09-Jan-2025
About an hour up the coast from Catania by train is Taormina. We'd planned to visit tomorrow. But early this morning, while enjoying our ritual first coffee, I read that rail strikes are planned for tomorrow. Best to bring Taormina forward, then.
The views en route are again wonderful:
And you arrive at a splendiferous station, rebuilt in 1928:
As is the case with so many Sicilian places of our acquaintance, the station is at sea level, and what you've come to see is a long, long way up...
Here we go again... Down here is the road, and up on the skyline is our objective...
But your efforts are rewarded by fabulous views...
The kind of history that we've come to associate with Sicily -- namely, centuries of being swapped around among powers and dynasties -- is evidenced again in Taormina.
But what's especially interesting about this place is its history of tourism. Visitors have been coming here since the 18th century. And as the 19th century merged with the 20th, a veritable who's who of European and American arts practitioners fetched up here.
The Taormina Cult offers a bit of a primer on all this:
The first hotel in Taormina, built in 1850. Among its guests were Richard Wagner, and Rasputin murderer Felix Yusupov, whose friend Tao Kerefoff we came across in Calvi
Florence Trevelyan, paid by Queen Victoria to stay away from the prince who would become Edward VII, encountered Taormina, and decided to stay there. She gifted this beautiful cliff-top garden to the city
The Grand Excelsior, built in 1904, was another attractor of famous guests
Oscar Wilde stayed here during his month-long visit to Taormina in 1898
And then there was D.H. Lawrence... He and his wife, Frieda, lived in Taormina from March 1920 to February 1922.
We learn from Sea and Sardinia, however, that early in 1921, he feels "an absolute necessity to move". It's Etna that does it: "Etna, that wicked witch, resting her thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her orange-coloured smoke... Etna of the snow and secret changing winds, she is beyond a crystal wall... Ah, what a mistress, this Etna! ... She makes men mad... She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she takes his soul away from him... Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and at once."
As we know, he didn't stay long on Italy's other big island either, and it was back in Taormina, Etna or no, that he wrote Sea and Sardinia (he also wrote much of Lady Chatterley's Lover while living here).
Now, he has a road named after him, and a plaque:
It's kind of unprepossessing...
And the second date seems wrong...
But I'd have stayed for these views, I think. Truman Capote also lived here for a while
I've named only a few of the literary figures who came here. On the list, too, were J.W. von Goethe, Guy de Maupassant, Selma Lagerlof, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Gide, and Friedrich Nietzsche (who wrote much of Thus Spake Zarathustra while he was here). Not to mention a number of painters.
You could see what they were all here for. It's very, very beautiful:
The ancient Greek theatre is one of the huge drawcards. As tickets were EUR 14 each, and we didn't feel we had sufficient time to get our money's worth, we didn't visit
BIG cannoli... Before tackling these, we enjoyed our first spremuta d'arancia. After seeing all those oranges yesterday, we felt we needed to make an effort. And they were wonderful. There's nothing quite like a fresh orange juice in Italy
The downside of all this attractiveness is that this place is busy... The main thoroughfares are lined with tourist infrastructure, and the streets around the well-known drawcards are people-heavy even on a weekday in January. In summer it must be unbearable.
I'd read about this overload. It was the reason we opted to base ourselves in Catania, where the tourist presence is considerably diluted.
Nevertheless, it would be a great pity to skip Taormina completely.