Mountain Magic

There's something fascinating for me at the thought of living up high on a mountain, in a remote village where everyone knows each other and the only contact you have with the outside world is the occasional tourist that dares to venture so far up.

I experienced this feeling a few days ago when I visited Taormina with my family. Taormina is a tourist destination, a bustling village up high on a mountain range in North-Eastern Sicily. We took the easy way up, a cable car, which landed us two corners away from a busy road full of ice-cream shops, souvenir vendors and the like. Up here, the drop in ambient temperature is immediately noted as you get out of the cable car. Amongst all those tourists, however, the village looked nothing different from any other famous place around the world. Yet, there was still something magical floating around the place.

As we walked the busy streets, we passed by three different churches, all of which had marriages going on at the time. There were people dressed up in suits and gowns outside and a lot of tourists taking pictures of the bride and groom as they walked down the isle and then out of the door into the plaza. Marriages in Taormina seemed to be idyllic since as we walked back down the same roads later on in the day there were yet other marriages taking place still. Maybe they all felt that magic in the air.

Further up the road we came to a large open area with a balcony hanging from the hillside. From here I could see the beaches down billow and the red houses dotting the landscape, becoming denser as you moved towards the coast. From up here it seemed as if there lives were different from the lives of the people around this place. It was as if the people living down there were temporally stuck in an unreachable place.
There were so many questions rushing through my head as I looked down at the sea and the waves and surf left by the boats. How did they build up here? or who was the first person to decide to settle here? It was all very fascinating.

This feeling, somewhat magical, I am trying to describe has come to me each time I went up on mountain ranges. I felt it in Italy, in Spain and in Switzerland and now it happened to me again in Sicily. I am not very fond of heights, yet, when my feet are on the ground but I know I'm above the rest of the world I feel ecstatic. Call me a mountain dweller, or a crazy man with Heidi's syndrome, but I know I'll be visiting some other mountain very soon.