Beautiful, Scandalous Taormina

After Cefalù we turned Sicily's north-eastern corner and edged down the coast to beautiful Taormina. (Sicily is commonly represented by the three-legged trinacria, a symbol of the island's three 'corners'. The head at its centre is that of the Gorgon Medusa, whose hair was turned into snakes by the goddess Athene. The three legs denote the three coastlines of Sicily - considered as gorgeous as the legs of a beautiful woman. Dante, in Paradiso, refers to Sicily by its original name of Trinacria, calling it la bella Trinacria.)

Like Cefalù, Taormina has long been a place of refuge for artists, writers and musicians. It was particularly attractive to English emigres - more remote than Florence, Naples or even Palermo, so the more dedicated, adventurous and, dare I say, eccentric travellers tended to end up there. It's not hard to see why they liked it so much. Goethe pronounced it a little patch of Paradise...

And DH Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover here - as well as numerous poems, short stories and travel pieces. Lawrence had eloped with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his Nottingham University professors, and embarked on a bohemian life of constant travelling - visiting France, Germany, Italy, South America, Ceylon, Australia, the USA and Mexico. They stayed two years (1920-22) in Taormina, in a house called Fontana Vecchia, which was built in the mid-1600s and is the oldest dwelling on the town's east side. 30 years later Truman Capote also lived here for a while. It's now in private ownership, and you can't really see much, only the back view from the road...

Lawrence probably based the character of Constance Chatterley on a real-life (unmarried) woman from Taormina who took up with a Sicilian farmer. Their naked frolicking in the olive groves apparently shocked the whole town! It seems Lawrence took this germ of a story and from it created his great novel - a book which caused a huge scandal in its day, and for a long time afterwards. Never before had a romantic novel portrayed a sexually liberated woman so explicitly - with hints of a subtle pacifism to boot (Lawrence places Clifford Chatterley in a wheelchair). The novel was finally published in Florence in 1928, but it wasn't until 1960, after a notorious obscenity trial, that it appeared in Britain in its uncensored form.

The other exceptional house in Taormina is the Casa Cuseni, often described as the town's finest residence. It was built in 1905 by the painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson, aided by his friend the artist Frank Brangwyn, who had once been apprenticed to William Morris. Consequently it's a mixture of Sicilian and Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts Movement styles. This is Kitson's own painting of the front, sea-facing view of the house...

Kitson owned the first motor car in Taormina, which he used to ferry the injured during the earthquake of 1908, and the first swimming pool, which he sited to reflect the moonlit slopes of Mount Etna. After his death in 1948 his niece Daphne Phelps took over this delightful villa, opening it up to paying guests - a story she tells in her book, A House In Sicily (Virago, 1999).

When Daphne herself died in January 2006 at the age of 94, family members found it difficult to keep the house going - and I see it's now up for sale. It had many famous visitors over the years: Bertrand Russell, Tennessee Williams, Henry Faulkner, Roald Dahl - and DH Lawrence, of course (whenever his back was turned, Frieda set about the task of seducing much of the male population of Taormina, including passing tradesman etc, whom she was in the habit of greeting at the door in the nude!)

As readers of this blog will know, DH Lawrence is one of my favourite writers (no mean painter either). His four great novels - Sons And Lovers, The Rainbow, Woman In Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover - I still find wonderful. His travel essays are some of the best ever written in the genre (Sea And Sardinia came out of a visit made to Sardinia from Taormina), and his poetry is powerful, muscular and sensual.

I'd like to do more in-depth posts about Lawrence's writings and artistic philosophy at some point, but in the meantime here's a short extract from his poem The Snake. Lawrence is in the garden of Fontana Vecchia - in his pyjamas because of the heat - when a venomous snake comes for a drink at his water trough. After an internal debate about whether to kill it or not, he half-heartedly throws a log at the snake, which then disappears into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front... Lawrence immediately regrets his cowardly action, and ends up despising the voice inside him which had urged him to be a man and kill the snake.

Someone was before me at my water trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On that day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

I know of no other poem about an animal, and about a relationship between a man and an animal, quite as powerful as this one - though some by Ted Hughes come near. It's a quite extraordinary blend of subjective feeling and objective observation.

Two Interesting Facts About Cefalù

First interesting fact about Cefalù: it was the place where Giuseppe Tornatore shot the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. I watched this film again recently on DVD and still found it utterly charming. It's a nostalgic celebration of films and filmmaking, and its critical and public success helped revive the Italian film industry at the time.

Second interesting fact about Cefalù: the mountaineer, chess player, poet, playwright, occultist, alleged British spy, and practising black and white magician Aleister Crowley lived here from April 1920 until Mussolini expelled him from Italy in April 1923. Crowley was a very bad boy. Known as 'the wickedest man in the world' and 'The Great Beast', he travelled the world on inherited money with a string of impressionable, slightly screwball women in tow - most of whom he impregnated and/or persuaded to cooperate in esoteric 'sex magic' rituals. He was also vain, arrogant, bullying, ruthlessly ambitious, racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, and one of the most thoroughly unpleasant charlatans ever to have been born on English soil.

