Step out of the apartment and you are already inside it. The Kasbah is the old Arab quarter of Mazara — a maze of narrow lanes, painted doorways and ceramic-tiled walls, built when the town was ruled from North Africa.

It is one of the best-preserved quarters of its kind in Europe, and unlike most of them, people still live here. Washing hangs above the streets. Neighbours talk from their doorsteps. Nothing about it is staged.

Five minutes on foot and the town ends in soft golden sand. Tonnarella runs for kilometres along the edge of Mazara, with shallow, warm water that stays calm well into the afternoon.

Outside the peak weeks of August you will often have long stretches of it almost to yourself — something you will not find on Sicily's more famous coasts.

In 1998 a fishing boat from Mazara pulled a bronze statue out of the sea. It turned out to be a Greek work more than two thousand years old — one of the finest ancient bronzes ever recovered from the Mediterranean.

It now has a museum of its own, four minutes from the apartments. Most visitors to Sicily have never heard of it. It is worth the walk.