Taormina Culture

For a town of eleven thousand people Taormina carries an unusual amount of cultural weight, and almost all of it runs through one building.

A theatre that never stopped

The Teatro Antico is not a ruin that hosts occasional events; it is a working venue with an ancient shell. Concerts, opera, ballet and film screenings are staged in it through the summer, with the audience sitting on the stone tiers and the stage backed by the gap in the scaenae frons through which Etna appears. Performing there is a genuine draw for musicians, and the acoustic — designed for the human voice two thousand years ago — still works.

The Grand Tour inheritance

Taormina has been receiving foreign visitors continuously for well over a century, and the town's character is shaped by it. There is a long tradition of northern Europeans settling here — Florence Trevelyan, who laid out the public gardens and owned Isola Bella; von Gloeden, whose photographs made the town a byword; D.H. Lawrence, who wrote here for three years. The result is a place that is entirely Sicilian and also entirely used to outsiders, which is not a contradiction it finds difficult.

Gardens as eccentricity

The Villa Comunale gardens are the clearest survival of that era: a hillside laid out by an Englishwoman in the 1890s, planted with subtropical species and studded with small brick-and-stone follies she built for birdwatching, unlike anything else in Sicily.

Sicilian, underneath

The food is Sicilian and good — granita with a brioche for breakfast, almond sweets, Etna wine from the slopes opposite — and the surrounding villages are ordinary working places.