&We went into raptures at the sight of Taormina. On our left, closing the horizon, Etna rose, that sky column, as Pindaro called it, which with its violet mass was silhouetted against the reddish sky because all crossed by the borning rays of the sun. In a second plan, two tawny montains which one could have said covered with a boundless skin of lion. After having appreciated a so great view, magnificent and bright, -so that Jadin, impressed, didn't want to make either a sketch, -we turned the bow towards the east.

Guy de Maupassant

If somebody might pass one day only in Sicily and asked: "What should I visit?" I would answer without hesitate: "Taormina".
It is only a landscape, but a landscape in which you can find all that seems to be created on earth to seduce the eyes, mind and fantasy.
Where are the peoples who could make, today, things like these?
Where are the men able in building, for the crowd pleasure, works like these?
Those men, the ones of a time, had soul and eyes different from the ours; in their veins, with blood, flowed something lost: love and cult for Beauty.

Here we feel as if we lived for a thousands of years.
I know that Taormina isn't waiting only for me, it waits for all men.

Edmondo De Amicis

&What you see is a view that Naples, Constantinople and Rio de Janeiro haven't so great. Down, you see the little smiling town, which extends as an arc among almond and orange trees, cactuses, pines; on the back of the town, an half-circle of mountains which rush at sky its rocky vertexes crowned with castles and villages; further on there is the huge Etna, with its white head coloured with pink, overhanging the Jonio Sea, and it seems that it advances to dip there its flank; on the right and on the left you see almost the whole eastern coast of Sicily...and this huge view of breasts, promontories, woods, villages, gardens smiles upon the sea beauty and under the sky beauty of which the human word couldn't give idea. I don't believe in hell, but in paradise, because I've seen it ....and it's this one.

...Sicilian spring begins in January, and it gathers in a bouquet worthy for a queen, in the garden of a magician where all is in bloom.
April, writes Eliot, is the cruellest month: but not here.
Here it's bright, as the snow on the Etna...
I noticed with surprise, sat on that wall, an old man with velvet pants, winded in a black mantle...It was an astonishing theatrical apparition and nothing more; only after having watched with more attention I noticed he was Andrè Gide...