Taormina historical timeline

Taormina begins with the destruction of another town. Naxos, on the shore below, was the first Greek colony in Sicily, founded in 734 BC; Dionysius I of Syracuse destroyed it in 403 BC, and the survivors moved up onto the defensible terrace of Monte Tauro. The settlement was refounded as Tauromenion around 358 BC under Andromachus.

Greek and Roman

The theatre was built by the Greeks, probably in the third century BC, and then substantially rebuilt by the Romans in brick, who enlarged it and adapted it for gladiatorial games. It is the second largest ancient theatre in Sicily after the one at Syracuse. Under Rome the town was prosperous and unremarkable, which is generally the best thing that can happen to a place.

Arab and Norman

Byzantine rule ended when the Arabs took the town in 902 after a long siege, and it was rebuilt under Islamic and then Norman rule. That sequence is legible in the architecture: Palazzo Corvaja incorporates an Arab tower into a later Gothic palace, and the fortress-like cathedral of San Nicolò is thirteenth-century.

The Grand Tour

Taormina's modern life began with travellers. Goethe came in 1787 and described the view from the theatre in his Italian Journey, and by the later nineteenth century the town was a fixture on the northern European circuit. The German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden settled here in the 1870s and his classically staged photographs, widely circulated, did as much as anything to make the place famous.

Twentieth century

D.H. Lawrence lived at Fontana Vecchia from 1920 to 1923. The town survived the war, resumed as a resort, and hosted the G7 summit in 2017.