Grand Hotel Timeo

At the top of Corso Umberto, where Taormina's main street gives out at the gate of the ancient theatre, a drive turns into the gardens of the Grand Hotel Timeo. The hotel and the Greek theatre share a boundary wall. Francesco La Floresta opened the house in 1873, the first hotel in Taormina, and named it after Timaeus, the historian born in the Greek colony of Tauromenion in the fourth century BC.

History

Taormina in the 1870s was a stop for painters and classicists rather than a resort, and La Floresta's hotel began as a modest house of a few rooms. The German painter Otto Geleng, who settled in the town in the 1860s and whose canvases of the theatre and Etna drew northern Europeans south, gives his name to the hotel's restaurant. The La Floresta family enlarged the building over the following decades as the town filled with winter visitors. The guest book of the 20th century reads like a literary index: D.H. Lawrence, who lived in Taormina between 1920 and 1922, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Greta Garbo among them. In 2010 Orient-Express Hotels, renamed Belmond in 2014, bought the Timeo together with Villa Sant'Andrea on the bay of Mazzarò below the town. Belmond passed to LVMH in 2019.

Architecture and design

The hotel is a long ochre building on terraces cut into the hillside, about 200 metres above the Ionian Sea, with the garden falling away in steps of cypress, palm and bougainvillea. Interiors keep to a 19th-century register: patterned tile floors, painted ceilings, tall shuttered windows, Sicilian ceramics and antique prints. The Literary Terrace, which runs the length of the façade, frames Etna on one side and the bay of Naxos on the other, and is the best-known room in the house despite having no roof.

Rooms and suites

The Timeo has about 70 rooms and suites, divided between the main house and a villa in the garden. Most look to the sea and to Etna; several open directly onto the garden. The largest suites occupy corners of the upper floors with private terraces, and the rooms in the garden villa are the quietest.

Dining

Otto Geleng, the restaurant on the terrace, holds a Michelin star and seats a handful of tables outdoors above the bay, in the evening only and in season. The main restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner with Sicilian cooking. The Literary Terrace & Bar serves through the day, and a bar by the pool opens in summer.

Wellness

The pool sits in the lower garden with the same view as the terrace. The spa has treatment rooms, a sauna and a steam bath. Guests may use the private beach of Villa Sant'Andrea at Mazzarò, reached by the hotel shuttle.

Weddings and events

The Timeo hosts weddings and private dinners, with ceremonies in the garden and receptions on the terrace or in the garden villa. A small number of rooms serve for meetings. The ancient theatre next door is used by the town for concerts and for the Taormina Film Fest in June, which fills the hotel early in summer.

Location

Of the luxury hotels in Taormina, the Timeo is the only one with the Teatro Antico as a neighbour, at the eastern end of Corso Umberto. Catania airport is about an hour's drive. Taormina-Giardini station lies at the foot of the hill, 15 minutes by taxi, and the cable car to the beaches at Mazzarò leaves from Via Pirandello above the town. The summit craters of Etna are about 90 minutes by car.