Adventures in White Lotusland

The bus sped us through seaside Naxos

The schedule for the day was a trip to Mount Etna in the morning and sightseeing in Taormina in the afternoon, mid-afternoon, really, because of the long drive to and from Mount Etna. In our tour booklet, the Etna trip had been billed as a drive through the lava field. But in reality it included outdoor lava field hiking time, and the predicted temperature up there was a few degrees above freezing at best. We might have awkwardly triple or quadruple layered and stayed warm enough, but for us, seeing Mount Etna up close wasn't compelling enough to overcome our lack of sufficiently warm clothing.

Sweetie decided that instead of Etna she was going to go into Taormina early. I quickly came to see the wisdom of this choice. Our tour guru quoted us a taxi price. Not us. We're rocks. We'll take the bus.

We only light real candles

Before we left, I turned on roaming. With our mobile phone package, it didn't cost too much for a single day to be able to navigate on our own and stay in touch with our group without wi-fi. When we visited central Italy nine years ago, we tried to make do with wi-fi only. As I recall, we enabled roaming at least twice. If we were to tour in Europe on our own for even a week, I think at least one of us would do the sim card thing.

We walked down our pedestrian-unfriendly busy road and a nicer side road to reach the bus stop Google Maps had directed us to. The fare was €1.90 each. We thought we were catching an express bus, but we were barely on time, and the bus was full. The local came right afterward.  We had a fun ride through Naxos and the waterfront, listening to people speak in their own dialect.

The end of the line for the bus was a short walk below the walled city of Taormina. We bought some gifts on the way up. Just after the Porta Messina, we hit Gelatomania for breakfast gelato. The woman who ran it was super nice, and the gelato was excellent.

Post-gelato, we visited Chiesa di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, who is the Catherine of the Catherine Wheel. In her statue, she holds a book in her left hand, because she was said to have been a scholar. The church was restored in the 17th century after the destruction of an earlier church. The façade and interior are not fancy but still beautiful.

Cool old map of the Kingdon of Sicily

We wandered along the Curso Umberto, looking at buildings, visiting shops, popping into churches that allowed it. Sweetie bought a lovely, soft cotton sweater because the weather continued to be cooler than we had planned for. I snapped a shot of Mount Etna in the clouds. As much as anything, we absorbed the atmosphere.

I wanted to check out lunch somewhere off the Curso, away from tourists. As we wandered into a section lower on the east side of the hill, we stumbled upon the front of the "White Lotus," in real life the San Domenico, a Four Seasons hotel. I braved the guards at the front gate and shot through to the front entrance. I didn't know at the time that the shot is almost like a still of the White Lotus front entrance sequence. (Apparently, the beach front of this hotel is a bit rocky, so the White Lotus beach scenes were shot on the sandy beaches of Cefalù on the north coast nowhere near Taormina.)

Front entrance of the "White Lotus"

Right nearby, we found Siciliano Osteria-Pizzeria Tradizione Contemporanea. It didn't exactly sound like Nona's home cooking, but we'd been having plenty of that. The hostess had partly pink hair and was cute and welcoming, so we went with it. Good choice, as it turns out. Outside under a tarp. Mostly Italians around. I actually took pictures of this food: a beautiful insalata siciliana, such as we had not had yet (shaved fennel, mandarin segments, olives, red onions, anchovies); and scialatielli (a thick square-cut spaghetti, more typical of Campania) with amberjack, olives, tomatoes, herbs, whatever. We enjoyed the meal and the atmosphere and the service, and I enjoyed some wine and then espresso, very much.

We did more wandering. Somehow we were never bored, even though I can't always remember what we did. We walked quite a way off the Curso to spend time in the Villa Comunale di Taormina, a lovely park with a great view of the coastline. And as we walked toward the piazza where we would meet our group, we were drawn back to Gelatomania for another round.

We met up with our group around 3:30, and the local guide promptly led those willing to climb up to the Teatro Antico di Taormina, which included me but not Sweetie. This theatre is much more intact than the one in Neapolis, and the views from the cheap seats made me wonder how anyone ever actually watched the plays. It would have been like watching Shakespeare at Bard on the Beach main stage, open to English Bay and the mountains behind, except more spectacular (and no party boats).

Less of a construction zone than Neapolis

Our guide then gave us a tour of the Curso Umberto, so we were shown a few things we hadn't seen and heard many stories that we hadn't known. The tour somehow did not include a meander through the Duomo di Taormina, dedicated to San Nicoló, so we did that with the bit of free time we had after the walking tour, before meeting the group to return to our hotel. It was rather unspectacular for the local cathedral. Maybe Taormina is not so much about churches! We took an aperitivo at the far end of the Curso where there were few tourists and then rejoined our group for the ride back to Caesar Palace.

Taormina literally took my breath away, even more than the Chiesa di Santa Chiara in Noto. I feel like a chump. Everyone falls in love with Taormina! I don't usually love what everyone else loves, but sometimes the rest of the world and I are on the same page. We also felt good about our ability to get along on our own for the day. There's more of Taormina that we didn't see, above and below the Corso. We left the city thinking of how lovely it would be to stay in a pensione for a few nights.