In Cefalù he founded the Abbey of Thelema - inspired by the eponymous abbey in that rollicking series of novels The Lives Of Garagantua And Pantagruel by François Rabelais. The abbey's motto was 'Do What Thou Wilt', a precept to which Crowley irreligiously adhered throughout his whole life. A habitual experimenter with drugs - including opium, cocaine, hashish, cannabis, alcohol, ether (ethyl oxide), mescaline and morphine, he died a heroin addict in 1947 at the age of 72. A lot of people who should have known better were influenced by his pseudo-mystical, drug-fuelled antics - including Timothy Leary, David Bowie, heavy metal bands Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, the avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and the spooky founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. A final interesting fact: Crowley was also one of the figures on the cover sleeve of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

A Walk On The Rock

A brick and stone path zigzags from Cefalù's old quarter up the western crag of La Rocca, or The Rock. This view's looking back over the new town and its crescent-shaped beach lapped by the Tyrrhenian sea...

The path takes you past prickly pear and giant fennel, and through swathes of purple and yellow wildflowers...

... to the Temple of Diana, an ancient megalith which had been 'done up' by the Greeks...

A steeper, rougher track climbs to the ruins of an old fort at the summit. Near the top a black snake hurtles across the path in front of me - a viper possibly, but, in view of its speed, more likely a western whip snake. Everywhere there are black and yellow lizards, about 5 to 6 inches long. They freeze, dart along the warm rocks, then freeze again. It's a hot, sunny morning - maybe 26 or 27 degrees C - and, on the way down, the cooling shade of a small pinewood is very welcome. A jay perches fearlessly on the lowest branch of a pine tree a mere arm's length away.

Here's the view from the Rock's northern edge overlooking the intricate warren of Cefalù's old town, wedged between sea and cliff...

Blue On Gold

Cefalù's cathedral is one of the most impressive Norman churches in Sicily and I liked it very much. My first sudden view of it - from the train window just before entering Cefalù station - made me catch my breath. It commands a slightly elevated position overlooking the huddled terracotta roofs of Cefalù's old quarter. Behind it rears the sheer-sided limestone cliff of La Rocca. Its situation is quite superb.

Building began in 1131 (the Normans conquered Sicily in 1091) after Roger II, King of Sicily, vowed to God he would build a cathedral here - having survived a severe storm and been washed up on Cefalù's beach. The photo above shows the cathedral's western façade with its triple-arched 15th century portico set between two square towers, each surmounted by a small spire. The tree in front of the cathedral is a date palm. This is the interior with its pink granite columns and astonishing Byzantine mosaics:

Master craftsmen from Constantinople created these wonderful blue and gold and red and green mosaics. They are exceptionally fine and are considered the best examples of Byzantine mosaic work in all Italy. The main image is of Jesus Christ as Pantocrator, meaning 'Almighty' or 'All-Powerful Ruler'. Christ's right hand is raised in benediction, and in his left he holds a Bible open at this verse from St John's Gospel (which you can read in both Greek and Latin): I am the light of the world. Who follows me will not wander in darkness but will have the light of life. Beneath Christ is the Virgin Mary flanked by four archangels, and further below are the apostles and the evangelists. Christ as Pantocrator is the very first representation we have of Christ in early Christianity, and it's an iconic image of the Eastern Orthodox church:

Tourists And Travellers

I'm not very fond of tourists and tourism. I like to think of myself as a traveller - or at times a pilgrim - rather than a tourist. Although we flirted a little with tourism and rubbed shoulders with tourists on our trip round Sicily, we didn't generally share their habits, and viewed them as a kind of alien species. On my recent winter walk from Seville to Santiago I don't think I saw a single tourist. Even world-important sites - such as the Roman theatre in Mérida - had very few visitors.

I know I'm simplifying, but tourists on the whole seek the familiar in the strange, want instant gratification, don't like staying too long outside their comfort zone. They enjoy ticking off the places they visit like items on a shopping list. They want things mapped out. They prefer the hedonistic delights of the beach or the boulevard to the secret, more subtle, less secure worlds of the bayou or the back streets...

Luckily tourists behave in lumpen and predictable ways. They tend to tread the same, well-worn tracks - usually in groups and following a guide - so that, while certain places become tourist hotspots, most places remain relatively tourist-free. We found this in Sicily and along the Amalfi Coast. The Corso Umberto in Taormina, for instance, was awash with tourists from dawn till dusk. But you only had to divert away from the designer shops and trendy boutiques and you were on your own.

In Amalfi tourists kept arriving by the coachload. We noted their behaviour like amateur anthropologists. They would surge into the little square before the duomo, cameras and camcorders thrust aloft like arm extensions. Snap, snap, click, snap. An overpriced cup of coffee and cake at the café in the piazza. A quick browse round the gift shops and a frenzied purchase of ceramic lemons and sun hats. Another surge up and down the short main street. Then they were gone.

To be replaced by another lot. But that was fine. For just off the main street, in a labyrinth of narrow alleyways and stone staircases, and in the lush valley of vines and lemon trees and derelict paper mills which climbed into the hills above town, and in the mountains higher up where huge limestone crags blocked the sun and high thin waterfalls plunged into tiny pools - there was no one. It was amazing. We had these places completely to ourselves...

All the photos are of Cefalù, the next place we stopped on our clockwise journey round Sicily. We tended to stay a couple of nights in each place and then move on. We travelled by local transport - mainly by train, which is fairly cheap in Italy. We had no accommodation booked in advance and no return flight organised. We wanted to travel as freely as possible.

It was quite easy to escape the tourists in Cefalù, though there were not big crowds of them in May. One evening we took a splendid walk along the rocks between the Arabic defensive wall of the historic centre and the sea, and we met not a soul...