SICILY BY CAR Car Rental at Palermo Airport

The service desk for Sicily By Car is located inside the terminal, in the arrivals area of Palermo airport. The Sicily by Car team can be contacted by telephoning +39 091 591 250. Reservations can be made via using the form above. Sicily By Car offers visitors arriving at Palermo Airport a great choice of vehicles, among them the Ford Kuga, Fiat Panda, Opel Cascada Cabrio, Ford Fiesta, Peugeot 308, Ford C-Max and Volkswagen Tiguan. There's something for every leisure or business travel need and budget.

Sicily By Car at Palermo Airport also offers customers 24/7 roadside assistance. If you happen to have a problem with your rental car, simply call 800 06 98 37 (anywhere in Italy) or mobile number +39 015 255 9656.

Sicily By Car is just one of the many car hire companies at Palermo Airport.

Palermo's wonderful botanical gardens have been around for some 200 years, now showcasing a vast number of plants, among them many rare species. The entrance to this large urban lung is located on Via Lincoln. Orto Botanico di Palermo hosts various cultural events and flower shows throughout the year, as the gardens are also a research and educational institution that is part of the Department of Botany of the University of Palermo. The gardens open at 9.00 am every day and close at 6.00 pm. Be prepared to spend some time: the gardens span some 10 hectares! Orto Botanico di Palermo includes a Herbarium, a Seed Bank and a Virtual Herbarium with more than 90,000 images that can be consulted online. But it's the living collections in the gardens that draw visitors from all over the world to Palermo (www.ortobotanico.unipa.it).

If you love the outdoors and walking, if seeing rare plants of the Mediterranean delights you, take a trip to Catania in the southeast of Sicily, where the Giardino Botanico Nuova Gussonea is one of the highlights of a trip. The University of Catania already had a chair for Botany in the early part of the 19th century, but it wasn't until the Benedictine monk Francesco Tornabene Roccaforte came along as holder of the chair in 1843 that the idea of a botanical garden began to take shape. He managed to buy a piece of land in the Borgo in 1847. It took a long time to get things moving, but by 1862 the first plants were established, having arrived from Botanical Gardens from other parts of the world, including Sweden and France, but also from other parts of Italy, including Palermo.

Today the gardens cover around 16,000 square meters, and contain thousands of specimens, including a vast greenhouse filled with 160 different plants alone (www.ortobotanicoitalia.it/sicilia/catania/ ). The gardens are located on Via Etnea in Catania, and are open from April to September from 8.00 am to 8.00 pm from Mondays to Fridays, and from 8.00 am to 1.00 pm on Saturdays. The gardens are closed on Sundays. In the winter months the gardens close at 5.00 pm.

Catania is some 209 km distance from Palermo, about a 2.5 hour drive via the A19 motorway. This ancient port town is well worth visiting on a trip to Sicily. Sitting in the shadow of Mt Etna, Catania has many tourist attractions, including the beautiful Cathedral of Catania, the charming Fontana dell'Elefante fountain on Piazza del Duomo, and volcanic Mount Etna itself, which can be accessed via several trails that lead to the summit.