Giardini Naxos

Giardini-Naxos is a seaside resort town on Sicily’s eastern coast, set in a small protected bay at the foot of Taormina. Framed by the Ionian Sea, green hills, Monte Tauro and Castelmola, it has the character of a coastal town where summer life gathers along the waterfront, but its identity reaches far beyond its modern resort atmosphere.

The town is closely tied to the beginnings of Greek Sicily. Ancient Naxos was founded in 734 BC by Chalcidian settlers from Euboea and is identified as the first Greek colony on the island, a place where Greek civilisation first took root in the West. Later sources also preserve the older local expression “borgo delli giardini”, a reminder of the name from which modern Giardini-Naxos developed.

Today, its distinctiveness lies in this meeting of sea and origin story: a lively Ionian town whose landscape is inseparable from Taormina above it, and whose name still carries the memory of Sicily’s earliest Greek foundation.