The words were uttered by DH Lawrence during his time in Taormina. Today the town is a fashionable, precipitous Sicilian seaside resort to the north of Syracuse, though in the three years he spent there with Frieda it was a very different, less glitzy place. Yet the villa they rented, the Fontana Vecchia, was congenial, their breakfast bacon came from Malta, and it remains one of the Lawrence addresses to which people are still irresistibly lured.
It was the furthest point on his long Italian trail, beyond which he could only change direction. By then the ailing author’s death in Vence, in France’s Alpes Maritimes. lay not far off. He needed mountain air, he had been advised, more than he needed the seaside.
But he still had places to go, and the strength to go to them, and he was still writing with relentless gusto. One January night in Taormina he and Frieda awoke in darkness, filled a thermos of tea, packed what they described as their mobile kitchenino, and walked down the hill to the railway station for an improvised trip to Sardinia. At dawn they caught a local train to the wrecked town of Messina, destroyed by a mighty earthquake in 1908 with thousands of dead, before changing in pouring rain to the single-track Palermo express with a 32-hour voyage to Sardinia - “lost between Europe and Africa” “
as Lawrence put it - in prospect.
No journey, even the later one with Lawrence’s death at the end of it, was ever too daunting for them. It was their lifestyle, to which the possibility of a family parenthood was always irrelevant. When they got back to Sicily, Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, one of his best books, in his most tirelessly vigorous prose and went on eating Maltese bacon.
In Sardinia they docked in Cagliari, where in 1990 the World Cup final between England and the Netherlands would result in a draw and Bill Bufford, innocently representing Granta Magazine was beaten up by the carabinieri during a nasty clash between the Italian police and the public. For the Lawrences, striding up the steep hill from the harbour to find a hotel for the night, things were less eventful. Next day they steamed by puffer train to the centre of the island to continue their adventure.
A decade after Lawrence’s death, during the Second World War, Taormina became the home - as well as Gestapo headquarters - of the ruthless Albert Kesselring, Germanys’ Nazi commander in Italy, from which he was eventually driven out by the start of the Allied thrust northwards from Sicily through Anzio (scene of the admirable new novel by Sebastian Faulkes) and Monte Cassino, the area from where so many of Edinburgh’s resident Italians came.
But the Lawrence villa in Taormina still stands in a street beyond the public esplanade at the top of the town, where Lawrence had thought the sight of the plumes of smoke emerging from Mount Etna had looked so sinister. Geoff Dyer, in his study of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, wrote of a split level restaurant on the precipice, which Sue and I would also visit during our time in Taormina, when one floor stood empty and the other was serving customers a far from fresh local white wine with a misleadingly inviting name.
We were on our honeymoon and in quest of the Lawrence villa. The town, with its scenic Greek amphitheatre, was now effortlessly attractive. We found the villa, and so, on another occasion, did the modern American travel writer Paul Theroux, who commemorated its Lawrentian connection in a creepy little novella entitled The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, set in the town’s best hotel.
Continuing In Lawrence’s wake, Sue and I tramped the streets and down to the station to take a train to Syracuse - familiar to Lawrence - via squalid Catania, birthplace of the exquisitely Chopinesque bel canto composer Vincenzo Bellini at the foot of Mount Etna.
We had reached Sicily from Rome via a week in Paestum, with its spectacular Greek temples, pine groves, and buffalo fields, before crossing to the island on the railway ferry, the long-promised bridge across the straits not yet having been built - it still hasn’t. We returned north via lunch in Rome to the hill town of Todi in Umbria, where we sheltered from rain in shop doorways and warily walked the ramparts. Lawrence’s Italian trail has many strands.
3 October 2016
It was the furthest point on his long Italian trail, beyond which he could only change direction. By then the ailing author’s death in Vence, in France’s Alpes Maritimes. lay not far off. He needed mountain air, he had been advised, more than he needed the seaside.
But he still had places to go, and the strength to go to them, and he was still writing with relentless gusto. One January night in Taormina he and Frieda awoke in darkness, filled a thermos of tea, packed what they described as their mobile kitchenino, and walked down the hill to the railway station for an improvised trip to Sardinia. At dawn they caught a local train to the wrecked town of Messina, destroyed by a mighty earthquake in 1908 with thousands of dead, before changing in pouring rain to the single-track Palermo express with a 32-hour voyage to Sardinia - “lost between Europe and Africa” “
as Lawrence put it - in prospect.
No journey, even the later one with Lawrence’s death at the end of it, was ever too daunting for them. It was their lifestyle, to which the possibility of a family parenthood was always irrelevant. When they got back to Sicily, Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, one of his best books, in his most tirelessly vigorous prose and went on eating Maltese bacon.
In Sardinia they docked in Cagliari, where in 1990 the World Cup final between England and the Netherlands would result in a draw and Bill Bufford, innocently representing Granta Magazine was beaten up by the carabinieri during a nasty clash between the Italian police and the public. For the Lawrences, striding up the steep hill from the harbour to find a hotel for the night, things were less eventful. Next day they steamed by puffer train to the centre of the island to continue their adventure.
A decade after Lawrence’s death, during the Second World War, Taormina became the home - as well as Gestapo headquarters - of the ruthless Albert Kesselring, Germanys’ Nazi commander in Italy, from which he was eventually driven out by the start of the Allied thrust northwards from Sicily through Anzio (scene of the admirable new novel by Sebastian Faulkes) and Monte Cassino, the area from where so many of Edinburgh’s resident Italians came.
But the Lawrence villa in Taormina still stands in a street beyond the public esplanade at the top of the town, where Lawrence had thought the sight of the plumes of smoke emerging from Mount Etna had looked so sinister. Geoff Dyer, in his study of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, wrote of a split level restaurant on the precipice, which Sue and I would also visit during our time in Taormina, when one floor stood empty and the other was serving customers a far from fresh local white wine with a misleadingly inviting name.
We were on our honeymoon and in quest of the Lawrence villa. The town, with its scenic Greek amphitheatre, was now effortlessly attractive. We found the villa, and so, on another occasion, did the modern American travel writer Paul Theroux, who commemorated its Lawrentian connection in a creepy little novella entitled The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, set in the town’s best hotel.
Continuing In Lawrence’s wake, Sue and I tramped the streets and down to the station to take a train to Syracuse - familiar to Lawrence - via squalid Catania, birthplace of the exquisitely Chopinesque bel canto composer Vincenzo Bellini at the foot of Mount Etna.
We had reached Sicily from Rome via a week in Paestum, with its spectacular Greek temples, pine groves, and buffalo fields, before crossing to the island on the railway ferry, the long-promised bridge across the straits not yet having been built - it still hasn’t. We returned north via lunch in Rome to the hill town of Todi in Umbria, where we sheltered from rain in shop doorways and warily walked the ramparts. Lawrence’s Italian trail has many strands.
3 October 2016
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