Taking Taormina by Strategy

"And that is how Sicilians are. So terribly physically. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other’s face. Never in the world have I seen such melting tenderness as between casual Sicilians on railway platforms."

Powered through and stayed up past seven so I could have a proper dinner. The streets were alive. It was like Carnival, though just an ordinary Saturday. I suppose when you grow up in the shadow of an active volcano, you decide to live while you can. Everyone was out and dressed and going wild. Old men with tight, grey mustaches doubled over in laughter, children's mouths giallo with gelato, clowns tipping invisible hats, Senegalese selling neon wands.

As I made my way to the cocktail district, I was met with a similar scene to that of the old town in Ostuni, teens and tweens everywhere! Kissing on motorcycles, kissing in corners, faces greasy with kebab meat. Professors rode their walking sticks like witches and women swung their helmets in wild circles. It all seemed to justify the morning markets, They need blood and protein in huge amounts to fuel these ecstatic nights!

Ducked out of the crowd and into a bohemian bar. It was the sort of place that won't serve you until you've undergone an "interview" with the bartender, who must first determine your "palate" and then apply a "Sicilian twist" to a classic drink. It was absurd, and it took a long time, and my interlocutor had a curly mustache. But I bought in, and god damn if it wasn't one of the best drinks of my life, a kind of Mandarin Orange Rye Thing with a Basil Leaf.

I had brought the script of the play with me and I read and edited while I drank. I couldn't remember if it was "write drunk, edit sober" or "write and edit drunk," so I had a second cocktail. I resisted the third with tremendous effort.

At the table next to me, an Irishman was discussing a friend of his. He said:

"He was an excellent dungeon master, could tell a story that would have you riveted, loved playing with him. But he would ruin you at darts, out-think you. And he threw so hard. I still hear the sound. I couldn't compete. 

He shot me once. In the kitchen. We had been hunting, and we brought our kill and our rifles into the kitchen. His went off and got me. I was bleeding. And when he saw it, he fainted. And when I saw him pale and on the ground, I thought, 'got you at last, you bugger.'" 

I was amazed by this tale.

The place was very crowded by this point, many people lined up for their interview. I asked a server to find my bartender, so I could pay. She told me she knew what I had had and told me the price. 

It seemed too intimate, somehow, that she, a total stranger, knew my palate.

Outside, the crowd had grown even thicker. Thankfully, I was well greased with mandarin-infusions, and slipped easily home. I navigated the ladder to the loft with a practiced ease. Slept and slept. 

I was awakened by the sound of a screaming child, a shouting adult, and the sounds of violence. Perhaps the nun from yesterday had caught one the slower kids. it was terrible to hear. I thought of my stepson. I thought of the children in my life. I thought of myself. I suppose when you grow up in the shadow of an active volcano, you don't have the time for sympathetic parenting. 

I took a shower to drown it out, and when I emerged clean, the world was at peace. For the moment. Got my day-bag together and went out to photograph a mural of Clint Eastwood fighting Darth Vader. I had seen it the previous day when it was too dark to capture.

On the walk, I saw men setting up the market, and a man in a white apron was unloading thick slabs of "carni equine." Horse meat. All around me, butchers were prepping their tables as they have for centuries. 

If history has a sound, it's the endless ring of cleavers striking marble through meat and bone. 

There wasn't a shower around to drown it out, so I hurried to the alley and got the shot. Hilarious and strange. Made my way to a neighborhood called "San Berillo" a former red-light district the police handed over to artists. Happily snapped murals and paintings on brick walls while a group of Tunisians warmed themselves over a fire they'd built in an alley. 

A women croaked "Ciao" from a doorway completely hidden in shadow. I jumped and "Ciao"ed back. A good fright! On the road to the train station I saw a strange park statue of a man poking out of a book. I don't think I've seen one like that before. They usually have the author reading to people or holding a book. This guy was like, "Hey, it's me! Betcha thought it'd be words in here, but nope! It's me." 

Station was easy to navigate. The rail system here is excellent. Simple to buy tickets, and the trains go everywhere. Taormina was only an hour away. The part in the Odyssey where the Cyclops loses his shit and hucks rocks at our boys is said to have happened around here. 

