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Taormina and Castelmola
Etna, Taormina and Castelmola, 6-7 hours, full day
Our driver leads you across Rifugio Sapienza at a height of 2000 meters (6561 ft). Here you can choose different ways to visit the Volcano but only with the authorized tourist guide of Etna. Mount Etna is the tallest active volcano in Europe and it is one of most important volcanoes in the world (3350 meters- 10990 ft). It has four craters at the peak of mount. If you don’t climb, from here (Rifugio Sapienza) it’s possible to walk somewhere around Crateri Silvestri (“Woodland Craters”) next to the parking where there are stores and restaurants also. The landscape is spectacular and you would think to stay on the moon.
It’s better take this tour in the morning and for the lunchtime is recommend to move to Castelmola where there is a folkloric restaurant for all who love light lunch and approve a joking spirit considering the furniture with a lot of phallic shaped objects. From Castelmola you enjoy one of most spectacular panorama in the world. You see the sea and the volcano Etna, gulf of Catania and Messina, you can see the town of Taormina and Giardini Naxos too.
It is recommend to visit the church of Saint Biagio that it was the first church built in Castelmola and it put on the rock. Inside the church is found a fresco of XVIII century drawing “the Virgin Mary with child, saints Biagio and Angels”.
It’s possible to make more interesting this tour visiting a farm which produces traditional Sicilian food and visiting a wine cellars which produce Wine of Etna, Norello Mascalese, Cataratto and Grecanico. Here we can make a light lunch with wine tasting and traditional Sicilian foods and also we can visit wine cellars and vineyard. On the home page of our web site, you will find the button to enter the "wine tours". Here you will find information and cards with details of the best wineries that we recommend. Link: http://www.chauffeurs-italy.com/index.php/en/wine-tours
Near Castelmola there is Taormina, it is the village more visited in Sicily, very fine and beautiful, with a lot of fantastic shops and restaurant situated beside the sea and there are also luxurious hotels in invidiable location and its architecture. Taormina is at 200 meters above sea levels and it has a shape similar to terrace in fact there is an observation platform where you can see the volcano Etna so near. The village is a very popular tourist destination for the whole year thanks to its cultural beauty and peculiar naturalistic but also thanks to its recreational system and welcoming Sicilian people.
In the centuries, the village always has been a tourist destination and very important people has visited Taormina like Guglielmo II, or writers such as Goethe, Maupassant, D.H. Lawrence, A. France, Oscar Wild, Brahms, and stylists such as Dior, and noblewomen such as Florence Trevelyan, and German painter Geleng, and English and France nobles.
Thanks to the beauty of Taormina many filmmakers have shoot films such as “L’avventura” of Michelangelo Antonioni.
You can stay fascinated by Taormina and you can choose different activities in this area.
Tormina (Greek: Tauromenion, Latin: Tauromenium) has many news but uncertain and unreliable. Diodoro Siculo, in XIV book, say that Siculi (Sicilian People) live in Taormina rock living to agriculture and livestock holdings, even before the Greek arrive on the Taormina coasts (753 B.C.), where at mouth of Alcantara River founded a town called Naxos (now Giardini Naxox) that it was the first Greek colony in Sicily. Strabone (Strabo) speaks of Tauromenion as one of the cities on the east coast of Sicily that was still subsisting in his time, though inferior in population both to Messina and Catania. Both Pliny (Plinio) and Ptolemy (Tolomeo) assign it the rank of a Roman colony.
