Taormina belongs to about four hundred people for six hours a night, and I have spent most of this week trying to be awake for them.
In the day it belongs to everybody. Two million a year come through a town you can walk end to end in fifteen minutes. Coaches at the top, cruise groups up from the port, the whole east coast arriving for the afternoon. By eleven in the morning the main street is a slow river of people moving in both directions at once and there is nowhere to stand that is not in somebody’s photograph.
Then at about seven it starts to drain, and by ten it is gone.
The practical version of all this, the tickets and the cable car and where to sleep, is in my complete guide to Taormina. This is not that.
I did not expect the difference to be so complete. I thought there would be a tail of it, the way there is in most places. There is not. The last of the day visitors go down the hill and the town closes over behind them like water.
At midnight the lanes are empty and lit by one lamp each.
They are not picturesque at that hour. They are just streets, with rubbish bags out and a cat working along the wall and somebody’s television through a shutter. The bougainvillea that photographs so violently in the afternoon goes black. What you get instead is the sound, which in the day is impossible and at night is very specific: your own feet, a scooter two streets over, cutlery being put away.
I walked the whole town in about twenty minutes and met four people. One of them was sweeping.
There is a version of this diary where I am pleased with myself about that, and where the empty midnight town is the real Taormina and the daytime one is a fake. I do not think that is honest. The daytime crowd is not an infestation. It is the economy. Half the people I met all week make their living out of that river of visitors, and the town has been doing exactly this since the nineteenth century, when the English and the Germans arrived and decided it was beautiful and never entirely left.
Taormina is not a village that tourism found. It is a town that tourism built, twice.
What is true is that it is a different place after ten, and the difference is not scenery, it is what the place is for.
I took a glass of almond wine out onto the ledge outside the room, which is very sweet and tastes like marzipan and is drunk here as though it were nothing.
The coast goes away to the south in a long curve, and every town along it is a smear of orange. You can pick out where one ends and the next begins by the dark stretches between. Somewhere down there is the airport, and every few minutes a light lifts off it and climbs out over the sea, and it is difficult not to watch them and think about how many of the people in those seats were on this street this afternoon.
My grandmother would have hated it here. She has a stone house in the south of France with fields and goats and a road that nobody drives up by accident, and her whole idea of a good place is a place that does not want anything from you. Taormina wants something from you constantly. It has a menu in six languages and a man outside to read it to you.
And yet.
At about one in the morning I looked down the coast and the volcano had a red mark on it.
Not an eruption. Nothing dramatic. A dull orange smudge at the summit, the colour of a cigarette end, visible for a while and then not, depending on the cloud. I stood there for a long time trying to decide whether I was actually seeing it or had talked myself into it, and then it brightened slightly and there was no argument left.
It is thirty kilometres away. It has been doing that, on and off, for five hundred thousand years. It buried Catania in the 1690s and the city was rebuilt in black stone out of its own destruction, and people planted vines on its flanks the whole time because the soil is the best in Sicily and the mountain is worth the risk.
That is the thing I keep turning over about this coast. Everyone here lives in front of something enormous that is not paying them any attention. The Greeks cut a theatre into the hill two and a half thousand years ago and aimed it so that the audience would look through the stage and see the volcano. They built the view in on purpose. They were sitting in a stone bowl watching a play with an active volcano as the backdrop, and the point of the seating was to make sure nobody missed it.
Two and a half thousand years later there is a hotel terrace forty metres from that theatre where people are photographing the same mountain with a phone, and the arrangement has not really changed. A town on a rock, arranged around a view of something that could kill it.
The lamp near me had a moth going at it. Down the hill the cable car had stopped for the night and the last of the beach clubs had shut, so the bottom half of Taormina was completely dark, and the top half was a thin bright line along a cliff with black underneath and black above.
I could hear the sea but only just.
Tomorrow at eleven there will be nine hundred people on the main street and somebody will be selling ceramic heads.
Tonight there is a red mark on a mountain and a cat and me.
V.
