Dawn coast ... reflections of the simple life in ancient Syracuse.Credit: iStock
Sicilians have never let death spoil a good party. Every day at the monastery in Savoca you can find a gathering of nobles, all dressed in their top hats, robes, buckled shoes and corduroy suits. They stoop and grin and wring their papery hands. The only odd thing about this particular get-together is that everyone's been dead for more than 130 years. Everyone, that is, except their curator, an Indian in an exquisite lilac sari.
"They were all mummified in salt," she says fondly, "then washed in vinegar and put back in their clothes." But no one seems to know how they died, what they are doing here, or why they are on show to curious visitors.
From its imponderable monastery, Savoca spreads out along a mountain ridge. Every now and then, bits of it tumble off the precipice into the valley below (as happened to the church in 1880). The streets are too narrow for the 20th century and Mount Etna is always there, a distant cone of purple and smoke. It's eight years since the last fireballs but there's no saying what's to come.
In some ways, Savoca is like Sicily in summary: poor, scruffy, magnificent and fleetingly sinister. Small wonder it was used as a setting in The Godfather, in 1971. Little has changed. The Bar Vitelli has the same fly-screen made of horse whips and there are still death notices plastered up the street. Naturally, in this stupendous world of armoured trees and vertical deserts, humans have always looked endangered.
As elsewhere, most of the villagers have long since fled, building new lives in Sydney and Caracas (in one year alone, 20 per cent of Sicilians left). As for the Savocesi that remain, they are tough and suspicious. Here, the service is deadpan and prices sharp. Forget the charm and exuberance of Umbria. Beautiful though it may be, this is Italy's ragged edge.
I thought about this a lot as I drove up and down the east coast. These were unforgettable journeys. Here, high above the sea, was the entire story of Sicily, told in rocks: there were Roman temples; Byzantine churches; Arab and Norman castles; Spanish palaces; flashy fascist villas; and then the Nazis' last resorts. At times, it seemed as if everyone had run Sicily, except the Sicilians themselves.
Sometimes, the mountains just stopped, dropping into a void fringed with black sand and surf. In other places, vast gouts of lava – the texture of burned bread – had rolled through the scrub before exploding on the shore. The weather, too, could throw tantrums of biblical ferocity.
Once, I found myself in a blizzard of hailstones the size of mothballs and then – a few hours later – summer was restored. This is the Sicily that the writers (Goethe, Waugh and Capote) all loved. Here, wrote D.H. Lawrence, "is the dawn coast of Europe".
Not surprisingly, they had all headed for Taormina. It has been pulling in the crowds for more than 2500 years. The Greeks were the first to make a virtue of its improbability. Taormina looks as though it is mounted on a buttress, 275 metres high.
Most of the streets are stepped and everything ends in a chasm. As if this wasn't enough, the Greeks topped it off with a theatre, which has functioned ever since.
Amid such drama, Taormina seemed to sidestep reality. The fruit was made of marzipan and the shops sold either designer wear or crossbows. It also had a park full of little palaces for hobbits and the waiters all looked like insurgents.
But their food was perfect and my favourite eatery was Gambero Rosso.
Even my hotel, the San Pietro, was like the set for a play. The library was full of English newspapers and the waiters wore tuxedoes. I half-expected to find a deer park stretching out from the back but, instead, beyond the pool there was nothing.
Nothing except The Bay of the Beautiful Island, several hundred feet below. From here, I set off for the volcanoes to the north. From the mainland, the Aeolian Islands look like an archipelago of teeth. Sheer and exposed, only seven of them – "the sisters" – are inhabited. They have been an unruly brood.
Vulcano (where my hydrofoil was heading) only burst out of the sea 90,000 years ago and still hisses and grunts with life. Meanwhile, Stromboli, the youngest, still spews out 570 cubic metres of lava every day.
All this had made my fellow-passengers a hardy breed. They travelled with tyres and tractor parts and furniture wrapped in plastic.
Their ancestors originally came to mine obsidian (for Europe's first knives) but since then they have been surviving droughts, ash, lava bombs and earthquakes. Understandably, the population (12,600) has halved since 1911 but those remaining are more phlegmatic than ever. Many still fish from open skiffs and – on Stromboli – they live in tiny cubic houses, all the better for riding out the tremors.
Such "work in progress" ought to make the islands ugly and yet it doesn't. Once, I clambered up Vulcano's Gran Cratere and discovered that the newly cast Aeolians are actually ribboned in greenery: vineyards, almond groves and brilliant plateaus covered in tiny farms.
It's the landscape of some unforgettable films, including Stromboli and Il Postino.
But perhaps the best view of all was that from my hotel. The Therasia Resort was built on a headland that had only surfaced in 183BC and looks out over all the other islands. But the real trick is in the design. Infinity pools, limestone floors and driftwood forms all conspire together to create the illusion of calm.
I was so entranced that I did what I've never done before and stayed an extra day. Before leaving, I joined a boat trip around the islands. The captain had a Russian girlfriend and every time we stopped, she plunged off the bridge like a gannet. It was an extraordinary voyage.
Occasionally, we had an escort of dolphins, and then, at one point, the sea seemed to boil as we sailed across an underwater vent. Oddest of all was Stromboli. It's a perfect cone, 915 metres high, with a temporary town and a beach as black as ink. As darkness fell, we could see that the summit was glowing, a sure sign of the unfinished business within. For my last few days, I travelled south to Syracuse. It was like a journey through a very old painting, rich with grandeur and decay.
I stayed in a mansion, Villa Politi, on the edge of a quarry now overgrown with lemon trees and figs. With its stone, the ancient Greeks had built the greatest city in the world and although Syracuse was sacked in AD878, much of the splendour remains.
There's a vast temple (now the cathedral), an amphitheatre and a theatre (where Plato and Archimedes enjoyed some of the first comedies ever staged). But much, too, has gone, buried under subsequent cities. Even the present version is now artfully crumbling away.
There are whole streets of mansions boarded up and palaces for pigeons. Everything is honeyed with age, and even the two old prostitutes on the harbour look like Caravaggio's subjects. Yes, luxury yachts call by and there are signs of scaffolding and gingham.
But, for now, Syracuse is still sleeping off the glory days and in a permanent state of dusk.
My hotel, too, had absorbed some of this ancient inertia. Every night, there were large sombre parties in the ballroom.
In all the hair oil and black suits, it was hard to know if these were weddings or wakes. Perhaps that's just the way Sicily is: alive or dead, the carnival goes on.
TRIP NOTES
Emirates flies daily to Dubai and on to Rome, see emirates.com/au/english/
Alitalia flies to major Sicilian cities, see alitalia.com.
Citalia offers the five-star Hotel San Domenico Palace, Taormina, from £110 ($219) a person a night, and the five-star Hotel Therasia, Vulcano, from £105 a person a night. Phone + 0871 664 0253, see citalia.com.
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