It would take a braver man than me to claim to have understood how Sicily works. Even understanding that already foreign country of southern Italy doesn't prepare you for the culture shock that is Sicily. Perhaps it's no more than the layering of history upon this island of 5 million inhabitants, the biggest island of the Mediterranean, that makes understanding it so daunting a task.

Sicily has had a complex and long history. While Latin shepherds were thinking about building a city called Rome, while Hellenic Greece basked in its Athenian Golden Age, the people of Sicily - called the Siculi back then - were going about their business. Soon these people were to become a part of Greece, what was known as 'Graecia Magna' and assume entirely Greek identities and culture. Famous Greeks came from here, people like Pythagoras and Diodorus, and today all over Sicily you can see the remnants of this culture, nowhere better expressed than the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. Perfect classical Greek temples abound, surprisingly so, in so seismic a land. After the Greeks came the Romans, then the Saracens, the Normans, the Hohenstaufe Germans, the French, the Spanish for a long time, and lastly the Italian mainlanders.

The island itself is seismic, volcanic, full of extraordinary geothermal and geo-active phenomena, so it's perhaps no wonder that its people are in temperament volatile and explosive. Etna, Europe's biggest volcano, dominates the eastern sea-board of Sicily. It's huge, nearly 150 kilometres in circumference, it's high, it's imposing and above all else, it's active. It spews lava regularly, black basaltic lava that pours from its many craters. White plumes of smoke emit continually from its hundreds of fumeroles, reminding observers that quiet though it is for the moment, violence is not far beneath the surface. White smoke is fine, I was told, yellow smoke is okay too, but if the smoke is blue, run. If there's a sense amongst both Sicilians and Italians that Sicily is really a place apart, then perhaps it can be explained by tectonic plate theory. Sicily lies on the North African plate, while Italy and its toe, Calabria, are on the European plate. Geologically, Sicily is part of Africa.

These two tectonic plates - and two different cultures - meet in the Straits of Messina - that narrow bit of sea between Sicily and Italy's toe. Vicious currents and rip-tides are a feature of this stretch of sea, and the occasional geothermal activity on the fault under the sea serves only to add to the sea's unpredictability. Since ancient times this strait - personified as Scylla and Charybdis - was feared by mariners for its volatility.

There are many Sicilies - the Sicily of literature, of Pirandello, Sciascia and Quasimodo; there's agricultural Sicily that is perhaps the majority of the island; there's intellectual Sicily, long renowned for its academics and philosophers; there's violent Sicily, the Sicily of drug dealers and mafiosi; and there's tourist Sicily, the Sicily with its welcoming face, the Sicily that is centred in Taormina. Taormina has been a tourist haven since it was a resort for the ancient Greeks and Romans, and under the reign of the Bourbon Kings it came to international recognition again in the eighteenth century. Today it hosts five-star hotels, opulent villas owned by international jet-setters and a film festival that rivals Venice. Taormina is beautiful, well-kept, safe and rich. A town of 10,000 inhabitants, it has ten banks and possibly the most beautiful railway station I've ever seen. Let's be clear about this; tourist Sicily is beautiful and welcoming, but it is only one of Sicily's many faces.

Like many southern Italian towns, Taormina is on a hill-top. Whichever way you walk you'll have steps to face in one direction or another. It's main street, the Corso Umberto, has all the shops that the affluent expect to find - Dior, Prada, Max Mara and all the host of Italian designers. There are art galleries and good restaurants, wine boutiques called 'enoteca' and antique shops that have fine antiques at affluent prices. It's a town that wears its wealth lightly and a town that parties late into the night. Even at midnight the streets are filled with young people, walking, shouting or promenading ceaselessly on their noisy Vespas. Uphill from the Corso you come to the Graeco-Roman theatre. Italy is full of Roman theatres, but this one is spectacular. It's big; when it was built it had a capacity of 5,000, an enormous number when you consider there was no amplification. The shape of the auditorium itself was the only help the unaided human voice had - and acoustically its shape is a marvel. But it's position, overlooking the Ionian sea and the summit of Etna, is what raises this theatre to aesthetic heights.

