes — six nights are spent moving through Noto, Syracuse, Agrigento, Trapani and Palermo, with the group based in a different town every one or two nights. Noto’s Baroque churches, the Neapolis Archaeological Park in Syracuse, the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento and the mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale at Piazza Armerina each stand as full sites in their own right, and the tour treats them as such rather than rushing between them. The Sicilian leg closes in Palermo and Monreale, taking in the Arab-Norman Cappella Palatina and Teatro Massimo before the group flies onward.

Sicily carries the heaviest concentration of world-renowned sites in the itinerary, and readers planning independently often underestimate how much ground it covers. Our dedicated Sicily itinerary article sets out the Noto-to-Palermo route stop by stop, including which towns work as day trips and which need an overnight stay.

Sardinia: A Change of Register

After Sicily, a short flight (routed via Rome or Milan, since no direct connection between Sicily and Sardinia currently exists) takes the group to Cagliari, and the tone of the trip shifts again. Sardinia’s nuragic towers predate Sicily’s Greek temples by more than a thousand years: the island holds over 7,000 surviving nuraghi, the fortified stone towers of a Bronze Age culture that occupied Sardinia between roughly 1800 and 500 BCE. The tour visits Su Nuraxi di Barumini, a UNESCO World Heritage nuraghe complex, alongside Nora, Sardinia’s best-preserved Roman city, and the Tomb of the Giants en route to Olbia. Seven nights are spent across Cagliari, Fonni and Olbia, with a day trip by ferry to Maddalena Island’s coastline and a day in the walled town of Alghero included toward the end of the Sardinian leg.

Sardinia tends to be the least familiar of the four islands to overseas travellers, which is part of why it works well as the third stop rather than the first — by this point in the trip, the group has the context to appreciate just how much older this island’s nuragic story is than the Greek and Roman Sicily it has just left behind. Readers wanting the day-by-day detail behind these seven nights can follow our dedicated Sardinia itinerary from Cagliari to Alghero, or our guide to things to do in Sardinia beyond the beach for more on Nora, Su Nuraxi and Barumini specifically.

Corsica: Mountains Meeting the Sea

The final week crosses to Corsica by ferry, landing at Bonifacio’s dramatic clifftop citadel before working north through Sartène, Propriano and Ajaccio — Napoleon’s birthplace and home to the Palais Fesch, which holds France’s largest collection of Italian paintings after the Louvre, alongside an important collection of Napoleonic art. From there the route follows the coast to Calvi and the UNESCO-listed Golfe de Porto, before finishing in Bastia via the mountain town of Corte. Corsica is administratively French but was ruled by Genoa for centuries before a brief period of independence in the 18th century, and that layered identity — Italian in architecture, French in governance, distinctly Corsican in language and in a food culture running from mountain charcuterie to coastal seafood — comes through clearly in the towns the tour visits. Our guide to things to do in Corsica beyond the beach covers Ajaccio, Bonifacio, Corte and Cap Corse in full.

Ending the itinerary in Corsica rather than starting there works partly for geographic reasons and partly because, after three islands shaped by Mediterranean trade and conquest, Corsica’s more insular, mountainous character makes a natural final act.

Pace, Health and What 25 Days Actually Involves

This is not a beach holiday with occasional sightseeing built in — Odyssey lists the tour at Level 3, Moderate to Challenging, which assumes participants are in excellent health, very mobile and active, and able to manage walking tours and coach travel across varied terrain, including cobbled old towns and some uneven archaeological sites. Accommodation changes fairly regularly, particularly through Sicily, where the group changes hotel every one or two nights. Anyone weighing up the full 25-day route against a shorter option, such as the 12-day Malta & Sicily – Mediterranean Islands small group tour, which covers the same Malta and Sicily days before finishing in Palermo, is better served thinking honestly about stamina for sustained travel over that Level 3 rating alone.

Against that, the reward is coherence: rather than four separate short trips bookended by international flights, the four islands are experienced as a single, connected journey, with one internal flight, ferries between islands, and one program leader throughout.

How much walking does this tour involve, and when is the best time to go?

Odyssey rates this tour Level 3, Moderate to Challenging, with up to six hours of activity a day over varied terrain, often on cobbled streets or uneven archaeological ground. Summer heat in Sicily and Sardinia can make long touring days harder going — for more detail on how timing plays out on the ground, see our guide to the best time to visit Sicily.

Travelling This Route as Part of a Small Group

Group size on this tour is up to 16 participants, deliberately small enough that a single tour leader and local guides can manage logistics across four islands, several languages and a number of ferry and flight connections without the trip feeling like a large coach tour. Odyssey caters specifically to mature travellers, and the group includes both couples and solo travellers — a meaningful consideration on a 25-day trip, where shared meals and a fixed itinerary reduce the planning burden that solo travel usually adds.

Four islands, each with a genuinely different story to tell, rarely combine into a single well-paced trip without a lot of independent planning — which is exactly the gap this itinerary is designed to close. Whether you’re drawn in by Malta’s Knights, Sicily’s temples, Sardinia’s nuraghi or Corsica’s mountains, seeing all four in one carefully sequenced journey, with the logistics handled, is where a guided small group tour earns its place over planning the route yourself.