Taormina

Exploring Taormina

I started each day with breakfast at Bar Pirandello, just 300 meters toward the center from where I was staying. Some other travelers would be there, but the majority of the clientele was local. You order at the bar and find a seat, they bring out your order when it's ready.

Cornetto e doppio caffè or a croissant and double coffee. That's coffee in the Italian sense, what an English speaker would call espresso.

The Sicel people had a settlement here before the Phoenicians and then the Greek colonists arrived. The Greeks called it Tauromenion or Ταυρομένιον after a nearby "Bull Mountain". There's more on the deep history on the later page about ruins. As for modern Taormina...

Taormina's first hotel was built in 1864. Italian unification, the Risorgimento, wasn't complete until 1870, but it had started on Sardinia and extended through Sicily around 1860. By 1864 the unification process was compressing the remaining Papal territory around Rome and was expanding in the far northeast. And, Taormina was building up its tourism.

Royalty came to Taormina. Kaiser Wilhelm II of German first visited in 1896, returning often. Other members of the interconnected and dangerously inbred European royal family began visiting, sometimes under false names. From the U.K., Edward VII in 1906 and George V in 1924, and Edward VIII surely worked in a stop on his way to and from his visits with Hitler.

"Baron" Wilhelm von Gloeden arrived from Germany opened a photographic studio in Taormina. He claimed to be a Baron but wasn't, and claimed to have been born in a specific castle, the "Schloss Volkshagen near Wismar", which never existed.

Von Gloeden specialized in erotic photos of boys, and took a local 14-year-old boy as his long-time lover when he arrived in town. Homosexuality was illegal in Germany, the U.K., and some other northern European countries, so the local tolerance of von Gloeden and his photography led to Taormina becoming a destination for homosexual men.

Kaiser Wilhelm II and two generations of the Krupp family, the leading steel and arms merchants in Europe, were major patrons of Gloeden. Friedrich Alfred Krupp had become the subject of scandalous newspaper stories about a wealthy foreign industrialist involved in homosexual orgies in Italy. His wife received anonymous letters, possibly including compromising photographs, and she asked the Kaiser to take action. He refused, and Krupp had his wife committed to an insane asylum for being a pest about his peccadillos. The stories continued and then Krupp suddenly died in what is suspected to have been his suicide. All that shines a somewhat different light onto the First World War.

Taormina became a fashionable international resort after World War II. Intellectuals, authors, playwrights, and actors came to Taormina — John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Roald Dahl, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Bertrand Russell, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, and others. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton spent parts of both of their honeymoons in Taormina.

Corso Umberto is the main pedestrian street through the center of the old town. It runs from Porto Messina at its northeast end to Porto Catania in the southwest. Both those are gates from the old city walls, each named for the city beyond it. Piazza Vittorio Emanuale is a short distance inside Porto Messina. It was the site of the Greek agora and then the Roman forum. Now Via Teatro Greco branches off there toward, obviously, the Greek theatre. Piazza IX Aprile, commemorating Taormina's role in the Risorgimento, is near the middle of Corso Umberto, with great views out to sea and on up the mountain.

Cosro Umberto and Via Teatro Greco are lined with restaurants and shops, many of which are elegant high-end clothing and jewelery shops while others have all the tourist kitsch you could want. One day I noticed an English-language sign advertising courses in how to boil pasta. Without their servants, the wealthy would starve.

Tour groups march through those streets daily. Their guides walk at the front of the pack, talking into a headset and gesturing dramatically. The group lags behind, wearing lanyards with their names, their tour company, and a receiver with which they could listen with their earpieces.

Some drift away to make their multiple daily phone calls back home. Many of the Americans have no understanding of time zones or the spherical nature of the Earth, but they're keen to learn what time it is back home. They are routinely shocked to learn that if they call from Italy in the mid-morning, it is still several hours before daybreak in North America. How do I know this? Because they shout into their phones.

Other things I saw rather than heard. Elderly women sunburned a brilliant shade of magenta sitting down for dinner at 16:30, three to four hours before an Italian would think of eating dinner. Americans wearing their hats into churches.

Cruise tourists, swanky clothing and jewelery shops, none of that relates to or interests me. So why was I here? Just like my visits to Santorini and Mykonos, I was in Taormina for the ancient history and the vulcanology!

