Sizzling Sicily puts on a show

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.

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.

The street is the quietest I’ve known it. Most of the shops turn off their lights, others close their shutters. For a moment the place is a community again, a single body that feels every individual wound as its own. But then the corpse is gone, past the cable-car station, down the hill to the cemetery, in the direction of the shingle beach at Mazzaro, whereupon the shops reopen and the tourist buzz resumes.

There isn’t much to do in the Taormina heat except sit and watch the human parade: the brown-legged girls, the older Italian men with their jackets draped loosely on their shoulders, not quite overflowing like Etna but demonstrative all the same. This is fine by us. Most days we take a front-row seat at Mocambo, in Piazza IX Aprile, order water and panini, or maybe cannoli (inordinately phallic pistachio-and-marsala-flavoured fried pastry delicacies spilling sweet ricotta cheese, of which I cannot eat too many), and wait for the town’s most popular street musicians to strike up - a guitarist and a mandolin player, the latter with a face at once melancholy and insolent, like the music he plays, Neapolitan most of it, pulling at the heartstrings one moment, mocking the next.

When we’ve been torn from Sorrento more times than we can bear, we leave our seats and drop down to one of the beach resorts below: Mazzaro, which is pretty enough if you want to walk on pebbles, or Giardini-Naxos with its endless rows of recliners for hire and a long, ugly shopping strip that makes you long for Clacton. And there is the Greek theatre to visit, of course - a magnificent eagle’s nest of an auditorium, a great sweeping arc of terracing hewn from rock.

They are preparing for a happening the evening we’re there, but it’s strictly local - something a school is putting on - and nobody will tell us whether we can watch or not. A couple of lighting engineers cut us completely. People at the office pretend not to understand.

I have encountered this hostility in Italy before when asking about an event Italians would rather you didn’t attend. Partly - to put the best gloss on it - it’s because they can’t imagine we’d be truly interested. This might be why, for example, there is no information posted anywhere a tourist might see it about the festival of San Pancrazio, the first bishop of Tauromenium (as Taormina then was) and subsequently the patron saint of Taormina and Giardini-Naxos. Apparently, the procession climaxes in an effigy of Pancrazio being taken out to sea and then I don’t know what. Burnt? Crucified?

I’m glad of it. I wish there to be something here of which I am not welcome to be a part. The more especially when the event at the Greek theatre they were so secretive about proves to be a primary school production of Giselle performed by tots in Lurex tutus.

One day I wander out the back of town in search of Lawrence’s old house. I am touched to find there is a Via David Herbert Lawrence. In this country he is all but forgotten, in Taormina he has his own street. And his own accommodation facility, too - a ceramic plaque proclaiming David Lawrence Bed and Breakfast. Seeing me taking photographs, a small round Italian in a red shirt tells me the bed and breakfast belongs to him and that he named it after the “scrittore inglese”.

“Sono scrittore,” I tell him, stupidly. He shakes my hand and points out Lawrence’s actual house further up the hill. A worn plaque marks the spot. DH Lawrence lived here - 1920-23. Poor Lawrence. Don’t ask me why I think that, I just do. A mandolin couldn’t have upset me more. I try to see the garden where the snake disturbed him at his water trough, “On a hot, hot day and I in pyjamas for the heat”. But it’s built over now. The view to the sea remains, however, and the hazy coastline of Calabria, and, of course, always, always, “Etna smoking”.

Howard Jacobson travelled as a guest of Seasons in Style. His new novel, The Act of Love, will be published by Jonathan Cape on September 18

TRAVEL BRIEF

Getting there: the nearest airport is Catania, 30 miles from Taormina. Fly there nonstop with British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com), Air Malta (020 7660 0188, www.airmalta.com ), Thomsonfly (www.thomsonfly.com ) or FlyThomasCook (www.flythomascook.com ).

Where to stay: in Taormina, the San Domenico Palace (00 39-0942 613111, www.thi-hotels.com ) has doubles from £229 low season, £307 high season. It occupies a former Dominican monastery: plush rooms with superb views. Or try the Villa Belvedere (0942 23791, www.villabelvedere.it ; off-season doubles from £95).

Tour operators: Seasons in Style (01244 202000, www.seasonsinstyle.com ) has seven nights at the San Domenico Palace from £1,020pp, with B&B accommodation, flights from Gatwick to Catania with BA, and transfers. Or try Citalia (0871 200 2004, www.citalia.com ), Simpson Travel (020 8392 5858, www.simpsontravel.com ) or Holiday Options (0844 477 0451, www.holiday options.co.uk ).

TOP SPOTS FOR LAVA LOVERS

STROMBOLI, Italy Off the north coast of Sicily, just 70 miles from Etna as the lava bomb flies, Stromboli has been lighting up the night sky since Roman times. It’s a tough two-hour trek up from the island’s shore to the crater, but you’re rewarded with a succession of thunderous gas explosions. In theory, at least, a guide is compulsory (there are plenty near the hydrofoil stop) and should cost about £20. Fly to Palermo with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ), from where Ustica Lines (www.usticalines.it ) runs a summer ferry to the island.

FOGO, Cape Verde islands There aren’t many volcanoes where people actually live in the caldera, but that’s the reality in this remote speck in the Atlantic Ocean. The inhabitants of the lava-block village of Cha das Calderas live in a moonscape of black ash and smoking fumaroles, but manage to grow some excellent wines and greet visitors with a gracious smile. Explore (0845 013 1537, www.explore.co.uk ) has a 12-day tour, spending two nights in the village, from £1,749, including flights.

KILAUEA, Hawaii There are three active volcanoes on Big Island, but this is the youngest, and most effusive - its lava flows down to the sea, adding a little more land every day. Drive on Highway 130 to see the superheated steam blasting into the air as the molten rock hits the water; go there at dusk to see the ominous red glow from the lava making its way down the mountain. United (www.unitedairlines.co.uk) flies to Honolulu from about £620.

MOUNT HEKLA, Iceland The entire island is formed from lava that has gushed up over the millennia. Hekla is the most active peak, and as recently as 2000 a lethal pyroclastic flow gushed down the mountain. Even in calmer times, hot springs bubble and fumes gush from vents on the plateau. Discover the World (01737 218800, www.discover-the-world.co.uk) has a seven-day, self-drive trip taking in Hekla, from £1,213 including flights.

MOUNT BROMO, Indonesia It may not have the fiery drama of some but it beats them all for atmosphere: the sun rising through the plume is one of the greatest sights in Asia. Imaginative Traveller (0845 077 8802, www.imaginative-traveller.co.uk ) includes an ascent on its 14-day tour, plus Java and Bali, from £485, not including flights.