House & Garden 
A SICILIAN VILLAGE. 
VEN on the shores of the Mediterranean 
few places have the romantic beauty and 
the exquisite charm of Taormina. Clinging 
to its hillside hundreds of feet above the sea 
it looks out over a sweep that ranges from 
Messina on the north, with the far-off Cal¬ 
abrian mountains, to Catania on the south, 
with the ever dominant mass of snowy Etna. 
Once it was the ancient city of Tauromenio, 
ing like a contour line around the side of the 
mountain and of a few lanes that lead up and 
down. About the middle of this one street 
is the piazza where the villagers gather for 
gossip or to draw water from the clumsy 
fountain that fills its centre, while near by is 
a courtyard where steps run up to A Balcony , 
the gothic corbelling of which overhangs the 
simple arch of a long disused doorway. 
Toward the northeast are still the remains 
of many sepulchres of the Roman and Sara- 
DOORWAYS 
a name derived from the mountain Tauro 
on which it was built. Its original confines 
were determined by the nature of the 
ground and were limited on the north by 
the torrent of the old Eontana Vecchia, on 
the west by another torrent and elsewhere by 
the cliffs. Defended in its position by these 
steep precipices, in the clefts of which walled 
stairways struggle toward the summits, Taor¬ 
mina consists to-day of a single street wind- 
TAORMINA 
cenic epochs, while a careful search in the 
rocks of the cliffs will discover the approaches 
to the more important monuments, such as 
the sea-fight and the temple (now the church 
of S. Pancrazio). In fact many of the towns 
in Sicily speak by the remains of their build¬ 
ings in unmistakable accents of some period 
of its complex history. Syracuse and Gir- 
genti tell the story of the refined, luxurious 
art-loving civilization which the Greeks car- 
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