Cefalù was named by sailors before it was named by residents. The Greek settlement of Kephaloidion — little head — took its title from the 270-metre limestone crag above the bay, a landmark charted from the sea and recorded by Diodorus Siculus in the fourth century BC. That order of naming still shapes how Cefalu Yacht Tour tours frame the town: La Rocca reads as a navigational mark first and a monument second. The crag carries the older evidence. Near its summit stands the so-called Temple of Diana, a megalithic structure built over a cistern, its polygonal masonry dated to roughly the ninth century BC and reworked in later Greek periods. Below it, Roger II founded the cathedral in 1131. Its twin Norman towers still set the town's skyline, and the apse holds a Christ Pantocrator mosaic completed around 1148 by Byzantine craftsmen — the earliest of Sicily's great Pantocrators, predating Monreale by four decades. UNESCO inscribed the church in 2015 as part of Arab-Norman Palermo and the Cathedral Churches of Cefalù and Monreale. The coast itself is a single geological argument. The same Mesozoic limestone that forms La Rocca continues east and west underwater, and centuries of Tyrrhenian swell have dissolved it into overhangs, blowholes and sea caves that cannot be reached on foot. Sixteenth-century watchtowers such as Torre Caldura were planted on these headlands against Barbary corsairs; they remain the clearest sightline markers on any Cefalù coastal boat tour. Meadows of Posidonia oceanica hold the water column clear, which is why the shallows read green over sand and ink-blue over rock. Modern Cefalù layers other histories over the medieval one. Aleister Crowley kept his Abbey of Thelema in a farmhouse above the town from 1920 until his expulsion in 1923. Giuseppe Tornatore filmed sequences of Cinema Paradiso here in 1988, fixing the piazza and the cathedral steps in international memory. The fishing quarter on the old seawall still shows the arched slipways that once hauled boats clear of winter storms, while a giro in barca departs from Porto di Presidiana rather than the historic harbour. Seen from a deck, the Madonie foothills, the Norman façade and the bare crag stack into a single frame — the composition that every Cefalu Yacht Tour tour is arranged around.