How Was Taormina Built

Taormina is shaped by having almost no flat ground, and every part of the town is a response to that.

The theatre

The Greeks cut the cavea into the hillside itself, which is the standard Greek solution and the reason the seating survives at all — it is partly the hill. The Romans then rebuilt in brick and concrete, raising the stage building and enclosing the structure for their own kind of spectacle. The two phases are easy to tell apart on site: cut stone below, brick above.

The Naumachia

Behind the Corso, a Roman brick wall over a hundred metres long runs along its own lane, faced with a row of large niches. It was a retaining structure holding up the terrace above and fronting a cistern, not the mock naval battleground its name suggests, and it is among the largest Roman works of its kind in Sicily. It is easy to walk past, because it is now simply one side of a narrow street.

One street

The Corso Umberto runs the length of the ridge between the Porta Messina and the Porta Catania, because a ridge gives you one line and no more. Everything else is a stair or a lane dropping off it, and the squares are terraces cantilevered out toward the sea rather than open ground. Piazza IX Aprile, with its chequerboard paving and its balustrade above the bay, is the clearest example.

Layered facades

Palazzo Corvaja is the building that shows the town's history most directly: a tenth or eleventh-century Arab tower with a fourteenth-century Gothic palace built around and onto it, in black lava and white limestone laid in bands. The cathedral, San Nicolò, is thirteenth-century and built like a small fortress, with battlements along the roofline.

Lava and limestone

The two local stones are used decoratively against each other throughout the town, which is a habit shared with Catania and the other Etna towns.