Being on a hill, the town of Taormina is not itself a beach resort. Down by the sea though, there are lidos, beaches and all the usual sea-side trappings. Taormina segues seamlessly into Giardini Naxos. The name means the gardens of Naxos, a name that resonates with Greek heritage. Giardini Naxos has the resort hotels, the three-star hotels of the two-week stay. At first sight you get the impression that this part of Sicily has been colonised again, this time by Germans. The hotels even gear their breakfasts to this newest invasion: you can find smoked cheese, Westphalian ham and gherkins for breakfast, but not a proper cappuccino.

If you're staying in Taormina or Giardini Naxos you may want to try an excursion other than another trip to the beach. Messina isn't far away, so neither is Milazzo and the ferries that take you to the Aeolian islands, named after the Greek god of the winds, Aeolus. This little group of islands lie just to the north of Sicily, about an hour away by ferry, and include the seismically active Stromboli, the picturesque Salina where the film 'Il Postino' was made, the dormant Vulcano, and Lipari, the largest of them. The main town of Lipari, also called Lipari, was aflower with bougainvillaea and blue-flowering Jacaranda trees. In its tiny winding streets we found 'La Trattoria D'Oro', a simple but good restaurant that does what is done so well in Sicily - great fish dishes. We left the restaurant clutching our ice-cold sorbets in our hands to catch the ferry to Vulcano, a smaller island with a population of a mere 500. Most of these inhabitants seemed to be clustered around the tiny port where the ferries dock.

Vulcano has beaches of black volcanic sand and one major tourist feature, it has bubbling mud springs that reek of sulphur, where the hardy (or the foolish) immerse themselves before a refreshing dip in a part of the sea that also bubbles with uprising volcanic gasses. I took one look at the mud-clad revellers and decided to go back to the sign I'd seen offering a scooter for hire for €5. Paolo's scooter emporium, 50 meters from the dock, rented me a shiny red scooter into which I put €10 of petrol. I could have rented a four-wheeler quad, or a peculiar three-wheeled thingy, but I chose to relive my Italian adolescence with a classic scooter. I thought that perhaps two hours would be sufficient to explore the island, but I was wrong. You can explore it twice in two hours. I covered every little road from the north to the south, and once beyond the port there's not a soul on the roads. I disturbed the occasional basking snake on the northern tip, but other than that it was just me, the scream of a tiny engine, and the wind blowing through my hair. Here at least, there's no one to tell you to wear a helmet, so you can just rev away with only your shades for protection. After seeing some spectacular scenery and even riding through the cool cloud that surrounded the volcano's crater, I got my scooter back to Paolo with about €8 worth of petrol still in it two hours later.

But a stay in Taormina can't finish without a trip to see Etna. Just to put things in perspective, the base of Etna covers an area of approximately 620 square miles, or nearly twice the size of County Louth. It's not only very big, it's also high, almost 11,000 feet high, so even though it's as far south as the northern tip of Africa, its summit is covered in snow for much of the year. Its slopes are incredibly fertile, supporting forests, olives and vines. Occasionally these green vistas are interrupted by the black streams of the lava flows. It takes about forty years for lava to become usable soil, but farmers here have learned to hurry the process up by planting sweet chestnuts, whose root systems are strong enough to break down the porous basalt. The upper reaches of the volcano are covered with broom; holy thorn, which is endemic on Etna's slopes; and the Etna violet. The eco-system is fertile enough to support a large colony of rabbits and a direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian dog, which has adapted to survival on Etna by predating on the plentiful rabbits.

We drove the 'Circumetneia', a road that circles the volcano, and drove it until we reached the 2002 lava flow, which cuts across the road for half a kilometre or so. It's still too hot to touch in places, you can feel the warmth coming up through the soles of your shoes and in the very air itself. Pine trees lie dead and brown, surrounded by the lava flow. In some places you can find 'cannon stones', lumps of lava that cooled down around the trunk of a pine. The searing heat burnt away the pine, leaving a cylindrical hole where the tree used to be. Cooling lava flows have another peculiarity, the outside edges and the top form a crust quickly, while the flow continues inside this tube. When it finally finishes, you can be left with a hollow inside the flow. We climbed into one of these, dated 1776 by the robbers who made it their damp and dingy hideaway, and completely failed to see the attraction of speleology. The highest point we reached by four-wheel drive was the rim of an early crater, the Valle del Bove, dating to about 600,000 years ago. Looking down into this now deeply forested circular abyss about five kilometres across, it's hard to believe that cataclysmic events had taken place on this spot.

