The bright blue of the Ionian Sea stretches endlessly below, while terraced hills burst into flame with magenta bougainvillea. Behind it all, Mount Etna rises, taller and more imposing than I had imagined. Around the piazzas, laughter bubbles up, a singer’s voice rises above the chatter, and the flicker of matchsticks lights the evening air. Above all, the locals’ deep love for their hometown.

It takes time here for a visitor to move beyond spectator – to become part of this living performance. Thoughts about this town always take unexpected turns.

Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Sicily, nature remains untouched and generous.

The ancient Greeks, never failing to choose spectacular sites, built a theatre on a Taormina hill. Its ruins, still hosting performances today, are among the rare theatres worldwide where the show must constantly compete with the landscape to hold the audience’s attention. I suspect Johann Wolfgang Goethe stood somewhere among those very ruins when he spoke so fondly of this place. He  arrived here at the end of a long journey through Italy, coming with a kind of elegant exhaustion, and what he found here lifted it: a place he would later describe as his corner of paradise.

His impressions, noted in Italian Journey, are now woven into local lore. The view from the ancient Greek theatre left him spellbound: the sweep of Mount Etna, the glittering coast down to Catania. Since then, every guide and hotel concierge has repeated his words to visitors, myself included. Within hours of my own arrival – under a gentle rain that persisted throughout my stay – someone leaned in to inform me that Goethe had declared this Eden.

Naturally, the Taormina of the 18th century bore little resemblance to the one we see now. Then, it was a walled village with no hotels, only convents and family homes. Today, it dances to a different rhythm: luxury boutiques, sunset aperitifs, and a steady hum of international accents. Goethe may have been the first foreign visitor. He certainly wasn’t the last.

Another German came decades later: Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose dreamy photographs of young locals and classical ruins gave the town a new kind of fame. His work found its way into drawing rooms and museums abroad – and now, onto fridge magnets and postcards in the souvenir shops of Corso Umberto. His portraits helped summon a glamorous crowd: Capote, Garbo, Dietrich, Loren, Hepburn.

And now, in a different century, me. I didn’t come chasing poetry or myth, just a tightly curated trail of food, drink and beautiful interiors. But Taormina has a way of surprising you. The landscape stirs something deep, the light shifts just so, and suddenly you understand why everyone keeps quoting Goethe.