Taormina

Where it sits. Taormina stands on a terrace of Monte Tauro roughly 200 metres above the Ionian Sea, on the eastern coast of Sicily between Messina and Catania, with the village of Castelmola on the summit above it at around 530 metres and Etna filling the horizon to the southwest. The town is long and narrow because the ledge is: one main street, Corso Umberto, runs about 800 metres from Porta Messina to Porta Catania, with lanes and stairways dropping off it on both sides. Below, the coast splits into two bays — Mazzarò and Isola Bella to the south, Letojanni and the long beach at Giardini Naxos to the north. The rock is limestone, the slopes are terraced in prickly pear and bougainvillea, and the drop to the water is close to vertical in places.

The story behind it. Greek Tauromenion was founded in 358 BC by survivors and successors of Naxos, the first Greek colony in Sicily, destroyed by Syracuse a decade earlier down on the shore below. The town passed through Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman hands, and each left something: the 1st-century AD brick terrace wall called the Naumachie, the Arab tower core inside Palazzo Corvaja, the fortress-like thirteenth-century cathedral of San Nicolò with its battlemented roofline, and the Catalan-Gothic windows of Palazzo Duchi di Santo Stefano. In front of the Duomo, a baroque fountain of 1635 carries the town's emblem, a two-legged female centaur. Piazza IX Aprile, halfway along the corso, is a chessboard-paved terrace hanging over the bay — the single most photographed spot in eastern Sicily.

The foreign colony. From the 1870s Taormina became a wintering place for northern Europeans, and the reputation it built was not only scenic. The German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden worked here from the 1880s, staging classicising nudes of local youths that made the town notorious and prosperous in equal measure. D. H. Lawrence lived at the Fontana Vecchia house from 1920 to 1923; Truman Capote took the same house in 1950. The Grand Hotel Timeo opened beside the ancient theatre in 1873 and the San Domenico Palace, a Dominican convent founded in 1374, became a hotel in 1896. Taormina has been in the business of receiving visitors for a hundred and fifty years, and it shows in both the polish and the prices.

On screen. The town played itself in The White Lotus season two, broadcast in late 2022, with the San Domenico Palace — a Four Seasons property since 2021, and the venue of the 2017 G7 summit — standing in as the fictional White Lotus Sicily. Its cloister, terraces and pool run through all seven episodes, and the production worked across the town and the bay: the ancient theatre, Corso Umberto, the beach at Isola Bella, the Villa Sant'Andrea shore below Mazzarò. Other Sicilian locations carried particular sequences, including Palermo, Cefalù and Noto, and the palazzo party was shot at Villa Tasca outside Palermo rather than in Taormina. The Sicilian ceramic teste di moro that the series turned into a motif come from Caltagirone, in the island's interior. Earlier, Woody Allen filmed the Greek chorus of Mighty Aphrodite (1995) in the ancient theatre, and Taormina's bay appears in Luc Besson's The Big Blue (1988).

Getting there and timing. Taormina-Giardini station sits at sea level below the town; from there it is a bus or taxi up five kilometres of hairpins, or the funicular from Mazzarò. Buses run from Catania airport in about an hour and a quarter, and the A18 motorway exit feeds a car park at Porta Catania — driving inside the walls is effectively impossible and pointless. The corso is pedestrian and mostly level, but everything off it is stairs. Late April to mid-June and mid-September into October give warm sea, open restaurants and manageable crowds; the summit weeks of July and August combine heat, cruise-ship day trippers and peak room rates. Out of season the town stays open, which is unusual for a Sicilian resort.

What else to do. The Villa Comunale gardens, laid out from the 1890s by the Scottish exile Florence Trevelyan with brick follies she called beehives, are free, shaded and the best-kept quiet corner in town. Castelmola is a forty-minute climb or a short bus ride for the view straight down onto the theatre. Etna's southern access roads are ninety minutes away, and the Alcantara river gorge, a basalt slot cut into columnar lava, is twenty kilometres inland. Giardini Naxos, ten minutes down the hill, keeps the excavated remains of the 734 BC Greek colony behind a modest archaeological park on the Schisò headland, and its seafront hotels cost a fraction of what the same view costs up on the ledge.