Trapani, Erice and Mozia: Western Sicily’s Salt Coast

At the western tip of the island, Trapani, Sicily, sits on a narrow curved spit of land running out into the sea, with salt pans and windmills spread along the flat coast to the south and the limestone mass of Monte Erice rising behind. Within a short drive are three quite different places: Trapani’s Baroque old town, the medieval hilltop town of Erice on the mountain sacred to Venus, and Mozia, a small island in a shallow lagoon that was once one of the most important Phoenician cities in the western Mediterranean. This guide covers all three, with practical notes on getting around. On our Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica tour, the group spends two nights in Trapani and visits Mozia and Erice in a single day.

Trapani, Sicily: a city shaped like a sickle

Trapani takes its name from the Greek drepanon, a sickle, after the curve of the land it stands on. The town narrows from the plain at the foot of Monte Erice onto a thin peninsula with the sea on both sides. In antiquity it was the harbour for Eryx, the Elymian settlement on the mountain above. The Carthaginians took it and made it a naval base in 260 BC, during the First Punic War, and it passed to Rome in 241 BC, the year a Roman fleet defeated the Carthaginians off the nearby Egadi Islands and ended the war. For the wider story of Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans on the island, see our article on the early history of Sicily, from the Phoenicians to the Arab conquest.

Salt, tuna, wine and coral made the town’s later fortunes. Trapani’s coral workers were known across Europe in the sixteenth century, and the port still ships salt and wine. The old town was heavily bombed by the Allies in the Second World War, but much of its Baroque centre survives.

Walking Trapani’s old town

The spine of the old town is Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a pedestrian street that fills with strollers in the late afternoon and ends at the Baroque Palazzo Senatorio. Along it stand the Jesuit College church and the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. The cathedral dates back to the fourteenth century but owes its Baroque façade of three broad sandstone arches to the eighteenth-century Trapani architect Giovanni Biagio Amico; inside is a Crucifixion attributed to Anthony van Dyck.

A few streets away, the Church of the Anime Sante del Purgatorio keeps the Misteri, twenty life-size groups of carved figures showing the Passion, most dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each group belongs to one of the town’s trade guilds, which carry them through the streets on Good Friday in a procession that has taken place for more than 400 years. It leaves the church in the afternoon and returns the next morning. The groups stay in the church the rest of the year, so you can see them on any visit.

For the sea, follow the Mura di Tramontana, the old northern sea walls, which you can walk along the top towards the Torre di Ligny, a seventeenth-century watchtower at the tip of the peninsula. It is best at sunset. Further out, in the newer part of town, the Santuario dell’Annunziata holds a revered statue of the Madonna attributed to the Pisan sculptor Nino Pisano. Next door, the Museo Regionale Agostino Pepoli occupies the old Carmelite convent and displays Trapani coral work alongside paintings and sculpture.

Can you visit the Trapani salt pans?

Yes: the salt pans between Trapani and Paceco are a nature reserve that you can visit, and they are still in production. The Sicilian Region created the Riserva Naturale Orientata Saline di Trapani e Paceco on 11 May 1995, and WWF Italia manages it. It covers about 1,000 hectares, and it has been a Ramsar wetland of international importance since 2011. At the time of writing, the WWF runs guided visits on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays by prior booking, from its visitor centre in a former windmill on the Trapani to Marsala road.

The landscape is entirely made by people. Sea water is moved through a chain of shallow basins of different sizes and depths until the summer sun and wind leave a crust of salt to rake up and heap into long white mounds. The windmills had three jobs: pumping water from one basin to the next, lifting it, and grinding the salt crystals. Salt-making on this coast is traditionally traced back to the Phoenicians. The Museo del Sale, in an old salt-workers’ house at Nubia, explains how it is done.

The pans also attract birds. More than 240 species have been recorded here on the migration route between Africa and Europe. Only 16 flamingos were counted when the reserve was created; there are now around 1,200, and in the summer of 2026 the WWF reported the first flamingo chicks hatched in the reserve.

Erice, Sicily: Venus’s mountain town

Erice stands at 751 metres on the summit of Monte Erice, directly above Trapani. In antiquity it was Eryx, an Elymian town famous across the Mediterranean for its sanctuary of an Elymian goddess later identified with the Phoenician Astarte, the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus Erycina. The Norman count Roger I took the town in the eleventh century and renamed it Monte San Giuliano, which remained its name until 1934.

The town is a compact triangle of lanes inside its old walls. The Chiesa Matrice, the main church, was built in 1314, with a detached bell tower of 1312 and a porch added in 1426. At the far end of town, the Castello di Venere stands on the cliff edge over the remains of the temple of Venus, reusing fragments of the ancient sanctuary in its Norman walls. A drawbridge joins it to the Torri del Balio, and the terraces around it look out over Trapani, the salt pans and, on clear days, the Egadi Islands. At the time of writing, the castle is open daily.

How do you get from Trapani up to Erice?

