Nothing is left of the Castello di Villagonia, and yet everyone who steps off the train is looking straight at it: when the state railways rebuilt Taormina-Giardini station, the architect Roberto Narducci reworked the castle's forms, crenellated towers included. The seat of the De Spuches marquises stood on the shore, in the Villagonia district of Taormina, and belonged to the defensive network of Capo Schisò: in the early 16th century, to stop the pirate raids, the area of ancient Naxos was fortified by rebuilding an older fort and linking up Torre Vignazza, the old castle of Naxos and Villagonia itself. Family ties later carried the castle to the San Martino, princes of Pardo and dukes of Montalbo and Santo Stefano di Briga; the last owners, Giuseppe San Martino and his wife, lost it to expropriation in 1913, when the station was to be enlarged. The chapel of the Madonna di Porto Salvo came down with it. A few photographs from the early twentieth century are all that survives.
What to see
In its place stands the station building put up between 1926 and 1928: a two-storey central block, two symmetrical battlemented towers, pointed-arch windows in Sicilian-Catalan Gothic taste, a wrought-iron canopy over the entrance. The quotation of the vanished castle is deliberate, and it is why no other stop on the line looks like this one.
Inside, the halls keep the frescoes and relief decoration of the Palermo artist Salvatore Gregorietti, who also made the stained glass and the wrought-iron fittings, among dark Sicilian furniture of the late nineteenth century. From the embankment the view runs over the bay of Giardini-Naxos to Capo Schisò, that is, over the chain of towers the castle once belonged to.
Visiting
The address is Taormina-Giardini station, at km 288+476 of the Messina-Siracusa line, opened on 12 December 1866 and flanked by the SS 114 coast road. There is no ticket and no opening time: you study the front from the forecourt and the halls from inside, and twenty minutes covers it. The town bus climbs from here to Taormina, the taxi rank is outside the entrance, and drivers leave the car in the park-and-ride yard to the north.
Our editors' tip
Come by train and get out on platform one: from there the two towers are seen at an angle, exactly as the castle appears in the old photographs. Then cross the main road and walk five minutes towards the Villagonia beach; the spot where the San Martino house met the water is right there, under the tracks. Don't put it off too long: once the line upgrade is finished the station is due to be replaced by a new stop, a plan the heritage authority has already spoken against.