Clifftop Greek theatre, Mount Etna on the horizon, arancini, granita, and the most dramatic coastline in Sicily
Taormina is a clifftop hilltop town in eastern Sicily, perched 200 metres above the Ionian Sea on the slopes of Mount Tauro — a small medieval town of baroque palazzi, flower-filled terraces, and the best-preserved Greek theatre in Sicily, open to the sky with Mount Etna (Europe's largest active volcano) perfectly framed in the stage backdrop. The town has been a destination for European artists, writers, and nobility since the 19th century — Goethe visited in 1787, D.H. Lawrence lived here in the 1920s, and Truman Capote wrote here in the 1950s. The Sicilian food tradition in Taormina is at…
Taormina (ancient: Tauromenion) was founded by Sicilian Greek colonists from Naxos in 358 BCE, after the original city of Naxos below was destroyed by the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius I. The Greek theatre (Teatro Greco) was built in the 3rd century BCE and expanded by the Romans into an amphitheatre. Under Arab rule (9th–11th century CE), Taormina was known as Al-Muazzam and was a prosperous agricultural centre. After the Norman conquest of Sicily (1061–1091), the town returned to Christian rule under Roger I. The upper town's medieval street layout (the Corso Umberto I colonnade, the Palazzo C…