The sand here is grey. Not dirty. Grey the way slate is grey, and warm underfoot before eight in the morning, and I had been swimming off it for three days before I properly understood what I was lying on.
It is the mountain. All of it. Ground down and carried out and put back along the shore.
You can see Etna from almost everywhere in this town, which is the first thing anybody tells you, and after two days you stop seeing it the way you stop seeing a building you walk past. It becomes weather. It is there behind the theatre, there over the rooftops, there at the end of the street with a scarf of cloud on it, and it is so consistently present that it goes quiet.
The practical Taormina, the cable car and the tickets and where to eat, is in my complete guide to Taormina. This is a day I went up it.
Sixty-five kilometres and about an hour and a quarter, and the change happens in stages you can watch through the window.
Lemon and orange for the first while, then vines, and the vines go on much longer than you expect because this is wine country now and the soil is the reason. Then chestnut. Then a kind of scrubby birch that looks wrong for Sicily. And then, quite abruptly, nothing. No soil at all. Black fields of broken rock running down the slope in tongues, with dates on signs beside them, because every flow here has a year attached to it and people can tell you which one took which road.
That is the part nobody prepares you for. It is not one mountain. It is a stack of everything it has ever done, and the town at the bottom keeps rebuilding on the newest layer.
Rifugio Sapienza sits at one thousand nine hundred and ten metres and is a car park, a row of cafes, and a queue.
I want to be honest that the first twenty minutes up there are not romantic. It is busy and functional and everybody is putting on a fleece they had to buy at the bottom. The cable car is fifty-four euros return to two and a half thousand metres, and there is a version that goes higher with a guide and a truck for eighty-two, and you feel every euro of it while you are standing in the line.
And then the cable car lifts you off the last of the vegetation and none of that matters.
It is cold. Properly cold, in the third week of August, in a place where I had been in the sea at seven that morning. That is the thing I keep coming back to. Twenty degrees of difference in an hour and a quarter, and I was standing on a black slope in a linen dress and a borrowed jacket with my arms folded, laughing at how badly I had judged it.
Up there the ground is not rock and it is not sand. It is something between, coarse and light, and it moves under you with every step so that walking is a slow negotiation. Red in places. Yellow where there is sulphur. Steam coming out of the ground in thin ribbons that you can put your hand near and feel, which nobody warns you about either.
But the thing I actually took away is the sound.
There is none. Not quiet, which is what a forest is. Nothing. No trees to move, no birds, no water, no surface for anything to bounce off, so a voice goes out of you and does not come back. Somebody twenty metres away spoke and it arrived thin and small and already finished.
I have a violin in a case in the room I am staying in. I travel with it and I take it out a handful of times a year, which is not enough and I know it is not enough, and I have a set of reasons that are really only one reason wearing different coats.
Standing on that slope I thought: this is the only place I have ever been where it would be pointless. Not wrong. Pointless. The sound would leave and there would be nothing to give it back.
I did not play it that night either. But I thought about it differently, which I am counting as something.
We came down at about four and the temperature climbed back through the window, and by six I was in the water at the bottom of the cable car in Taormina with the whole thing behind me and above me at once.
The sea here is very clear and quite cold at the edges where the springs come up, and the shore is that grey shingle that rolls under you when the water pulls back.
Same mountain. Ground down, carried out, put back.
I lay on it until the light went orange and thought about how the whole arrangement is a loan. The soil that makes the wine, the stone the town is built from, the sand I have been swimming off all week. Everything Taormina has, the mountain gave it, and the mountain is not finished, and everyone here knows that and books lunch anyway.
There is a photograph everybody takes, of the theatre with Etna framed inside the broken arch of the stage. I took it too. It is a good photograph and it is the wrong way round.
It is not the view from the ruin. The ruin is the thing standing in front of the view.
V.
More images from Taormina
