3 Best Sights in Marsala, Sicily

A sense of Marsala's past as a Carthaginian stronghold is captured by the well-preserved Punic warship displayed in this museum, along with some of the amphorae and other artifacts recovered from the wreck. The vessel, which was probably sunk during the great sea battle that ended the First Punic War in 241 BC, was dredged up from the mud near the Egadi Islands in the 1970s. There's also a good display of maritime and archaeological finds, as well as some Roman ruins with mosaics just beyond the museum's doors. A combined ticket allows you to take in the rather sparse archaeological area behind the museum, too.

A former Benedictine monastery near Piazza Repubblica is now the home of the Complesso Monumentale di San Pietro, a series of exhibition and conference rooms that include a collection of items relating to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the flamboyant hero of Italy's 19th-century war of independence. The resistance leader's name is ubiquitous in Marsala, for it was here that he disembarked his army of one thousand "red shirts" to battle against the Bourbons, a struggle that eventually led to a unified and independent Italy. Two rooms—including the monastery's former refectory—display guns, swords, busts, paintings, photographs, and uniforms from the campaign, including examples of the famous red shirts worn by Garibaldi's fiercely loyal followers. A box in the center of the room holds the guerrilla general's own pistol.

Other parts of the museum complex hold archaeological fragments from Roman hypogea and necropolis in the area as well as traditional masks and costumes worn in Marsala's Easter Thursday procession. The wide central courtyard is the venue for concerts and open-air movies in the summer.

Arranged in a series of rooms around the cobbled courtyard of the 18th-century Palazzo Fici, this museum in the old center opened in 2024 to showcase the Marsala wine for which the town is famous. It also chronicles the development of wine production in the region generally, from its Phoenician beginnings to the present, in the process providing a good summary of the history of the town itself. It's worth pausing in the first rooms to view the subtitled videos, before moving on to rooms that cover the terrain and manufacture of Marsala wine, focusing on the first British exporters—Woodhouse, Ingham, and Whitaker—and the Italian wine dynasties that succeeded them, notably the Florios.