Taormina is "a polite synonym for Sodom" according to the aesthete Harold Acton. He later, on what tragically disappointed grounds we do not know, moderated his views to call it "as boring as Bournemouth". The truth, I think, is somewhere between these dismissive extremes and kind to neither the City of the Plain nor the Dorset coast.
Certainly, its culture swings between the eroticised and the predictable. Inevitably, the looming presence of Europe's tallest and most active volcano dominates the genius loci with a continuous threat, or promise, of violent eruption. Precariously perched m above the sea on Sicily's dramatic eastern coast, Taormina has been attracting invaders, military and touristic, with deadly weapons and even deadlier wheeled suitcases, since it was founded as Tauromenium in the fourth century BC.
It has some claim to being one of the originating sacred sites of modern tourism: self-conscious visitors with high expectations, Goethe among them, made it a feature of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. Modern literary heroes followed. A quick roll call of celebrity ghosts includes Nietzsche and DH Lawrence. Also Sprach Zarathustra and Lady Chatterley's Lover were both written here, rather confirming a local inclination towards the magnificent and the sexual.
To the ancients, Sicily was a part of Magna Graecia, the greater dispensation of Greece, the backyard of Periclean Athens. Indeed, Taormina's most spectacular monument is the Teatro Greco, a magnificent amphitheatre that makes all of brooding Piranesi appear a hesitant understatement, a mere sketch. You doubt the gods exist? Sit among the ruins of the Greek theatre and be disabused, even as you are stepped over by a shrieking crocodile of spotty French schoolchildren.
Evelyn Waugh harrumphed that "the word tourist seems naturally to suggest haste and compulsion". Yes, I am afraid nowadays it does. The Grand Hotel Timeo, named after the Greek city's founder, is a fine remedy for these poisons, since it offers an extraordinary mixture of understated luxury, unobtrusive efficiency, relaxed charm and Only the dullest person would not be agreeably stupefied by the view of Mount Etna and the Gulf of Naxos achieved from its vast terrace. I am writing these notes here, a glass of Etna's Petra Lava Bianco to hand and an aggressive pigeon, maddened perhaps by volcanic dust, pecking at my salted almonds.
