The Straits of Sicily represent an important bathymetric gateway between the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. Plio-Quaternary seabed sediments consist of muds together with carbonate sands. These are contrasted with two onshore analogues from Sicily in order to better understand the linked tectonic and palaeoenvironmental controls on deposition. For one analogue, coastal packstones composed of fragmented shelly fauna and build large para-sequences, the facies fractionation was dominately controlled by wave and storm activity. The other analogue, bryozoa-rich packstones deposited on a shelf, are inferred to have been fractionated from muds from marine current activity below wavebase. These Pliocene shelf packstones and basinal muds are the favoured ancient analogue for modern offshore sedimentation and may record important palaeo-oceanographic data that reconstruct mixing between the ancestral Western and Eastern mediterranean water.