Almond blossom comes to Agrigento before the tourists do

Drive the back road below Agrigento in the first week of February and the hillsides have already turned. Almond trees flower before their leaves arrive, so each tree stands bare except for white, with a thread of pink at the centre of every blossom. The ground underneath is still wet from January rain and the grass is the green it only manages twice a year. Around the temples the almonds grow between the columns and along the old paths, planted there long before the site became somewhere people queue to enter. In the first week of February there is no queue. There is a groundskeeper, two or three walkers, and more light than you know what to do with.

The bloom is not a fixed date. It answers to the winter, not to the calendar. After a mild January the earliest trees open in the last days of the month and the whole thing is finished by the end of February. After a cold one, the flowering holds back and the hillsides are still white in the first week of March. Agrigento marks the season with an almond blossom festival, usually in the first half of March, with folk groups, a parade and a crowd. By then the best of the flowering has often gone over. If you want the trees rather than the festival, aim at the middle of February and accept that nature will move your plans by a week in either direction.

February is not a warm month, and we would rather tell you that plainly. Mornings near the coast start around nine or ten degrees. By one in the afternoon you can stand in a shirt in the sun and be comfortable, and by five you want the coat back. Rain arrives in short, heavy bursts and then leaves. The important number is the light. In February the good window opens around 16:30, which sounds early until you understand what the stone does. Sicilian limestone absorbs heat and colour all day and throws it back as the sun drops, so the last hour here holds longer and warmer than the same hour in a northern February.

For a proposal, February is the easiest month of the year to work in. The Valley of the Temples in August requires patience and a certain amount of standing about waiting for a gap between groups. In February the paths are close to empty at four in the afternoon, which means Salvo can place himself properly, at distance, with a long lens, and you can walk without an audience. The same is true at Punta Bianca and along the shore at Realmonte below Scala dei Turchi, where the winter sea is loud and the beach belongs to two or three dog walkers. You can see how the sites differ across the year at /locations.

For an elopement the month asks for one adjustment: the ceremony has to sit inside the light. Cristiana writes and leads every ceremony we hold, and in February she will usually begin at around a quarter past four, so the vows land as the stone starts to warm. She also handles the paperwork for couples coming from abroad, and she will tell you the same thing we are telling you here. Requirements for foreign nationals change, and you should confirm the current position with the relevant Italian authority, your consulate or the comune where you intend to marry, before you commit to dates or flights.

Two practical notes. Shoes first: the paths in the valley are packed earth and loose stone, and in February they hold water for a day or two after rain, so bring something you can walk a kilometre in and change at the site. Second, the wind. Almond blossom is fragile, and the same breeze that moves it will move a veil, a jacket and your hair. That is not a problem to solve. Some of the best frames of the season come out of a single gust. But a coat waiting just outside the frame makes the hour between the first photograph and the last considerably more comfortable.

February is a short season and it does not repeat. The trees flower for perhaps three weeks, the site is quiet for those three weeks, and then the coaches return. If you are thinking about an early spring in Sicily, tell us the dates you are already holding and what you have in mind, and we will give you an honest view of what the light and the flowering are likely to be doing. Start with a conversation rather than a plan. It is easier to build the day around what February is actually going to give you than to ask February to co-operate with a timetable written in November.