Enit and Taobuk together to promote a project to rediscover the city in the wake of literature, art and cinema.
It is “Taormina Cult”: a cultural circuit in 21 stages that trace the footsteps of writers, artists and intellectuals from all over the world and from every era. A complex mosaic of history, images, anecdotes and ideas, made of precious pieces that have the face of the Nobel Prize winners and the great protagonists of history. Like Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway.
And still directors, thinkers and novelists, dazzled by the vision of a place that Alexandre Dumas described with a word: “ecstasy”.
If Sicily, to put it with Bufalino, suffers from an “excess of identity”, Taormina, for its part, summarizes them all, finding an irreproducible synthesis of that Mediterranean centrality that makes the Island a “hinged over the centuries between the great Western culture and the temptations of the desert and the sun, between reason and magic, the climate of feeling and the heat of passion”. To discuss her genius loci means to realize how great is the debt that Taormina has contracted with the artists, travelers, writers who have dreamed, loved, frequented.
Taormina, not a Sicilian city, but a synthesis of all the cities of Sicily, is the gateway to the Mediterranean. Place of choice for immortal icons such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Remembering this osmosis between the imposing intangible heritage and the mission of the Festival, Mario Vargas Llosa defined El milagro de Taobuk the transformation of the city on the occasion of the five-day literary, when its streets, the beautiful medieval palaces, The hotels that have filled the social news from the Belle Époque to the present day, the cafes and squares symbol of the unforgettable Dolce Vita season come alive to welcome the events and the audience of the Festival.
Taormina Cult is a journey through the symbolic places that bring the whole world to Taormina, and Taormina in the world.
The Grand Hotel Timeo had guests Thomas Mann, Kaiser Guglielmo II, Richard Wagner, Jacqueline Kennedy but also Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo and Leonardo Sciascia. Piazza IX Aprile in whose bars spent the days Truman Capote, Winston Churchill, Michelangelo Antonioni and Vitaliano Brancati. Casa Cuseni who saw Tennessee Williams, Pablo Picasso, Bertrand Russel and D.H. Lawrence go through his rooms. The Hotel San Domenico was the stage of masterful performances and the real stage of the Greek Theatre, on which were honored, among others, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Lawrence Olivier, Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich. A precious plot of places, public and private, through the invisible thread of the lives of the great icons of the past that in these alleys, palaces and villas stayed, between attempts to escape in anonymity, search for inspiration and refuge from scandals.
