Taormina
Visiting Taormina
Taormina and the surrounding area
were inhabited by the Sicel people before
Greek colonists arrived in 734 BCE to found the nearby
coastal settlement of Naxos.
The southern third of the Italian peninsula
and the island of Sicily were
Megáli Éllás
or
Μεγάλη
Έλλάς,
"Greater Greece",
settled along the coasts by colonists from Greece.
Dionysius of Siracusa destroyed
the nearby port of Naxos in 403 BCE,
and founded this mountaintop settlement in 392 BCE.
The Greek colonists called it
Ταυρομένιον
or Tauroménion,
which evolved into Taormina in Italian.
Tauromenion eventually became a Roman colony in 21 BCE.
Then the Roman Empire crumbled through the third and
fourth centuries CE.
Tauromenion was seized by the Byzantine or
Eastern Roman Empire, based on Constantinople,
and went back to being Greek.
The Arabs of the Fatimid Caliphate
captured the city after a 30-week seige in 962.
They renamed it al-Mu'izziyya
in honor of their current Caliph,
and greatly expanded the mountaintop fortress overlooking it.
The Norman count Roger I of Sicily
captured the town and the
relatively new Arab fortress in 1078.
The population of the town and surrounding territory
still mostly spoke Greek.
Tourism began to develop soon after Italian Reunification,
and Taormina became popular with English men on the
"Grand Tour".
Academics, intellectuals, artists, and writers
came to Taormina.
Tourism led to grand hotels,
one of which was seized by Nazi Germany
to serve as command headquarters
for Sicily and North Africa.
Movie stars joined the visitors after World War II,
and Martin Scorcese was there for the annual film festival
a few weeks after my visit.
Today, bus loads of day-visitors from cruise ships
are marched through Corso Umberto,
and the soon-to-be-married take
meticulously staged and posed photos
on Piazza IX Aprile.
For me, this was like my visits to the Greek islands of
Santorini
and
Mykonos —
like those, Taormina is focused on luxury hotels,
high-end shopping, and both would-be and real glitterati.
However, I was there for the
history and the geology!
Taormina provides a good view from a safe distance
of Mount Etna, a dangerously active volcano
that's by far the largest in Italy.
Where Next In Italy?
( 🚧 = under construction )
In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to
scan cuneiform tablets
to archive and share 3-D data sets,
providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them.
Localized histogram equalization
to emphasize small-scale 3-D shapes in range maps, and so on.
I worked on the project with Gordon Young,
who was Purdue University's only professor
of archaeology.
Gordon was really smart,
he could read both Sumerian and Akkadian,
and at least some of other ancient languages
written in the cuneiform script.
He told me to go to Italy,
"The further south, the better."
Gordon was right.
Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome,
but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system
that runs overnight sleepers all the way to
Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners
of Sicily.
So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order,
as they should be.