The Trapani salt pans and the Nubia windmill

Salt has been harvested on this stretch of coast since antiquity, and the landscape it produced is unlike anything else in Sicily: a grid of shallow rectangles filled with seawater, separated by narrow white causeways you can walk along, with the Egadi islands out on the horizon and old stone windmills that once moved the water from pan to pan.

The whole area between Trapani and Marsala is protected as the Riserva Naturale Saline di Trapani e Paceco, and the best-kept windmill for photographs is the Mulino Maria Stella at Nubia, just south of the city, where a salt museum sits beside the pans. The mill gives you the vertical element every frame here needs — without it the picture is all horizon.

The pans face west and are perfectly flat, so this is a sunset location and nothing else. In the last half-hour the water goes copper, then pink, then silver, the windmill drops to a silhouette, and a person standing on the white path reads as a dark shape against colour. Wind is normal here and the surface ripples, so a mirror reflection is luck rather than a plan.

From roughly July to September the harvest is on: salt is raked into pyramids and covered with terracotta tiles, which changes the whole look and adds white cones to the composition. Wear closed shoes, keep to the paths, and expect mosquitoes at dusk in summer.