If you have been staying all along the way at the usual Swiss hotels with their familiar Franco-German cooking, why not try a genuinely Sicilian hostelry for once! Such quarters are to be found on the main street, in a hotel which wanders up and down the hillside in an ungainly series of overlapping stories and queer detached turrets and belvederes. From the street, the entrance looks very much like a black hole in the wall. It is exactly the same as the door of a little carpenter shop alongside, with the single exception of an inscription in faded paint: Ristorante.
The greatest charm of the place is a garden, which rambles about partly on the level, partly down steep little banks, and then, in the rear, rolls up to a stone wall beyond which is one of the milky white roads of the country. It is crammed with the wildest sort of tangled climbing roses, tiny things the rich color of a Maréchal Niel but no bigger than a ten-cent piece; large red, yellow, pink and white roses; splendid geraniums, orange trees, lemons, medlars, almonds, stubby agaves, prickly pear, pink-flowered climbing cactus, and wonder of wonders, even a pair of apple trees! Ivy, numerous other vines and brilliant convolvulus riot about them all, while down the center runs a path under lemon-arches half smothered in rose bloom.
Beside this walk is a trellis bower covered with thousands of the tiny yellow roses, and furnished with a marble-topped table and an iron chair—an ideal literary workshop. But alas! the village tinsmith evidently shared my prejudice in its favor. When I came out prepared to work he had already preëmpted it for his mechanical workshop, and was filling the air with clatter and the noxious fumes of smoldering charcoal as he knocked together watering-pots to keep the garden green.
There are so many means of communication between the wings and the dining-room that it is very easy to lose one’s self. Beware the kitchen stair especially, where a large, plump, elderly, and exceedingly dignified goat often blocks the way. Try to push her gently aside, and you are astonished to find how heavy and strong a goat is. Take her firmly by her stump of a tail and one horn, to hoist her bodily, and the proverbial pig under the stile could make no more distressing noise. Among those who hear is the cook. Full of apologies, and unheeding terrific protests, she grabs at the animal’s beard and a horn or leg, and literally yanks her inside. But the moment she lets go, Signora Goat bounces out again as though on the end of a rubber band.
Taormina is bound to the green hillside by one long, curving white ribbon of a street, with flying tag-ends of alleys and byways. This Corso Vittorio Emmanuele is the artery that carries the thin but pulsing tide of the town’s affairs, a narrow, wind-swept chasm, but far from being a dull one. Traffic is brisk, and the tiny shops, whose dark interiors are scarcely more than visible, do a lively trade with the townsfolk and contadini. Here and there a curio store—Taormina lives and fattens on the gullible foreigner, be he collector, artist, or traveler only—displays a great stringful of pottery hung beside the door to tempt the unwary browsing antiquary with tangible memories of “the glory that was Greece.”
All about artistic decay is embayed by square, ugly, utilitarian buildings which the natives consider more practical than the exquisite finery of their noble predecessors. The very unexpectedness with which delicate bits of ruin appear constitutes one of the town’s greatest charms. Yet happy in its isolation is the Badia Vecchia, a bit of fine old crumbling, machicolated stone tower once the nunnery of Taormina, surrounded by a brilliant patch of lavender-flowered cactus among the trees on the irregular hillside above the town. Roofless and abandoned, it stands outlined in soft brown against the cobalt sky, its delicate windows still bordered by snowy marble diapering, its walls partly checkered in black lava and white marble, a noble Gothic picture, saturated with the atmosphere of Norman days.
A rugged, winding path leads up this hillside to the ancient castle, crowning a crag far above, though the usual route is by way of Mola. To-day the chief importance of the castle is as a platform for viewing the stirring panorama of shore and hills. Just beyond Giardini on a little promontory now covered by a luxuriant lemon plantation, those ardent pioneers under Theocles—it seems hardly fair to call them pirates, as some writers have done—established Naxos, the elder sister of all Greek colonies in Sicily, in 735 B.C. One thing of especial interest about Naxos is that outside its walls on what quickly became neutral ground, the colonists erected an altar and shrine to Apollo Archegetes, not merely the patron of Naxos, but the patron of all Hellenic Sicily. Hither all the Greeks could come in safety for a blessing ere departing on a journey, no matter what internecine strife might rage in the island. The athletes and patrons of the Olympic and Isthmian Games came here before sailing, to secure the favor of the god in their endeavors to wrest the laurel from their brethren of Greece.
Naxos, however, was short-lived compared with the other cities. In 476 B. C., the Tyrant Hieron of Syracuse, who might well be called “the juggler of colonies,” forcibly depopulated it and resettled its inhabitants in the city of Leontinoi. This seems to have been a favorite amusement of tyrants. To satisfy a passing whim, or as a means of punishment, the tyrant of the moment would calmly compel some unfortunate community to move in a hurry to a spot of his own choosing. However, there seem to have been people living in Naxos seventy-three years later, for we read that in 403 Dionysius destroyed it completely, and ever since it has existed only as a name, as the first milestone along the path of the superior incoming Greek civilization that made Sicily great.
The Taormina castle, by the way, is an excellent vantage point from which to pick out the places to which excursions may be made, and there are many very attractive ones—by boat, on foot, or on donkeyback, to Capo di Taormina and Capo di Sant’Andrea, where the coast is pock-marked with curious grottoes, to Monte Venere, to Monte Zirreto, and to many another local beauty spot.