Chiesa di San Pancrazio

The saint known to the Greeks as Pankratios or Παγκράτιος, Pancrazio to the Italians, and Pancras as in the London train station to English-speakers, is the patron saint of Taormina. Chiesa di San Pancrazio a church dedicated to him, is a short distance outside Porto Messina. Here's a view from the gate toward the church, in the distance at center.

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His hagiography describing his life, and his multiple martyrologies describing his dramatic death, are all purely legendary. There was no such person. Nonetheless, the Vatican preserves what it describes as the largest portion of his relics, while a smaller portion are kept at Mount Athos. The relic trade has been strange.

The legend says that Pankratios was born in Antioch in Cilicia, the modern Adana, Turkey. He and his parents traveled to Jerusalem during Jesus's ministry, and later were baptized in Antioch. He traveled north across Anatolia to Pontus, on its north coast on the Black Sea, and withdrew to a cave. There, he was discovered by Peter and sent to Sicily in the year 40 CE to be the first Bishop of Tauromenium, today's Taormina. The local pagan opponents of the new religion promptly stoned him to death.

The church and the courtyard in front of it were built over a temple of Isis and Serapis, Egyptian deities. That temple was built and expanded by the Greeks through the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. The temple's walls were incorporated into the church. Its altar would have been in front of the temple, toward the rising sun, where the current courtyard is located.

A statue of a priestess shows that it was still a temple of Isis and Serapis in the 2nd century CE. If Pankratios had existed in the 1st century, those could have been the pagans blamed for his martyrdom.

Some times a temple is replaced by one of a different faith because of its auspicious location. But more often it's a case of the first one being built on its selected location, and the replacement making the point that the new faith has triumphed over the older one.

Now I suspect that Pankratios has become the patron saint of cellular telephony, with his church overlooked by the cell site up at the fortress. Multiple American devotées were in the courtyard of his church, performing their rituals by shouting into their phones.

So, maybe at 03:00 instead of 04:30.

At least they weren't shouting into their phones inside the church.

The first of these two large paintings in the nave depicts the martyrdom of Saint Procopius, whose statue is outside, to the right of the main door. He was Bishop of Taormina when the city was conquered by the Arabs of the Fatimid Caliphate in 962. His martyrology says that the Arab leader, Ibrahim ibn Ahmed, had Procopius tortured and his heart removed because he would not renounce Christianity and convert to Islam. He and his clerics were tortured and then beheaded.

The second painting, seen above, depicts the martyrdom of Bishop Nicone and his 90 monks, killed in the Soimandra district near Castelmola "during the persecutions against Christians", presumably also during the Arab conquest of Sicily.

Moving in through Porto Messina and continuing on Corso Umberto, Piazza Vittorio Emanuale is a short distance inside. Here's the typical scene just off there on Via Teatro Greco. The theatre where the annual Taormina film festival occurs is just off that square. It happened a few weeks after I was there, with Sicilian-American director Martin Scorcese attending.

Chiesa di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria

The Palazzo Corvaja is on one corner of the piazza. It's the crenellated building at right here. It was built in the late 13th century, over pre-existing Norman structures going back to the 12th century.

To its left is the Chiesa di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, built in the 17th century, it has a fairly plain exterior. The interior is Baroque but in moderation, not as headache-inducing as that style can be.

A somewhat ruined 16th century panel-painting of the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine is above the high altar, and there's a late 15th century marble statue of her along the right wall. The painting and statue would have been at the Capuchin church that stood outside the city walls, and transferred here when this church was built.

Remains of a Hellenistic period Greek structure are visible beneath the nave.

Yes, there was a red hat down in the Greek ruins. It wasn't a White Supremacist hat as favored by the dominant political party in the U.S. at the time, just a hat from a tour company with an unfortunate color choice. All the same, I chose to believe that someone had torn it off the head of an American idiot who was wearing his hat into every church. Hardly anyone else wears hats like that.

Few Italians wear ball caps. Many young Italian men had man-buns when I was there, but since none of them were Toshiro Mifune in a samurai film, they looked a little silly.

