Taormina

The Greek colonists of Tauromenion first cut the theatre into the slope of Monte Tauro in the 3rd century BC, exploiting the natural gradient for a cavea that faced the sea. Under Roman rule it was almost entirely rebuilt — probably in the 2nd century AD around the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian — when an elaborate brick stage building was raised, the seating enlarged to hold an estimated 10,000, and the orchestra later sunk and walled into an arena for gladiatorial spectacles. Measuring about 107 m across, it is the largest ancient theatre in Sicily after Syracuse. After antiquity its stones were quarried and houses grew among the ruins, but 18th- and 19th-century travellers on the Grand Tour made the view through its arches one of the most reproduced images of Sicily. Today it is a working venue for Taormina Arte.

Built in the 2nd century AD, the Odeon was a small roofed theatre — seating perhaps a few hundred — used for music, recitals and council meetings, the Roman counterpart to the great open theatre on the hill above. It was constructed directly over the podium of a Hellenistic temple, probably dedicated to Apollo or to the imperial cult, fragments of which remain visible in its structure. Long buried, it was rediscovered in 1892 when the adjoining church of Santa Caterina was being studied, exposing the brick cavea that survives today.

Built in the 2nd century AD, the Naumachie is — after the theatre — the oldest Roman ruin in Taormina. It is a vast retaining wall about 122 m long and 5 m high, faced in red brick and articulated by eighteen alternating large and small niches that once held statues; behind it lay a huge cistern that supplied the town and its baths, fed by aqueduct. The misleading name 'Naumachie' (from the Latin for naval battle) was wrongly applied by the Dutch antiquarian Jacques-Philippe d'Orville in 1764, who imagined the structure had flooded for mock sea-fights — a label that has stuck ever since despite its true role as nymphaeum and water reserve.

Casa Cuseni was built from 1905 by the English painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson, who made it a hub of Taormina's expatriate artistic life. Its celebrated dining room was decorated by the British muralist Frank Brangwyn, and over the decades the house and garden hosted a remarkable roster of guests said to include Bertrand Russell, Henry Faulkner, Roald Dahl and Tennessee Williams, with the painter Daphne Phelps (Kitson's niece) later turning it into a guest house and recording its stories in her memoir 'A House in Sicily.' It is now a private house museum holding Kitson's art collection, recognised for its cultural significance.

Santa Caterina was built in the 17th century on the Largo Santa Caterina, deliberately set over the buried Roman Odeon and the Greek temple beneath it — a vivid example of Sicily's habit of stacking sacred sites across the centuries. Dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, it preserves a single nave with a marble statue of the saint and antique columns reused from the ruins below. It was the building's study at the close of the 19th century that led to the rediscovery of the Odeon at its rear.

Built in the 13th century and dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Bari, the cathedral was raised on the site of an earlier medieval church and given its austere, crenellated appearance that earned it the nickname 'the fortress cathedral.' It was remodelled in the 15th and 16th centuries — the fine Renaissance side portal dates from 1636 — and the interior columns of rose-pink local marble were reused from older buildings. The Baroque fountain in the piazza was set up in 1635; its centaur, female and two-legged, holding orb and sceptre, has been the heraldic symbol of Taormina ever since, blending the town's classical and Christian identities.

Built in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, San Giuseppe is a characteristic piece of Sicilian Baroque, its theatrical pastel facade and balustraded steps designed to command the belvedere square. The interior preserves stucco decoration and relics associated with local devotion. Its position beside the clock-tower gate made it a fixture of the town's social and ceremonial life on the very terrace where visitors have gathered for the view since the 1800s.

The church honours Saint Pancras (San Pancrazio), venerated as the first bishop of Tauromenion, said to have been sent to Sicily by Saint Peter and martyred here in the 1st century — the town's patron saint. The present Baroque church was built in the 18th century directly on the platform of a Hellenistic temple thought to have been dedicated to Isis and Serapis, whose great squared blocks survive in the lower walls. Its position immediately outside the northern gate marks the ancient suburban sanctuary zone of the Greek city.

