Ancient Theatre of Taormina

Start with the stone under your feet. It is warm, worn smooth, and slightly uneven. Around you, curved rows of seating fall away toward a stage of weathered red brick. Behind that stage there is no wall of painted scenery. There is open sky, the blue line of the sea, and on a clear day the long grey shoulder of Mount Etna. Many visitors stop at the top step and simply look before they hear a single word of history.

You are standing in the Ancient Theatre of Taormina, on a high terrace above the Ionian coast of eastern Sicily. The town around you began as a Greek settlement called Tauromenion, founded in the fourth century before Christ. The theatre's builders chose this ridge for a practical reason. They carved the seating directly into the natural slope of the hill. Gravity and rock did much of the work, and the shape of the land made the bowl you see today.

Here is the first surprise. Most of what you see is not Greek. The theatre most likely began in the Hellenistic period, the era after Alexander the Great, when Greek culture spread across the Mediterranean. But the Romans later rebuilt it on a large scale. The red brick, the tall stage building, and the columns all belong largely to that Roman phase. So when people call this a Greek theatre, they are only half right. It is a Greek idea in Roman clothing.

Look at the material closely. Greek builders usually preferred cut stone. The Romans worked with brick and mortar, and they used them generously here. You can see the flat, layered courses in the walls of the stage building. In some places the facing has fallen away, and you can see the rough rubble core inside. That core shows how Roman engineers built quickly and strongly. They made a solid heart, then dressed it with neater brick on the outside.

Now turn your attention to the stage building itself. The Romans called it the scaenae frons, which simply means the front of the stage. In its original form it was a tall, decorated wall. It had niches for statues, rows of columns, and doorways for actors. Today only part of it stands. Several columns still rise in front of the brick, some of them reassembled in modern times. Imagine the whole surface finished in marble and colour, and the space feels very different.

This is the second surprise, and it is the reason so many photographs of this place look the same. The stage wall did not survive whole. Over the centuries part of it collapsed, and that gap opened a window onto the landscape. So the famous view of Etna through the ruins is partly an accident of decay. The ancient audience would have looked at a closed wall. You are looking at a frame that time cut open.

The theatre is large. It is often described as the second biggest ancient theatre in Sicily, after the great theatre of Syracuse further south. Several thousand people could sit here together. Think about the sound of that crowd. The bowl shape carries the voice remarkably well. If someone speaks clearly from the stage area, you can often hear them in the upper rows. Many visitors test it with a friend, one standing low, one standing high.

The Romans did not only use this space for plays. Over time, tastes in Roman entertainment changed. Many theatres across the empire were adapted for more violent shows, including fights with animals and gladiators. Archaeologists have noted changes in the lower part of this theatre that point to that kind of use. The space in front of the stage, where a Greek chorus once sang and danced, may have become an arena floor. The same stones held two very different kinds of performance.

After the end of the Roman world, the theatre slowly fell out of use. Parts of it were stripped for building material. Stone and marble from ancient sites often ended up in churches, houses, and walls nearby. For long periods the ruin sat quietly above the town. It returned to wide attention in the eighteenth century, when northern European travellers began to tour Italy and Sicily in search of classical ruins.

One of those travellers was the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He visited Taormina in 1787 and wrote about the theatre in his account of his Italian journey. He was struck by the way the ruin and the landscape worked together, the sea and the volcano filling the view. His writing helped make this hilltop a stop for later travellers. In the nineteenth century, artists, writers, and wealthy visitors followed, and Taormina grew into a resort town.

The theatre is still a working stage. In summer it hosts concerts, opera, dance, and the Taormina Film Festival, one of the older film festivals in Italy. Modern seating and lighting are sometimes set up over the ancient rows. It can feel strange to see stage equipment against Roman brick. But it also continues the oldest purpose of this place. People still climb this hill in the evening to sit together and watch a performance under the open sky.

Before you leave, walk to the highest part of the seating you can reach. From there, look in each direction in turn. Toward the stage, you see Etna, which is still an active volcano and sometimes releases a thin line of smoke. To the side, you see the curve of the coast below, where the Greek colony of Naxos once stood. Behind you lies the town, its narrow streets and pale stone houses. Ancient and modern Sicily meet on this single slope.

Take one more moment where you are. Feel the breeze that comes up from the sea, and listen. You may hear swallows, voices in a dozen languages, the distant hum of the town below. The people who sat on these steps two thousand years ago looked at the same mountain and the same water. As you walk back toward the gate, glance once over your shoulder. The gap in the old wall will still be holding the view in its frame.