Where The White Lotus Season 2 Was Filmed

Season two aired from 30 October to 11 December 2022. It was shot in early 2022: HBO confirmed filming at the hotel on 28 February, the production took over the San Domenico Palace before it opened to guests for the season, and the boat unit worked out of Giardini Naxos through late April and May. The wrap date is not on record.

Most of it is in Taormina. The parts people most want to visit are not.

In Taormina

Castelmola — the village on the crag above the town — appears, though no source pins a scene to it. The bar there that every list names was where one of the actors says the cast went off duty. It did not appear on screen. Neither did the cable car, which every list also names.

The boat above is the way to see the Taormina set from the angle the show used: the port the yacht sailed from, the cliff below the hotel, the headland and the rock, and Isola Bella with a swim. What it is not is a scene-by-scene tour — the coves it stops in are lovely and were never filmed, and nobody has yet confirmed the hotel is identifiable from the deck. We say so because the page that doesn’t is the page you stop trusting.

Not in Taormina

This is the half most lists blur, and it decides whether a day’s plan works.

The beach is Cefalù. The opening-episode beach where Daphne finds the body, the beach conversations, and episode six’s old port, cathedral steps and the bench in Piazza Marina are all in Cefalù, about two hundred kilometres away on the north coast. The show’s creator passed on Taormina’s beaches, which are pebble. Which beach in Cefalù is disputed between the town’s main lungomare and the old-port strand.

The villas are swapped. Daphne and Harper’s “Noto” villa in episode three is Villa Tasca — in Palermo, whose frescoes inspired the title sequence; it can be rented, at a price around five thousand a night with a three-night minimum, and local operators run guided visits and evening events. Quentin’s “Palermo” villa of episodes five to seven is Villa Elena — near Noto, a seventeenth-century monastery owned by a French designer, private, and not a visitor attraction.

Noto itself carries Daphne and Harper’s day: Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the cathedral steps and the aperitivo on Piazza del Duomo, and the homage to L’avventura on the steps of the church of San Francesco.

The opera is Catania. The Madama Butterfly the group attends was shot inside the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania; Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, which the exterior suggests, was unavailable and appears only from the steps.

The Godfather stop in episode three is the Castello degli Schiavi at Fiumefreddo, half an hour south of Taormina — the same private house that played Don Tommasino’s villa in all three Godfather films. It is not open to the public; visits are by appointment with the owner. godfather-tour-taormina.com sets out the trilogy’s Sicilian locations film by film, the castle’s access rules included.

The ceramic heads

The Teste di Moro — Moor’s heads — are the season’s motif, and the show tells half the legend. In the receptionist’s version, a Moor seduced a local girl, she learned he had a wife and children at home, and she cut his head off. The Palermo original continues: she planted basil in the head, it thrived on her tears, and the neighbours wanted copies — which is why they are flowerpots. The second version has the girl’s family behead both lovers and hang the heads as a warning, which is why they come in pairs. The show keeps the revenge and drops the rest.

They are made in Caltagirone, the ceramics town inland; in Taormina, Ceramiche Rapisarda on Corso Umberto sells Caltagirone work, pairs of heads included. Small pairs run around €90–100 online.

Getting to Taormina

From Catania airport the Interbus coach is €7 single, €14 return, about an hour and a quarter to the Via Pirandello terminal. The train from Catania Centrale takes 35 to 50 minutes to Taormina-Giardini, which is at sea level — then a local bus or the shuttle up. The cable car from town to Mazzarò and Isola Bella is €8 one way, €15 return, €20 for the day, every fifteen minutes. Parking tariffs at the Lumbi and Porta Catania garages conflict between sources; check the municipal operator before driving up.

Scene attributions come from HBO’s production stills as reproduced by location guides, the hotel’s own pages, and eyewitness accounts of the 2022 shoot; access and prices from the operators’ and institutions’ own sites, checked October 2026. Where sources disagree we have said so.