At Taormina one may linger long. The pure, inspiriting air of its lofty plateau, and the unequaled beauty of the prospect which it commands, would alone be sufficient to stay the hurried footsteps of even the most time-pressed of "globe-trotters"; but those who combine a love of scenery with a taste for archæology and the classical antique will find it indeed a difficult place to leave. For, a little way above the town, and in the center of an exquisite landscape stand the magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater, its auditorium, it is true, almost leveled with the plain, but more perfect as to the remains of its stage and proscenium than any other in Sicily, and, with one exception, in the world. But there is no need to be a scholar or an antiquarian to feel the extraordinary fascination of the spot. Nowhere among all the relics of bygone civilizations have Time and Nature dealt more piously with the work of man. Every spring and summer that have passed over those mouldering columns and shattered arches have left behind them their tribute of clasping creeper and clambering wild flower and softly draping moss. Boulder and plinth in common, the masonry alike of Nature and of man, have mellowed into the same exquisite harmony of greys and greens; and the eye seeks in vain to distinguish between the handiwork of the Great Mother and those monuments of her long-dead children which she has clothed with an immortality of her own. Apart, however, from the indescribable charm of its immediate surroundings, the plateau of the theater must fix itself in the memory of all who have entered Sicily by way of Messina as having afforded them their first "clear" view of Etna, their first opportunity, that is to say, of looking at the majestic mountain unintercepted at any point of its outline or mass by objects on a lower level. The whole panorama indeed from this point is magnificent. To the left, in the foreground, rise the heights of Castiglione from the valley of the Alcantara; while, as the eye moves round the prospect from left to right, it lights in succession on the hermitage of S. Maria della Rocca, the Castle of Taormina, the overhanding hill of Mola, and Monte Venere towering above it. But, dominating the whole landscape, and irresistibly recalling to itself the gaze which wanders for a moment to the nearer chain of mountains or the blue Calabrian hills across the Strait, arises the never-to-be-forgotten pyramid of Etna, a mountain unrivaled in its combination of majesty and grace, in the soft symmetry of its "line," and the stern contrast between its lava-scarred sides, with their associations of throe and torture, and the eternal peace of its snow-crowned head. It will be seen at a closer view from Catania, and, best of all, on the journey from that place to Syracuse; but the first good sight of it from Taormina, at any rate when weather and season have been favorable, is pretty sure to become an abiding memory.