Book Taormina theatre, tours & attraction tickets

Perched on a clifftop above the Ionian Sea, Taormina occupies one of the most theatrical positions of any town in the Mediterranean. The Sicilian coast drops away on either side, Etna rises to the south-west in a near-permanent haze of smoke and snow, and the town itself, strung along a single main street called Corso Umberto, has been drawing artists, writers, and aristocrats since the Grand Tour made it fashionable in the eighteenth century. Goethe wrote about the view. D.H. Lawrence lived here for a period. The photographs that made it famous in the twentieth century were taken on the terraces above Isola Bella, the small island connected to the shore by a narrow pebble causeway that has become the defining image of the Sicilian Riviera.

The ancient theatre is the reason most people come, and it rewards the expectation. The Teatro Antico di Taormina was built by the Greeks in the third century BC and later enlarged by the Romans, who converted its stage area for gladiatorial combat. What survives is a structure of considerable scale, with tiered seating cut into the hillside and a backdrop that frames Etna and the sea simultaneously. Tickets that include an audio guide allow visitors to move through the site at their own pace, absorbing the engineering logic of the cavea and the layered history of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine occupation. A guided tour adds the interpretive depth that the stones alone cannot supply, particularly around the scaenae frons, the elaborate stage wall whose columns still stand against the open sky.