A day trip to Taormina from Catania by bus

Taormina is one hour from Catania. Bus, train or car, all three work, and the whole day fits between a late breakfast and a late dinner without you having to book anything.

I didn't have a car, so this is the version of the day trip you do with a ticket in your pocket and nothing else planned. If you've done Cefalù from Palermo, it's the same kind of day.

Same setup as the rest of the summer: the Fujifilm X-E5 with the XF 23mm f/2.8 R WR, plus a K&F Concept black diffusion 1/4 screwed on the front and left there all day.

One thing to know before you plan the day: Taormina sits high on the hillside and the sun goes down behind it, on the land side. The town keeps its light until late, and the cove underneath tips into shade earlier. Worth knowing whether you're after light for photographs or a few hours of sun on the beach.

Take the bus, not the train

The bus leaves from the central bus station in Catania, next to the main train station, and drops you at the terminal in Taormina, up at the top, a few minutes' walk from the old town. You get off and you're already there.

The train looks equivalent on a map and isn't. The station is Taormina-Giardini, down at sea level, well below the town, so you either wait for another bus to take you up or you walk, and the walk is longer and steeper than it sounds when you're reading about it in a café in Catania. It's doable. It's just a transfer you don't need.

One hour, direct, and you can sit on the sea side going out. The coast road runs above the water most of the way, and if you keep the camera on your lap instead of in the bag you get the Ionian sea, the lemon groves and Etna going past the window. I didn't keep any of those frames. Good warm up anyway.

The old town

Taormina is built on a shelf halfway up the hill, so the streets are flat but everything around them drops away. You walk down Corso Umberto, the main axis, past the shops and the churches and the small piazzas, and every so often a gap opens on the right and the whole bay is laid out underneath you: the beach, the water, the coastline running south toward Catania.

Those gaps are where I spent most of my time. They're a specific kind of frame: dark stone in the foreground, a very bright bay behind it, eight or nine stops apart. Expose for the sea and the arch goes black, expose for the arch and the water blows out. I let the highlights go and kept the shadows readable.

The town itself is pretty the way these places are pretty, stone, shutters, bougainvillea, and it's crowded in summer because everyone else also read that it was worth an hour of their day. Two streets off the Corso it calms down. The side lanes go up or down, never flat, so you get staircases, laundry, cats and a lot of vertical frames, and that's the part of town that still works at midday, because the walls are close enough together to throw real shade.

Gelato and lunch

Then you eat. Taormina has more restaurants per square metre than it has any right to and a gelato place at every corner. Sit down somewhere with a terrace and take the two hours, so the hot part of the afternoon passes while you're not walking through it.

Isola Bella

Isola Bella is the part I'd come back for. A small cove below the town, with a tiny island sitting just off the shore, close enough that a thin strip of pebbles links the two when the water is low. The beach is directly underneath, all pebbles, no sand, tucked into the rock on both sides.

Bring water shoes. There are a lot of rocks and stones in the water and they're slippery, and the difference between a nice swim and ten minutes of careful hopping on one foot is a five euro pair of plastic shoes.

The cove tips into shade progressively through the late afternoon, because the sun sets behind Taormina on the land side. Go earlier and you'll have plenty of sun on the pebbles. Arrive at the end of the day like I did and you'll find the beach half lit, then not lit at all, which turned out fine.

For photographs the shade works like a huge soft box. The cliff kills the direct sun, the light arrives bounced off the sky and off the water, and everything on the beach sits in even, low contrast light while the sea a hundred metres out is still bright. Skin tones behave, the pebbles keep their texture instead of turning into white glare, and you can shoot people without waiting for someone to step out of a hard shadow. The rock face above goes a warm grey, and the island stays half lit for a while after the beach has gone dark. That edge, lit island against shaded cove, is what I kept shooting.

The shade also costs you two or three stops, so this is where the day stops being an f/8 day. Wide open at f/2.8, ISO climbing, and the fast lens you carried around all afternoon finally does something. It's where the diffusion filter starts showing too: the bright water behind the swimmers is the only hard light left in the frame, and it blooms exactly where you want it to.

Swim, walk the strip out toward the island, come back, swim again. Nobody is in a hurry and the beach empties slowly.

The recipe

Essenza, by Emanuele De Luca, the same photographer behind Last Summer Roll. SOOC JPEG, nothing done afterwards.

It's built on Pro Neg. Hi, which sounds wrong for a summer day and works. Pro Neg. Hi is a portrait simulation: it holds skin tones without pushing them orange, and it has more contrast than Pro Neg. Std without going near the crushed blacks of Classic Chrome. Color sits at +3 with both Color Chrome settings on Strong, so blues and reds get dense while the rest stays restrained. The sea reads deep instead of electric, and the bright colours on a beach stay readable instead of clipping into flat blocks.

The tone curve is the part that earns its place on this trip. Highlights at -2 protects the water and the white stone in the middle of the day, Shadows at +1 keeps some bite in the alleys, and DR400 gives you the latitude for those backlit gaps on the Corso. Grain is off and Sharpness is at 0, which suits the diffusion filter: the softness comes from the glass, not from the file.

Essenza Fujifilm film recipe settings

Getting back

When you've had enough you climb back up to the road and take the same bus in the other direction. An hour later you're in Catania, in time for dinner.

The one thing worth planning is the split between the top and the bottom. The town holds its light until the end of the day and the cove doesn't, so give Isola Bella the hours you actually want on the beach and keep the town for the rest.