Belmond Grand Hotel Timeo

Belmond Grand Hotel Timeo

Grand Hotel Timeo is the original hotel in Taormina, opened in 1873 in what was then a nobleman's residence, and it sits right in the historic centre with the Greek Theatre on one side and the six-acre gardens on the other. The gardens have their own history: they were originally laid out by Lady Florence Trevelyan, an Englishwoman exiled to Sicily following a scandal at the court of Queen Victoria, who fell in love with a Sicilian doctor and spent the rest of her life here. The views from the hotel take in the Ionian Sea, the medieval town's terracotta rooftops, and Mount Etna, all at once, and the rooms have private balconies or terraces so you are looking at all of this whether you want to or not. The hotel has had a serious guest list over the years: Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who liked it so much he rented the entire hotel for a month. The rooms are decorated with antique furnishings and period artworks and the Sicilian Neo-Classical bones of the building are intact. If you are considering a suite, the ones in Villa Timeo, the adjacent building, are worth the step up. The Michelin-starred restaurant Otto Geleng is named after the 19th-century Prussian painter whose watercolours of Etna essentially put Taormina on the European map in the 1860s, which is a good story. The Literary Terrace bar is the place for an evening drink, with views over the sea that have been making people stay longer than planned since the hotel opened. For the beach, a free shuttle runs down to Villa Sant'Andrea at the waterfront, where guests of both hotels have full access to the private beach and facilities. The short version: The town hotel to Villa Sant'Andrea's waterfront option. If you want to be in the middle of Taormina with the best view in Sicily from your terrace, this is it.