The church of the Madonna della Rocca was founded in 1640, hewn directly into the rock face of Monte Tauro on the ancient mule path linking Taormina to the castle and the hill-village of Castelmola. Its rear wall and ceiling are the natural stone of the mountain, a striking example of the rock-cut sanctuaries common in the Sicilian hill country. A statue of Christ the Redeemer was later set on the rocks nearby, and the sanctuary remains a place of local devotion and a favourite pause on the climb.

The Corso follows the line of the ancient decumanus, the main east–west street of Greek and Roman Tauromenion, and for centuries was simply the through-route of the walled town, punctuated by three gates that still survive. It was renamed for King Umberto I after Italian unification. Along its length the medieval, Catalan-Gothic and Baroque eras jostle — the Arab-cored Palazzo Corvaja, the 17th-century clock-tower gate, Baroque church facades — making the street itself a compressed history of the town. From the late 19th century its cafés and the terrace of Piazza IX Aprile became the open-air drawing room of Taormina's international set.

Set on Greco-Roman foundations and first raised in the 12th century, the tower is also called the Porta di Mezzo (Middle Gate) because it stands midway between Porta Messina and Porta Catania, marking the boundary between the town's two historic quarters. In 1676 it was destroyed by the French troops of Louis XIV during their occupation of the Messina region; it was rebuilt in 1679, and a clock was installed — giving it the name it carries today. The present mechanical clock dates from the 19th century.

One of the three surviving gates of the medieval walls, Porta Messina (also called Porta Ferdinandea) faces the road toward Messina to the north. The present arch was rebuilt in 1808 under the Bourbon king Ferdinand III, replacing an earlier medieval gate. Just inside it stands the church of San Pancrazio, raised over a Hellenistic temple, a reminder that the gate sits at the ancient edge of the town as well as the medieval one.

Also known as Porta del Tocco, Porta Catania was rebuilt in 1440 and carries a marble plaque with the arms of the House of Aragon, then ruling Sicily — a sign of the town's standing under the Aragonese crown. It pierced the south-western line of the walls and controlled the road toward Catania. The quarter just within, around the Duomo and the De Spuches palace, was the aristocratic heart of the late-medieval town.

The palace grew up around a cube-shaped defensive tower built by the Arabs in the 10th century, after their conquest of Taormina in 902. It was enlarged in the 13th and 15th centuries, acquiring its characteristic blend of Arab, Norman and Gothic forms and a relief frieze of the cardinal virtues on the staircase. In 1411 its great hall hosted the Sicilian Parliament, convened in the presence of Queen Bianca of Navarre, regent of the kingdom after the death of her husband Martin I — for which the building is still nicknamed the 'Palace of Queen Bianca'. It takes its lasting name from the Corvaja, one of Taormina's oldest noble families, who owned it for centuries.

Sant'Agostino was built in 1448 as a votive offering after an outbreak of plague, a modest Gothic church on what would become the town's grand belvedere. Long since deconsecrated, it was restored and given over to civic use; today it houses the Taormina public library, its austere single nave preserved as a reading room. With San Giuseppe opposite and the clock tower alongside, it completes the architectural frame of Piazza IX Aprile.

Built in the 14th–15th centuries for the De Spuches family, Dukes of Santo Stefano and princes of Galati, the palace is one of the finest fusions of styles in Sicily: a square defensive tower with Gothic two-light windows, crowned by a decorative band of inlaid black lava and white Syracuse stone in interlacing patterns of clear Arab-Norman descent. It survived as an aristocratic residence through the centuries and now belongs to a cultural foundation, housing a permanent collection of works by the Taormina-born sculptor Giuseppe Mazzullo (1913–1988).

