Historical Sicily #2: Taormina

Here is my second post on the lovely Sicily!

I didn’t feel it was fair to leave out the hotel I stayed at, and the historic town of Taormina.

The Town:

Taormina always existed as a little village, but was mostly made up of fishermen and farmers. This was until 1863 when a young Prussian baron called Otto Geleng travelled to Sicily several times to paint the amphitheater (in my previous blog post!). His Professor at the Academy where he was studying art loved the paintings, and suggested he took them to the European Capital of culture; Paris. The French were in fact very skeptical of the images of a snowy Mount Etna, with blossom trees and blue skies in the same image, and thought they were in Otto’s imagination! The cheek! Here is a picture I took to prove poor Otto was right:

After he took some of his critics to see Taormina to prove it, suddenly this little part of Sicily started getting a lot of tourists. As you can imagine, this meant the town exploded…

Possibly a more modern addition!

It owes much of its character to these early artistic tourists, many of who remained in the town.

 

One of Taormina's many arches. The people are a bit permanent too.

The beautiful Mount Etna looms behind Taormina. I was assured there are craters around it to “catch” the lava (you can imagine my skepticism), but it frequently erupts. It can be mostly lava, but on some of the roofs you can still see some of the ash that occasionally blights the town. Here is footage from the most recent eruption, in January 2014!!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YMTfssX2EQ

The Hotel:

(http://www.grandhoteltimeo.com/web/oght/grand_hotel_timeo.jsp)

I was lucky enough to stay in the Grand Hotel Timeo, (not my treat thankfully!). It was an Orient Express Hotel but it is now owned by the same company, which has renamed itself Belmond.

Now onto the history… The hotel is a very important part of Taormina’s history, as it backs right onto the Greek theatre. It was built in 1874 and has had some of the most influential guests you can imagine! Charles Stempel was a Latvian noble who resided in Taormina, and for a few weeks his friends Prince Yusupov and Archduke Pavlopic sheltered in the hotel to escape being apprehended for the murder of Rasputin.

Both Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Edward VII stayed several times at the hotel too. I also was shown a sneak peak of the Presidential Suite they would have stayed in. This part of the hotel is the original, when it would have just been a few rooms:

Beautiful! So that’s about it for Sicily. I was only there for 4 days, so hopefully this is enough to convince you that it has history to rival the rest of Italy…