Goethe climbed up here in 1787 and was left speechless by what opens out from the seating: the Ionian Sea on one side, Etna on the other. Ancient audiences never saw it, because the masonry stage building closed the view off completely. The theatre began as a Greek building in the third century BC and was rebuilt by the Romans, who in the first half of the second century AD gave it the shape we see today: 109 metres across at its widest, an orchestra 35 metres wide, room for about 10,000 spectators. After Syracuse, it is the largest ancient theatre in Sicily.
What to see
The cavea is cut into the hillside and fans out in nine wedges divided by eight stairways. A double arcaded gallery closes it at the top, carried on plain piers outside and marble columns inside: that upper walkway sits some twenty metres above the orchestra floor and is worth the climb. Of the Roman stage front the back wall survives, open in the middle, with a few marble columns lying at its foot. They are enough to show how tall the original elevation stood, and how little it resembled the panoramic gap everyone photographs now.
The Greek theatre is harder to spot, but it is there: the wall of isodomic blocks swallowed up by the stage building, three seats from the cavea with their inscriptions still readable, the base of the small shrine at the top of the steps. Then come the scars of the building's last ancient life, when the orchestra was turned into an arena for the venationes, the fights between gladiators and wild animals. The lowest tiers gave way to a vaulted corridor, and a hypogeum opened in the middle of the floor, from which machinery raised the stage effects. A portico went up behind the stage in late antiquity; in the Middle Ages the stage building and the two turris scalae were walled in and turned into a private house.
Visiting
The theatre stands at the top of the town, at the end of Via Teatro Greco, five minutes on foot from Corso Umberto; entry is ticketed and the ticket office sits at the start of the lane. A full circuit, upper gallery included, takes between forty minutes and an hour. From April to September the cavea doubles as a stage: since 1983 it has hosted Taormina Arte and the Taormina Film Fest, and while the staging is built part of the scene wall disappears behind rigging. Seated capacity for performances is 4,500, rising to 10,000 when the standing floor is opened for concerts.
Our editors' tip
We go at opening time, before the coach parties fill the orchestra, and climb straight to the top row. From up there Etna sits exactly inside the central gap of the stage wall, and the Roman decision becomes legible: they kept that opening narrow and closed off everything else, because what mattered to them was the actors' voices, not the volcano. If you come back in summer, a concert ticket earns its price: once it goes dark, the stage is the only thing left lit.
