Over the past few weeks, the world’s attention briefly landed on a corner of Sicily that has always deserved more of it. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner spent three days celebrating their wedding in Palermo, and in doing so, inadvertently produced the most compelling luxury travel guide to the city that anyone has published in years. The two properties at the centre of it all have been here for centuries. They simply needed the right moment to be seen.
Villa Valguarnera: Bagheria’s Best Kept Secret
Twenty-five kilometres from Palermo, in the town of Bagheria that was once the summer retreat of Sicilian nobility, Villa Valguarnera has been standing since 1712. Most people drove past it for years without knowing what was behind the gates.
It was here, on the evening of June 6, that the ceremony took place. Elton John at the piano. The Gulf of Palermo visible from the balustraded terraces.
The villa was designed by a student of Bernini, built in the shape of a symbolic key, and its library still holds over 15,000 volumes. Dolce and Gabbana filmed here with Sophia Loren. The current owner is a princess who is also, in a detail that feels entirely Sicilian, the first Italian translator of The Lord of the Rings.
The catering was handled by Tony Lo Coco, a self-taught Michelin-starred chef whose restaurant I Pupi sits inside the lower floors of the nearby Villa Palagonia. He has been cooking this way his whole life. Guests were served cassate and cannoli alongside a menu built entirely around what the island had to offer that week.
A place like this does not need a celebrity wedding to validate it. It simply needed the right moment to be seen.
Source: Villa Valguarnera
Villa Igiea: Palermo’s Grand Dame
Two days before the ceremony, the couple based themselves at Villa Igiea on the outskirts of Palermo. In choosing this address, they joined a guest list that stretches back to 1907, when King Edward VII arrived by royal yacht to lunch here and explore the city.
The Florio family built it in 1900, commissioned from Ernesto Basile, the same architect behind Teatro Massimo and the most important name in Sicilian Art Nouveau. What began as a planned sanatorium for the Florio daughter became, before it was even finished, one of the most ambitious luxury hotels in southern Europe. The frescoes in the Sala Basile, painted by Ettore De Maria Bergler at the turn of the century, depict the four moments of a single day across four walls. They have not been touched since.
By the late 20th century the villa had fallen into serious disrepair. Rocco Forte Hotels acquired it in 2019 and did what few restoration projects manage: returned it to its original character without making it feel preserved. The culinary programme went to Fulvio Pierangelini, a chef who held two Michelin stars for thirty years at his restaurant Gambero Rosso in Tuscany. Heston Blumenthal once drove five hours just to eat there. His philosophy suits Villa Igiea perfectly. Simplicity, he says, is the point of arrival.
Source: Tripadvisor
Palermo was never a secret
Neither of these villas needed a celebrity wedding to put them on the map. What the events of June 2026 provided was a moment of global attention directed at a city that has been quietly earning its place on the luxury travel radar for several years.
Palermo is not the obvious Sicilian choice. It lacks the resort polish of Taormina and the architectural tidiness of cities built for tourism. What it has instead is density, of history, of food culture, of architectural ambition, accumulated across millennia of Arab, Norman, Byzantine and Baroque influence, layered in a way that produces something genuinely unlike anywhere else in Italy.
The Ballarò and Capo markets, where Tony Lo Coco shops for his restaurant, are among the most visceral food markets in Europe. The street food, arancini, panelle, stigghiola, is the kind that serious eaters plan trips around. And the grand villas of Bagheria, most of them still privately owned and largely unknown outside Sicily, represent a form of aristocratic heritage with no equivalent on the island. Palermo has always had this. It simply took the right wedding to make the world look up.
Source of image: villasetvoyages.com
