Taormina

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Teatro Greco Streets of Taormina Picturesque

Taormina with a population of almost 10 000 is located 52km south of Messina, on a rocky plateau on the slopes of the steeply dropping Monte Tauro, dominating the Ionian coast from Capo Sant Andrea to Capo Taormina.

HISTORY. When nearby Naxos was destroyed by Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, in 358 BC, a group of survivors founded the Greek city called Tauromenion; the acropolis was at the summit of Monte Tauro and the agora where Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II is situated today.

Taormina expanded considerably in Roman times but in the last decades of the 1st c. BC Octavian punished its inhabitants for helping Sextus Pompey, deporting them and reducing the town to the level of a colony; Taormina thus began to decline, until the Byzantines reversed s fortunes when they chose it as the capital of E Sicily.

The Arabs destroyed it twice, in 902 and 962, after which they partially rebuilt it. Under the Norman domination the town spread to the area known as the Borgo, and it developed further in the 13th to 15th century.

Taormina has however developed most in the 19th c, becoming an internationally renowned tourist resort. Its scenery, together with the three columns of the Temple of the Dioscuri at Agrigento, the Arab cupolas of San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo, and the moving clock tower outside Messina Cathedral, are all stamped together in the collective imagination as desirable places to be visited.