Further along Corso Umberto, between number 133 and 135, is one of Taormina's silliest sights of supposed interest. It's Vicolo Stretto, only 52 cm wide, hailed as one of the narrowest streets in Italy.

Piazza IX Aprile

Piazza IX Aprile has great views of the sea and Etna. A railing lines the edge toward the sea, with a steep drop down to the waterline. Cafes and bars line its inland side. The date refers to 9 April 1860 when the people of Taormina rebelled against Bourbon French rule of Sicily, part of the Risorgimento or the unification of Italy. Taormina was the first city in Sicily to do so.

The 17th century Chiesa di San Giuseppe (that is, Joseph) is often used for elaborate weddings and as a film set.

Many people apparently come to Taormina to pre-enact their wedding photos. That leads to much narcissizing — primping and posing and pouting in oh-so-elegant ways, meticulously framing, checking, and then re-taking photos in a fashion that would exasperate even the notoriously perfectionist Stanley Kubrick.

The interior of the church, built between the late 1600s and the early 1700s, was built in the Baroque style.

The clock tower through which Corso Umberto exits the south side of the piazza probably dates back to the 12th century. Some of its stones still bear inscriptions from when they were parts of Greek structures.

Duomo

A Roman Catholic cathedral is a church that is the seat of a bishop. In Italy, a duomo is a prominent church that may have some of the features of a cathedral, although it may not currently be the seat of a bishop. The duomo of a city is "The Big Church", the most prominent one, or at least it was back when. It might be the cathedral, or maybe the cathedral is actually a different church, or maybe there isn't a cathedral in that city.

The duomo in Taormina is on its own piazza further along Corso Umberto. It used to be the most prominent church in town, although now Saint Joseph's on Piazza IX Aprile gets far more attention.

There had been a church dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Bari in this location. The duomo was built on its ruins in the 13th century. Then it was rebuilt and enlarged in the 15th, 16th and 18th centuries.

The resulting structure with its large stone blocks and battle-ready crenellations all around its perimeter looks more like a fortress than a religious facility.

The interior is a Latin cross church with three apses, one each in the nave and the two aisles. Six columns of pink marble from the Taormina area divide the nave from the aisle. These may have been taken from the Greek-Roman theatre.

The ceiling with its large wooden beams has carvings with a mix of Arab and Gothic styles.

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The duomo has a bust and two relics of Padre Pio, a priest, stigmatist, and mystic who is enormously popular in Italy. The relics aren't fingers or toes, but pieces of bandages said to be soaked by his continuously bleeding stigmata.

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In addition to the stigmata which was said to smell like perfume or flowers, Padre Pio is credited with an ability to bilocate (a theme in David Lynch's "Lost Highway"), and having experienced celestial visions, communicated with angels, and physically fought Satan and demons.

The Vatican was initially skeptical of his stigmata and claimed abilities, and in the 1920s attempted to restrict his publicity. There was some wiretapping, a traditional feature of Italian controversies through the 20th century. Pope John XIII (1958–1963) was extremely skeptical of Padre Pio. Then Pope Paul VI (1963–1978) dismissed all the accusations against him in the mid 1960s. In 1999, Pope John Paul II declared Padre Pio to be a saint. He may have been a bit of a hoaxster and a scoundrel, but he did inspire popular piety.

The fountain on the duomo piazza is topped by what appears to be a two-legged pregnant female centaur. It's probably an imaginative Baroque-period assembly of fragments of earlier statues.

Kesselring's Headquarters

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A former 14th-century convent complex a short distance down the steep slope from the duomo was converted into a luxury hotel in the late 1800s. It's now known as the San Domenico Palace.

By the time of my visit, it had become famous as the location of the second season of The White Lotus, a series about bad things happening to terrible people in luxury resorts. I think that some of the people arriving in white linen with wicker suitcases had had this show in mind.

I knew of the resort hotel as having been Nazi headquarters through much of World War II. The Nazis, of course, being far worse people yet.

Albert Kesselring had reached the rank of Generalfeldmarschall or Field Marshal in the Nazi German military. In November 1941 he became Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief South, the overall German commander in the Mediterranean theatre, which included North Africa. He established his headquarters in the Hotel San Domenico.

