Amazing! I don't have sufficient words to express what a wonderful experience it was staying at Daniela's home. Daniela herself is fabulous, charming, sweet and full of the joys of life. Her home has been in her family for generations and is being tended to with her love and care. It is a large Sicilian villa built around a central courtyard and surrounded by olive groves. Daniela lives in the main part of the villa and has created a beautiful exclusive private area at the back end of the courtyard for guests which can be entered through another old large door. The first thing you see is an absolutely gorgeous pool with the surroundings including potted fruit trees and herbs. Almost hidden at the side of this courtyard is an outside shower with a large rain shower head. From this outside area you walk into the private living quarters that is a mixture of carefully architected industrial modernity and original features of the farmworkers from the 1700's. The living room floor is a beautiful combination of somewhat mismatched floor tiles that the original workers lovingly arranged from the leftover tiles of the main house. The end result is beautiful. One of the doors is an original wooden door and the other is a modern metal and glass piece. Other than a fascinating focal element in the middle of the kitchen, that turned out to be a hutch used to house the precious olive oil, most of the rest of the place is modernized in a very complimentary way to the original features. The place is open and light with a specially designed metal staircase leading up to the two, open-designed, bedrooms upstairs. A clever use of a metal bookshelf creates a safety divider between one of the rooms and the staircase without blocking any of the light. The other room has a view of the pool and a mountain out of the one window and a view of the organic olive grove outside the other. We stayed for a week in March and Daniela had stocked our fridge with milk, water, pear juice and yoghurt and had provided cereal, breads, condiments, a bottle of wine and some of her delicious olive oil. Daniela offers cooking lessons and also arranges dinners made by her, on request. We partook in both and enjoyed every minute. The wine was plentiful, the food delicious and the company unsurpassed. We are heading home imagining that the speed in which we whipped up tagliatelle and a delicious caper, olive and tomato sauce will be repeated and enjoyed. We were given free reign to explore, take photos, pick vegetables from the organic garden or go walking through the olive orchard. We even got to pop into the little personal church in the farmhouse to take pictures. We treated this week as a down week on our trip to end off a 3 month stay in Italy. Three of the weeks were spent in Sicily. We couldn't have...