Despite its name, the Badia Vecchia was never a true abbey: it is a 14th-century battlemented building, probably part of the town's defensive and residential fabric, built in the same Chiaramonte-Gothic idiom as the Palazzo dei Duchi di Santo Stefano — three-light pointed windows over a frieze of interlaced black pumice and white stone. Restored in the 20th century, it today serves as a small museum displaying archaeological finds from Taormina and its territory.

The gardens were created from the 1890s by Florence Trevelyan (1852–1907), an Englishwoman who — by persistent legend — left the British court after a rumoured liaison with the future Edward VII, settled in Taormina and married the local doctor (and sometime mayor) Salvatore Cacciola. A keen gardener and early conservationist, she planted the terraces with Mediterranean and exotic species and raised the eccentric folly-pavilions of brick, lava and salvaged stone she called 'the Beehives' (le Vittorie), part Chinese pagoda, part bird-watching tower. After her death the estate eventually passed to the town and was named for the Duke of Cesarò; it remains a public garden and one of Taormina's loveliest legacies of its Anglo-aristocratic age.

The castle sits on the ancient acropolis of Tauromenion, the highest defensible point of the Greek city, later refortified in the Byzantine and Arab periods and rebuilt by the Normans — its popular name 'Castello Saraceno' recalls the Muslim era after the conquest of 902. Through the Middle Ages it anchored the town's defences, its garrison commanding the coast road and the climb up from the sea. Now a roofless ruin perched some 390 m above the water, it survives mainly as a viewpoint and a marker of the long line of conquerors who held this rock.

A cable connection between the clifftop town and its beaches has existed in various forms since the early 20th century, with works begun in the late 1920s. The modern aerial tramway in use today was built in 1992, with cabins running continuously between the upper station on Via Pirandello and the lower station at Mazzarò, overcoming the roughly 200 m drop that otherwise means a long switchbacking walk. It is now the standard way down to Isola Bella and the seafront resorts.

The square takes its name from 9 April 1860, when — during Garibaldi's campaign to liberate Sicily — a friar reportedly announced from here that the Thousand had landed, rousing the townspeople; the date later proved historically muddled but the name stuck. Long the social hinge of the upper town, it sits between two former churches: San Giuseppe and Sant'Agostino, the latter built in 1448 as a votive offering against plague and now the municipal library. Its panoramic parapet and chessboard paving made it the favourite promenade-terrace of the writers, painters and aristocrats who wintered in Taormina from the Belle Époque onward.

In 1890 Florence Trevelyan bought the little island below Taormina — until then almost bare rock — and built a villa on it, planting native Mediterranean species alongside rare imported trees and shrubs until it became a private botanical garden and refuge for sea birds and lizards. After her death it stayed in private hands (latterly the Bosurgi family) until 1990, when the Region of Sicily took it over and, in 1998, established a nature reserve, now managed by CUTGANA of the University of Catania. The islet and its bay are protected for their unusual flora and the marine life of the cove.

Mazzarò is the historic landing-beach of Taormina, the sea-level counterpart to the cliff-town and, since the resort era, its bathing quarter — the place the aristocratic visitors descended to by mule path and, later, by cable car. The bay's clear, deep water and proximity to Isola Bella made it the heart of Taormina's seaside reputation in the 20th century, and it remains the base for boat excursions along the coast to the Blue Grotto and neighbouring coves.

Bam Bar is a family-run granateria that has become, over recent decades, the most celebrated granita address in Taormina — a modern institution rather than a historic one. It serves the classic Sicilian breakfast of granita (a semi-frozen fruit or nut ice, here in many flavours) dunked with a soft brioche, a ritual that goes back centuries on the island and is said to descend ultimately from the Arab sherbets of medieval Sicily.

Opened in the dolce-vita decades of the mid-20th century on the town's belvedere square, the Wunderbar became the favourite watering hole of Taormina's celebrity set — its terrace tables associated with Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich and the parade of film stars who wintered or filmed nearby. It distilled the town's long reputation, stretching back to the Belle Époque, as a cosmopolitan retreat for artists, aristocrats and Hollywood, and trades on that gilded memory still.