Got very close to the end of The Historian, which I was recognizing to be a bad book. But.. it was my only friend, so I kept reading it.   

Taormina! Such a place! Nestled in the hills and charming as a cocktail interview. Fabulous, finely manicured mountain town with a marvelous main pedestrian road carving through a welcoming collection of shops, cafes and plazas with tremendous views of the sea. 

And an ancient amphitheater from antiquity! And it was here I learned the little fried teardrops I've been enjoying are called "arancini." A new favorite to rival burek! I had one stuffed with pistachio risotto! The "typical product" of this city is porcelain, specifically porcelain heads, sometimes called "Moorish" heads. They were everywhere and often gloriously beautiful (and expensive). 

I priced some salt and pepper shakers and instead of telling me the price, the old shopkeeper said, "One thousand year ago, Arab here. Arab! You understand?" He drew his thumb across his throat and made a sound like a busted bicycle chain. "They cut off heads. But now we sell their heads. You see?"

And fill them with pepper. 

I was disinclined to buy one after this, but not even that tale could darken the Delights of Taormina! An absolutely charming place with spectacular vantage points for marveling at the hills and the Ionian Sea! Sorry, Adriatic, you had your turn. Behold the glistening green of the Ionian!    

A read a plaque about a famous hotel where, it is said, many famous authors stayed. It made a point of saying Oscar Wilde told Andre Gide to take a room there. Those dudes only wrote to tell one another places where the man wouldn't hassle you for "the love that dare not speak its name." But the plaque didn't say that. 

The amphitheater was no Plovdiv amphitheater, but it was very nice. And as active as Etna! They still do concerts there with regularity. The views were... incredible. Deep green hills and villages hidden in the clouds, seascapes extending to forever. I had hesitated to pay the entrance fee, but it was the right choice on a perfect day. I lingered for an hour, sat on a marble bench and finished the book. Into the trash with you, buddy. You were disappointing, but you were also with me when I needed you. And there was a chapter in the Rila Monastery, and I've been there! So... I have complicated feelings where you are concerned. 

As I do with this vital, magical, terrifying island. Such beauty, such savagery! Such humanity! So thrilling and uncomfortable and rewarding at once.

The town center featured a little fountain with a centaur missing her two front legs. So, she became a sort of satyr in my mind. There were sprays of purple flowers and juicy prickly pears. Just for me the church bells rang.

It took a long time to get a taxi to the "stazione." But I did. 

Back in Catania I packed my bag. We have come almost to the end. It's mostly going to be two long travel days with a pilgrimage to the Spanish Steps sandwiched between. I take an eleven-hour ride to Rome in the morning.

Went out for one last Sicilian meal, and though Sunday evening the streets overflowed with families pushing strollers and shopping for bargains. Loud arguments over quiet espressos. I hadn't had fish yet, so I went to a place offering a "fried mix."

It was... all heads and spines with a light breading. Eyes and fins. Everyone else was just sluppering it up, waving gills around, spraying scales from their mouths as they laughed. I did my best to eat as much as I could. A beer helped.

While I ate, I read DH Lawrence's "Sea and Sardinia" and by some sort of magic, the section I landed on describes being on a train trip almost identical to the one I took this morning. He is going from Messina to Palermo.

On the train, a little girl is unwell. She walks between cars to throw up. Nobody holds her hair or goes to see if she's all right. She just pukes and comes back. 

He says, "They (the Sicilians) just quite naturally leave it alone to its convulsions, and are neither distressed nor repelled. It just is so. Their naturalness seems unnatural to us."

That passage, which I read over the cone of fried fish guts, seemed to capture it for me. I read into it the beaten child, the kissing in the street, the porcelain heads, the blood-soaked markets of horse meat, the shrugging at the volcano.

It's a bit reductive, this word "natural," but I felt like I knew what he was suggesting. I responded to it.

I came here to read and think and have new experiences, and the beauty of Taormina and that moment at night with the Lawrence passage seemed to encapsulate the purpose all at once. A beautiful day, one of the very best.