The easiest way up is the Trapani to Erice cable car, which takes about ten minutes. The line runs for about 3 kilometres from a lower station on the edge of Trapani, about 40 metres above sea level, to an upper station at 703 metres, on the edge of Erice. The current system opened in 2005. At the time of writing it is running, with occasional short closures for maintenance, so check the operator’s website (funiviaerice.it) before you go. A winding road also climbs the mountain if the cable car is not running. Bring a layer, as the summit is often cooler and windier than the coast.

Mozia: the Phoenician island in the Stagnone lagoon

South of the salt pans, towards Marsala, the coast shelters the Stagnone, the largest lagoon in Sicily, usually only a metre or two deep. It contains four islands and has been protected by the Sicilian Region since 1984. The most important of them is Mozia, the ancient Motya, an island of about 40 hectares that was settled by Phoenicians in the first half of the eighth century BC and grew into a walled trading city.

Motya fell in a single famous siege. In 397 BC Dionysius I of Syracuse attacked it with a great army; the Motyans cut the causeway to the mainland and resisted, but the city was taken; many of its people were killed and the survivors sold into slavery. The Carthaginians retook the island the following year, but moved its few remaining inhabitants to a new city on the mainland at Lilybaeum, the modern Marsala.

The island’s modern history belongs to Joseph Whitaker (1850–1936), a member of the English family who made their fortune in Marsala wine. He bought Motya and began excavating in the early twentieth century, publishing Motya: A Phoenician Colony in Sicily in 1921. The Fondazione Giuseppe Whitaker, established in 1975 under the patronage of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, owns the island and its museum, which is housed in Whitaker’s former house.

A path circles the island past the main excavations. At the North Gate, twin bastions guarded the end of a paved road, built in the sixth century BC, that ran across the lagoon to the mainland at Birgi; stretches of it lie just under the water. Elsewhere are the Cappiddazzu sanctuary, the Tophet (an open-air sanctuary used for burials), and the Kothon, a basin about 52.5 by 37 metres that Whitaker took for an artificial harbour; recent excavations by Rome’s Sapienza University have shown it was fed by springs and never linked to the lagoon, and identify it as a sacred pool at the centre of a sanctuary. The museum holds pottery, masks, jewellery and everyday objects from the excavations, with a newer wing for more recent finds.

Is the Motya Charioteer on display at Mozia?

Yes, at the time of writing the statue known as the Motya Charioteer, or the Giovinetto di Mozia, is on display in the Whitaker Museum on the island. It is a marble figure of a young man about 1.8 metres tall in a long, finely pleated tunic, found in October 1979 and dated to the fifth century BC. Scholars still debate who he is: the tunic suggests a charioteer, though other identifications have been proposed. The statue has occasionally travelled on loan, most famously to the British Museum in 2012, so if seeing it is your reason for going, check with the Fondazione Whitaker first. Excavation continues: in 2025 a University of Palermo team found a second marble statue, a draped female figure, in a pottery workshop on the island.

How do you get to Mozia?

Small boats run across the lagoon from jetties on the Marsala shore, opposite the island, and the crossing takes only five to ten minutes. Boats are frequent in summer, but services and museum hours are shorter in winter, so check times locally before you go. The island is flat, but the paths are unpaved, so wear sturdy shoes, and bring a hat, as there is little shade.

Trapani, Mozia and Erice on Days 9 and 10 of the tours

Both tours follow the same route through western Sicily, and the Trapani days fall on the same day numbers in each. On Day 8 the group visits the Roman mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale and spends the night in Agrigento. Day 9 begins with a morning in Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, then heads north-west with a stop at Segesta for a guided visit to its Doric temple, a temple that was never finished (its columns were never fluted and it was never roofed), and its ancient theatre. The group reaches Trapani in the late afternoon, with time at leisure before dinner at a local restaurant.

Day 10 starts with a walking tour of Trapani’s main sights. The group then transfers to San Leonardo for the boat to Mozia, visits the main archaeological sites and the Whitaker Museum, and has lunch at a local restaurant. In the afternoon the group rides up to Erice for the views over the valley and the sea, before returning to the hotel for the second night in Trapani. On Day 11 the route continues to Monreale and Palermo; our guide to things to do in Palermo covers the Norman and Baroque city that comes next. Both tours are rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging, with up to six hours of activity a day over varied terrain.

The two itineraries part company after Sicily. The 12-day Malta & Sicily – Mediterranean Islands small group tour ends in Palermo, while the 25-day tour flies on to Sardinia and Corsica. Our day-by-day Sicily itinerary follows the whole island route from Noto to Palermo, and the Mediterranean islands itinerary from Malta to Corsica sets the Trapani days in the context of the full journey.

Trapani, Erice and Mozia show three faces of western Sicily within a few kilometres: a working port built on salt and coral, a mountain town where Venus was worshipped long before the Normans arrived, and an island city destroyed by Syracuse and rediscovered by a Marsala wine merchant. On the Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica tour, a small group of up to 16 travellers sees all three with local guides and an Odyssey Program Leader.