Castelmola

The village occupies a steep limestone rock two kilometers and several hundred meters above the coast, reached by a climb that Taormina itself does not require. The site served as an upper acropolis to Greek Tauromenium below it from the late fourth century BC, a relation of height and defense rather than distance: whoever held the summit watched the lower town and the sea beyond it. The Byzantines fortified the rock around 800, and the local leader Costantino Caramalo strengthened the walls against Arab raids in the ninth century, work the Normans later built on when they raised the castle whose ruins still stand.

The medieval plan of stone lanes climbs from the church at the center up toward that castle, the whole village stacked along the one rock rather than spread across it. The result is a place defined by its verticality: a fortress town that grew inward and upward because it had nowhere else to go, and that still looks down on the city it was built to guard.