Castelmola

The first documented church here rose in the 16th century and was enlarged repeatedly; its grandest patronage came in the 18th century, when Castelmola was a principate. The present Chiesa Madre was rebuilt in 1934–35 over the older cathedral, layering Romanesque, Gothic, Arab and Norman motifs — the lateral portal, the choir arcade, altars and walnut pulpit reassembled from the earlier building. Its bell tower carries elegant twin-arched windows and a 10th-century Byzantine-Greek inscription, a direct survival of the village's medieval Greek past.

One of the cluster of churches that grew up around the borgo's square as the medieval village consolidated below the castle, San Giorgio anchors the eastern, sea-facing side of Castelmola and gives its name to both the neighbouring belvedere and the historic café opposite.

Raised between the 15th and 16th centuries with the traits of southern Italian sacred architecture, Sant'Antonio Abate stood at the very entrance of the medieval village. It was shattered by aerial bombing in the Second World War and patiently rebuilt from its original materials; deconsecrated for regular worship, it now serves the community as a cultural auditorium and home to a permanent presepe.

Carved partly out of the rock face of Monte Tauro below Castelmola, the Madonna della Rocca is a votive sanctuary on the ancient ascent between Taormina and its hilltop acropolis. It shares the ridge with Taormina's Saracen Castle, marking the steep medieval route that linked the lower town to the upper fortress of Mola, and remains both a place of local devotion and a celebrated belvedere.

Founded around 1100, in the decades after the Norman conquest of the district, the Santissima Annunziata is among the earliest churches of Castelmola and a tangible relic of the village's formation around the rebuilt Norman castle. Its survival on the upper slope marks the medieval extent of the borgo above Taormina.

The square sits at the threshold of the medieval borgo, the natural gathering place where the few level paces of the steep hilltop allowed a piazza at all. Its decorative paving in black lava and white stone is part of the early-20th-century beautification that turned Castelmola into a destination, and the surrounding buildings — the church of Sant'Antonio Abate, the Antico Caffè San Giorgio and Bar Turrisi — give it a centuries-deep mix of the sacred and the convivial.

The hilltop was the secondary acropolis of ancient Greek Tauromenion — the castrum superius, the upper fortress guarding the city below. The Byzantines fortified it around 800 AD; a surviving Greek inscription records that the castle was built under Constantine, patrician and strategos of Sicily, thought to be Constantine Caramalo, the last Byzantine governor of Tauromenion in the 9th century. In 902 the stronghold fell to the Aghlabid Muslims after fierce resistance, and much of the present fabric is of that 10th-century Arab phase. After Roger I, the Norman 'Great Count', took the district around 1078, the Normans rebuilt and extended the fort. Over the centuries the curtain weathered into the soft concave shape of a 'mola' (millstone) — giving Castello di Mola, and the village grown around it, its name.

The belvedere exploits the western edge of the acropolis ridge — the same commanding sightline that made the hilltop a fortified watch-point over Tauromenion and the coast road for the Byzantines and Arabs long before it was a place to admire the view.

This eastern lookout marks the seaward face of the old acropolis — the side that watched the ancient coast road and the approach from the sea up to Tauromenion's upper fortress.

The terrace occupies the summit platform of the ancient upper acropolis, the same vantage from which Byzantine and Arab garrisons commanded the approaches to Tauromenion and the sea below.

The premises began as a tavern run by monks around 1700, and in 1907 Don Vincenzo Blandano turned it into a proper café. He served a dark amber almond liqueur of his own — the 'Blandanino' — blending almond, raisins, spices, orange blossom and jasmine, the recipe that made Castelmola synonymous with vino alla mandorla. The café drew literary regulars: the French writer Roger Peyrefitte, lodging between Taormina and Castelmola, walked up daily and devoted a fond chapter of his 1952 book to it, sometimes with the journalist Indro Montanelli. Its celebrated guest book collected the signatures of bankers, princes and writers from around the world.

Bar Turrisi was opened in 1947 by Salvatore Turrisi, a miner's son who returned to Castelmola after the war and set up a tiny shop near the church selling almonds, Sicilian puppets, soft drinks and his own home-made almond wine — offered to guests, half in jest, as an 'elixir of love'. Drawing on two passions, Greek mythology and women, he began filling the place with phallic symbols inspired by the cult of Priapus, the fertility god, until the iconography overtook the décor entirely. By the 1990s it had been named one of the most peculiar bars in the world, and the family business — now spread over several floors and terraces — has been a Castelmola landmark ever since.