‘It began, like all the best travel discoveries, by chance’: 21 writers on their finds of 2021

It’s been a year bookended by travel restrictions, but our writers still found plenty of fabulous destinations, both at home and abroad

I spent September travelling around Sicily alone, mostly on foot, and I wanted to flop on a beach before going home. I settled on Cefalù on the north coast, because of its rare combination of sandy beach and medieval town – and it was love at first sight. I had heard that the tiny town gets unpleasantly packed in summer, but by late September there was just a lively buzz. Cefalù seemed a distillation of everywhere else I had been: Sicily in miniature. I gazed up at the mosaic-bright Christ Pantocrator in the twin-towered Arab-Norman cathedral. I came face to face with Antonello da Messina’s enigmatic Portrait of an Unknown Man, a masterpiece in the unassuming (and empty) Museo Mandralisca. I climbed La Rocca, a huge crag that looms over the town, to a fourth- or fifth-century temple and ruined castle.