Excursion

We came back recently, my husband and I, from a non-town. It’s called Taormina and it’s one of the earth’s beauty spots; as scenery it is superb, but as a non-town it is, alas, an artifice, a package showpiece rather than a living place. If, as my first boss once confided to me, position in life is everything, then Taormina does have everything. She sits perfectly, terraced and gardened, on Mt. Tauro facing the Ionian Sea with Mt. Etna in grand view to the south. No one can cavil with paradise; no one can visit unmoved the ruins of the Greek amphitheater so perfectly set between mountain and sea, so poignant in ruin, so overrun with the prolific wild flowers and sunshine of Sicily; no one can help rejoicing in the thrust of nature on the walks down from the heights of Taormina to the beaches of the rocky coves below. But the price for such beauty is high. Taormina is overrun with tourists and has lost her identity to them; they come in gross busloads from the North countries, clogging the narrow streets and spilling their camera-packing, sun-seeking contents out into piazzas, street caffès, the beaches, the shops, the mountain paths.

But how could Taormina resist being thus despoiled?—the economic advantage is too clear. No other town in Sicily is so pretty and clean and amenable to tourist sensibilities. Here, there is no dirt or poverty, nor are there fly-crusted children with eyes to pierce into souls and disturb one’s peace. Instead, the shop windows spill out the insignia of the non-town—Japanese camera supplies, American cosmetics and canned corn niblets, English tea biscuits, German girlie magazines, and the whole gamut of international stylized junk made to the standards of that crass entity know as the tourist trade.