Lacking the appropriate garb, I didn't even try to get in past the numerous private security guards. But there are views of it from Piazza IX Aprile and other vantage points.

Here it is as seen from Piazze IX Aprile in early evening. It's the entire multi-story complex extending left from the tall thin cypress tree pointing to the distant peak of Mount Etna.

And, from about a half-hour later that same evening:

The Allies had broken the Imperial Japanese Navy's JN-25 code as well as Japan's diplomatic ciphers. The JN-25 decrypts allowed them to read the detailed plans for an inspection tour by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

Yamamoto was a brilliant planner and commander, perhaps Japan's greatest single advantage during World War II. Successful cryptanalysis was definitely the Allies' greatest advantage. So, there was a heated debate about whether or not the U.S. Navy should launch a mission to shoot down his plane. Acting on the information would very likely expose the Allied ability to read Japanese messages, causing Japan to change its codes.

The U.S. decided to proceed, and shot down Yamamoto's plane on 18 April 1943. In the following weeks, the Allies decoded Japanese messages commenting on the strange coincidence, because obviously the Japanese codes were unbreakable.

The Allied landings on Sicily began less than three months later with an airborne attack the night of 9-10 July 1943. The Nazis knew that an Allied invasion was coming, and there was a large Axis command meeting at Kesselring's headquarters that evening.

The Allies knew of the meeting, having also broken the Enigma encryption, and planned a bombing raid to take out Axis leadership.

The bombing raid did not go as well as the Yamamoto shootdown had. The hotel was damaged, but Kesselring and other Nazi and Fascist leaders survived. A nearby church was hit. It happened that 9 July was the feast day of Saint Pancrazio, Taormina's patron saint (who, unfortunately, never existed), and 100 civilians at the church that evening were killed. Von Gloeden's villa and erotic photography studio were across from the hotel and it was completely destroyed, although the Nazis were all at the meeting that evening and none were killed. There's a memorial to the victims in the church a little further along Corso Umberto, just outside Porto Catania and the city wall, across from the post office.

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Taormina was liberated by British troops of the 50th Northumbrian division on 15 August 1943. By then the Nazis had evacuated Sicily, having retreated across the Messina strait to the southern Italian peninsula.

Allied detention report for Albert Kesselring.

Kesselring was convicted after the war of war crimes, for ordering the murder of 335 Italian civilians in the Ardeatine massacre, and for ordering his troops to kill civilians as part of reprisals against the Italian resistance movement. His legal team had been paid by "his friends in South America", Nazis who had escaped to Paraguay, Argentina, and Chile.

Kesselring was sentenced to death. However, that was commuted to life imprisonment because the death penalty had been abolished in Italy in 1944, regarded as a relic of Mussolini's Fascist regime. A political and media campaign then resulted in his release in 1952, ostensibly for health reasons. He lived for another eight years, becoming honorary president of three Nazi German veterans' organizations. Most notoriously, the far-right Der Stahlhelm, a völkisch nationalist and anti-Semitic group that had undermined democratic legitimacy and laid the groundwork for the Nazi regime into which it was eventually absorbed. It lingered in post-war Germany until 2000.

Taormina in the Evening

By about 18:00 each day, the tour groups brought in by buses for the day had left, and things calmed down.

The lighting of the views from Piazza IX Aprile changes.

Piazza IX Aprile is at about 240 meters elevation. The peak with the Arab fortress is at about 370 meters.

Similarly, the views from the overlook near where I stayed shift in the evening.

I had chosen Taormina for its proximity to Etna, not learning about all the history until closer to my visit. I had given myself five nights there, to give weather and Etna more chance to put on a show. After the first couple of days, the weather cleared up and Etna was emitting a long plume of ash. Excellent!

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Dinner in Taormina

I got dinner every night at a place near where I stayed. First, up the road to Porto Messina. Above is the view up the mountain from there.

Then, to the right and down the slope toward Piazza San Pancrazio.

The Sapori di Mare restaurant was a very nice place for dinner.

Some other tourists went there, but it was largely Italians speaking Italian.

Some were locals. Taorminaori, or whatever.

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Maybe start with bruschetta.

Side dishes were on display in a heated glass case.

Now for what I could see of earlier history of Taormina.