page_title: Taormina
section_title: Modern age
hierarchical_section_title: Taormina / History / Modern age
caption_attribution_description: Hotel Victoria Corso Umberto 81 where Oscar Wilde stayed in 1898
context_page_description: Taormina is a comune in the Metropolitan City of Messina, on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. Taormina has been a tourist destination since the 19th century. Its beaches on the Ionian sea, including that of Isola Bella, are accessible via an aerial tramway built in 1992, and via highways from Messina in the north and Catania in the south. On 26–27 May 2017 Taormina hosted the 43rd G7 summit.
context_section_description: Under the Bourbon dynasty of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, which lasted until 1860, Taormina did not have a relevant role; however, it obtained an easier access when part of the Catrabico promontory was partially cut and a seaside road connecting it to Messina and Catania was created. It received also a station on the second-oldest railroad in the region.
  There is some speculation about Taormina being an early gentlemen's destination. Capri had a similar reputation, as tolerant of gay men and artists. Taormina's first important tourist was Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who exalted it in Italian Journey, a record of his 1786 journey published in 1816.  Starting from the 19th century Taormina became a popular tourist resort in the whole of Europe: people who visited Taormina include Oscar Wilde, Nicholas I of Russia, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche (who here wrote his Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Richard Wagner and many others. In the late 19th century the city gained further prominence as the place where Wilhelm von Gloeden worked most of his life as a photographer of predominantly male nudes.
  Also credited for making Taormina popular was Otto Geleng (1843-1939), a German landscape painter who settled there from the 1860s. He was one of the first artists to capture the beauties of Sicily, and his exhibitions in Berlin and Paris lured northern Europeans to see for themselves. He married an Italian woman and settled in Taormina, renovating a palazzo into the first full-scale hotel to greet these visitors.
  In 1905, the English artist Robert Hawthorn Kitson, heir to Kitson and Company but driven from Britain by homophobia, built a house in Taormina. He commissioned Frank Brangwyn to design murals and furniture for the Casa Cuseni. Alfred East also contributed. The property, including extensive gardens, was inherited by his niece Daphne Phelps just after World War II. She intended to sell, but ended up staying, running the place as a pensione for half a century, with guests such as Bertrand Russell, Roald Dahl, Henry Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams. In 1999 she wrote A House in Sicily about life in Taormina in general and Casa Cuseni in particular.
  In 1907, the English architect C. R. Ashbee, a prime mover of the Arts and Crafts movement, came to Taormina on commission from an old client. Colonel Shaw-Hellier set him the task of designing the Villa San Giorgio, Biographer Fiona MacCarthy judges it "the most impressive of Ashbee's remaining buildings"; it is run as the Hotel Ashbee.
  During the early 20th century the town became a colony of expatriate artists, writers and intellectuals. Albert Stopford grew roses in his Edwardian garden; D. H. Lawrence stayed at the Fontana Vecchia from 1920 to 1922. (He wrote a number of his poems, novels, short stories and essays, and the travel book Sea and Sardinia.) Thirty years later, from April 1950 through September 1951, the same villa was home to Truman Capote, who wrote of his stay in the essay "Fontana Vecchia." Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais visited the place. Charles Webster Leadbeater, the theosophical author, found out that Taormina had the right magnetic fields for Jiddu Krishnamurti to develop his talents, so the young Krishnamurti spent part of 1912 in the city. 
  By this time Taormina had become "a polite synonym for Sodom", as Harold Acton described it.  Later, however, after the Second World War Acton was visiting Taormina with Evelyn Waugh and, coming upon a board advertising "Ye Olde English Teas” he sighed and commented that Taormina 'was now quite as boring as Bournemouth'.
  Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, wrote most of his first novel, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír ("The Great Weaver from Kashmir"), in Taormina which he then praised highly in his book of autobiographical essays, Skáldatími ("The Time of the Poet", 1963).
  The 43rd G7 summit was held in the town on 26–27 May 2017.
caption: Hotel Victoria at 81 Corso Umberto where Oscar Wilde stayed in 1898
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