On day four of our Sicilian adventure, we traveled via bus from Palermo to Taormina with a brief stop in Cefalú. This beach town has a very laid-back vibe above which towers an ancient megalithic (large stone) Temple of Diana high on a mountain top which none of us were about to climb in the 80+ degree heat.  Cefalú is beautiful and ancient and some on our tour took the opportunity to stick their toes in the blue waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea while we were there.

  Our final destination was another three hours away in Taormina. Taormina hangs on a cliff above the Mediterranean and is stunningly beautiful. It was the setting for the second season of TV miniseries White Lotus, which was filmed in the San Domenico Palace, A Four Seasons Hotel which, post-Lotus, charges $1,800 a night for a room. 

  Suffice to say we didn’t stay in the Four Seasons, but we did have a wonderful afternoon cocktail on the beautiful terrace at the Grand Hotel Timeo which overlooks the sea and Mt. Etna.  A junior suite there with a sea view will cost you just over $2,000 per night. We didn’t stay there, either. Our tour group stayed at the Eurostars Tauro, which was more or less a tour group hotel. Each room had a terrace with a view of the Ionian Sea. We had to be shuttled to the hotel in vans since our bus would not fit in Taormina’s narrow, winding streets. 

  Furthermore, the road leading from our hotel up to those narrow streets was at a 45-degree angle, a real hiker’s delight. I was hoping there would be a towrope to help me scale the heights. Alas, I had to manage on the shoe leather express. Great workout for the legs.

  While we were there in September, Taormina was still extremely full of tourists who arrived by the boat- and busload and were shuttled around in groups, discreetly wearing nametags and earpieces. Yet in spite of this large-scale invasion, Taormina still has a distinctly upscale vibe, with high-end stores like Louis Vuitton and Dior, lovely restaurants, and many of the aforementioned luxury hotels.

Taormina has been a fashionable resort since the mid-1800’s and a refuge for gay men and artists. In one of the piazzas there is a statue of Oscar Wilde. He visited Taormina in 1898 after his imprisonment and stayed at the Hotel Victoria where he hoped to reunite with his lover Bosie Douglas. Alas, it was not to be. In spite of the impassioned letters Oscar wrote to him, Bosie did not join him. Wilde loved Taormina but spent but one month there. Just over two years later, Wilde was dead from complications from surgery. He was, tragically, only 46 years old.

  You can easily see why Wilde adored this place.