Sometimes you just want to fall off the edge. In my case, because I am not an intrepid traveller, I like the sensation of falling off the edge while still just hanging on. And not off the edge of anywhere too remote either. Europe is far away enough.

So I chose Sicily, which some say both is and isn’t Italy. Taormina, to be precise, because it sounds edgy and because DH Lawrence lived there for a while.

I like going where Lawrence went.

He wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Taormina, many short stories and poems - including Snake - and a couple of wonderful travel books.

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Taormina gave him the very thing I was after - what he described as “a good on-the-brink feeling”. On-the-brink of Europe but on-the-brink of danger too, what with venomous snakes and Etna smoking and smouldering the whole time. Snakes I hadn’t come for; but Etna, yes. It turned out I had volcanic longings on me also.

I hadn’t realised how dominating the volcano would be. I was familiar with all the postcard views of it, most famously from the great Greek amphitheatre - ice-capped and fuming, a constant reminder to the audience of the fury of the gods and the instability of fortune. But I hadn’t imagined I would gaze at it every morning - out of affection, not fear - keep looking towards it throughout the day and then give half the night to inspecting it through a telescope.

You see the molten lava at night - I hadn’t counted on that. Even with the naked eye you can make out vermilion streaks in the sky. But through a telescope you actually see the streams of lava flowing and intersecting, and flames like fireballs shooting hundreds of feet high as though they mean to make another planet. And once you’ve seen that, once you grasp that all the fires of hell are down there, that we actually live on a ball of flame, you must return to look and look again.

Lawrence fancied that Etna turned the heads of Sicilians, making the men especially overflow with demonstrativeness. “They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips,” he wrote. “They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other’s face.”

I would like to say I observed that human overflowingness as I observed its molten equivalent on Etna’s slopes, but Taormina is not now what it was for Lawrence. Fatuous to complain about tourists when you’re one yourself, but the truth of it is there are too many. I don’t begrudge them, I simply feel I can’t get at the place itself, can’t peel away what’s for us, to get at what’s for them.

On our first evening, for example, I am excited to find a wedding party parading through the streets, the bride in full meringue, laughing and posing for photographs wherever there’s a picturesque church or fountain - that’s to say everywhere - the festivities spilling into the bars and cafes, the groom in a sort of metallic foil suit, such as you might roast a chicken in, consenting to be greeted by everyone whether he knows them or not, and then pausing to buy himself an ice cream like any old holidaymaker.

Ah, so this is it, I think, the Sicilian overflowingness of which Lawrence speaks. It is only when I hear one of the bridesmaids calling to a pageboy, “Christopher, stop that!”, that I realise the party is English, from Newcastle in fact, here on a nuptial package - sunshine, flowers, photographer, golden gothic backdrop, volcanic views, the lot.

One morning, though, we climb up the steps from our hotel - once a convent, now cloistered and set exquisitely amid bougainvilleas for the benefit of believers in the more fleshly things of life - to find a funeral cortege passing along the main street. At the front, a couple of white vans bearing flowers, a priest walking behind, and following him a hundred or so mourners, dressed as for everyday but processing solemnly, some in tears.

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