We left Catania around 11:30 and arrived in Taormina
about an hour later. The drive into
Taormina was amazing! It’s very much a
tourist attraction because of its location right along the Mediterranean Sea
and Mount Etna. Here are just a couple
of pictures that illustrate my point and they don’t really do it justice. The day was mostly overcast, so much so that
Mount Etna wasn’t visible at all. Below is the view of Mt. Etna we would have seen had the weather been more coorperative!
We enjoyed a quick bag lunch we purchased while in
Catania and then we entered the Greco-Roman theater. Initially built in 150 B.C. (and
enhanced/built up through the second century A.D.), the theater is beautifully
situated on a hill well above the shoreline of Taormina. The circular shape of the theater made for
good acoustics back then, since there was no such thing as microphones! One of the reasons the inhabitants picked this spot was because it was easy for them to use the natural terrain as the frame that would become the main
level of the theater.
While in the theater, selected students performed
excerpts from both a typical comedy and tragedy. The comedy of choice was Aristophanes Clouds, a cheeky play that makes fun of
Socrates, and the tragedy was Euripedes’, Medea,
which depicts a mother’s slaying of her own children as a spiteful revenge
against her ex-husband for divorcing her for another woman. I was privileged enough to play the role of
Child #1 and offered up a very dramatic interpretation of how he died. In the
picture left you see Reggie and Brianna acting out a scene in Clouds, where Reggie portrayed a very
clueless Socrates while Brianna played Socrates’ very snarky friend,
Strepsades.
After our very loose interpretations of Greek
tragedy/comedy, the students (with some prompting by Yvonne, see right) took us through an
archaeological account of how the theater was built and the various examples of symmetry, the golden ratio, and acoustic perfection were incorporated in the
design of the theater.
Afterwards, the students had 3 and half hours of
free time to explore Taormina. Many of
us, me included, took a hike up a cliff even higher than where the Roman theater was to a Monastery, Madonna della Rocca. At the ends of each switchback on the path to
the Monastery were bronzed Stations of the Cross (see left). Farther up the path, was an abandoned fort (see right) which at one time was used to defend the area from Norman rule in the 9th through 12th centuries. The hike was great but we were disappointed
to find that it was closed to the public once we arrived. L
Our very last site was La Isla Bella (see
left/right), just a beautiful island with a house perched on top of it just a
few meters of the coast of Taormina. Not
a bad place “get-away” place, right?
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