The street is built into the steep mountainside,
hence ‘salita’, ‘slope’. It is a wide street of steps –
edged with granite, inlaid with pebbles
and set in cement bordered by brick.
***
From our balcony, there is an impassive,
inscrutable vista of the old town’s
semi-circular, interlocking
clay roof tiles of varying shades of
terracotta and the occasional
Moorish-style chimney – finally
the public gardens’ umbrella pines and
the Ionian Sea becoming sky.
***
At dusk, Arab street sellers climb the steps
slowly, their wares in torn sheets on their backs.
When the street light comes on a gecko appears
on the wall opposite and waits. Each time
a new video appears on the large
plasma screen in Piazza Vittorio
Emanuele walls even here flash blue.
***
Ten thousand residents of Taormina,
two million tourists each year – beginning
with Goethe – and such sounds… the commune’s band
on the Corso Umberto – brass playing
nostalgia, drums braggadocio;
enthusiastic French tourists in step
on the Via Don Bosco; petulant,
throaty Vespas on the narrow ring road;
dogs, out of sight in walled yards or hidden
by oleanders, yelping, baying;
a blackbird’s solitary ‘chook, chook’,
beneath the lemon trees and plumbago
on a neighbouring terrace; a quick bell
rung a dozen times for matins; the cruise ships’
sirens sounding, sounding… Tennesse
and Truman with their paramours laughing
freely on the terrace of the Caffé
Wunderbar; Taylor breaking a guitar
over Burton’s head in the Hotel
San Domenica; D.H. Lawrence
beating up Frieda just down the road from us
in the Villa Vecchia Fontana…
***
We have neighbours: the elegant woman,
opposite, with the basset hound, in a house
with raised grills on the windows and an ornate
wooden door set in an arch of marble;
someone, whom we never see, in the apartment
above, who whistles Vivaldi on the stairs;
in the apartment below, the Arab traders
smoking hash, talking quietly into the night –
their tee-shirts and cut-offs on an airer
outside their front door to dry in the dark;
the elderly owner of the Summer
Bazaar near the beach, who complains of Africans
selling their wares on the gritty sand,
and climbs down eighty steps and back each day
to descend and rise in the Funivia;
the beautiful girl, who, each morning
walks down to work at the alimentari
on the Via Timeo beside
the ruins of the Roman theatre…
***
A cloud burst brings water centimetres deep –
and laden with particles of pumice
from the mountain – cascading down the steps.
‘Giafari’ is a variant of
‘jafar’, Arabic for stream. Below us,
by the Arco Dei Cappucini,
a fountain flows from the rock – and watching
over us on the mountain’s edge are
the shrine to the Madonna of the Rock
and the walls of the Saracens’ Castle.
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By David Selzer