Sicilians are as superstitious as they are religious. We passed a tiny roadside chapel where twice - yes twice - a lava flow stopped at its walls instead of submerging it under molten rock. A miracle, said our guide. Indeed, like the one close to my Italian home. When they bombed the Abbey of Montecassino in 1944, a bomb fell and failed to detonate right next to the tomb of Saint Benedict. A miracle indeed.

Later that night we dined in 'Case Perrotta', an old farm house on the lower slopes that has been refurbished for agritourism. Like many Sicilian meals, this one followed a little of the Spanish idea of tapas. We were served an antipasto or hors d'oeuvre, and then, while we eating it, a continual supply arrived of different sweetmeats: an artichoke heart, a cube of deep-fried cheese, an extraordinary orange salad, roasted vegetables, cured meats, sheep's cheese. All this before the risottos and the meats. The risotto flavoured with the wild mountain fennel, which we'd tasted earlier at 3,000 feet, was pretty good.

Sicily gets a mere 50 days a years of rain, but if you're in Taormina and you get one, a trip to see some of the hill villages is interesting. We took a trip one morning to Savoca, a small town that was once an important city. It has two points of interest. The first is the Bar Vitelli, run a by a spry old lady who waters her pot-plants, terrace, chairs and tables with equal vigour. It's a charming old world bar, but it might just look a trifle familiar. It was the bar where Al Pacino as Michael Corleone finds the father of his bride to be. I sat at the very table and hummed 'Speak Softly, Love' to whoever would listen. Up the hill from here are the catacombs of the old church, a fascinating window onto the Sicilian way of death. Down in the crypt under the church are the mummies. They're not prime examples of the embalmer's art, much of the flesh has gone, but each part of city life is represented here in death. The notary, the lawyer, the baron, the teacher are all standing there in niches set into the wall, dressed in their clothes of office. Time has taken its toll not only on the flesh of these mummies, but also on their clothing, which is disintegrating. It really is a theatre of the macabre; as much a play in death as once in life these people acted out their allotted parts.

So what of the Sicilians themselves? A proud people, honest and straight, slow to make friends, loyal when they do, and completely unforgiving. Make a mistake here and they won't talk to you for the next five generations. Our host for dinner one night, a man from Naples who has spent sixteen years in Sicily made this point to me. 'In Naples you can joke about 'la camorra' (the Neapolitan equivalent of the mafia) but here you can't even mention la mafia. They close up if you do. It's the big unspoken event.' Like the proverbial elephant in the kitchen that no one notices. One of our guides used the phrase 'the fantasy company' when referring to the mafia in public, so any eavesdropping Sicilians couldn't take offence. The more you hear about the mafia the more it becomes clear that it isn't so much an organisation as a way of life, an attitude to government and authority. For most Sicilians there isn't a choice. If you want to live here, you have to make your accommodations with the mafia.

We did take a drive beyond the boundaries of the tourist haven of the north-east, down south to Syracuse, the ancient Greek capital of the island. From Taormina to Catania you can see the wealth that tourism brings, once south of Catania you're into a different world. Syracuse itself looks as though someone spent money on it once - about 200 years ago - but not a penny since. It's litter-strewn and decrepit, although remnants of grandeur are still discernible beneath its peeling façade. I got a strong feeling of 'otherness' there, a profound sense of being a stranger in a foreign land. But in truth you may be closer to real heart of Sicily here, unvarnished and raw, than in the gentrified north-east. As a visitor, Sicily will confront you with beauty, paradoxes, charm, good food, insular pride and a blessed climate.

Places to eat and drink and things to do.

The DiVino wine bar, just off the Corso Umberto in Taormina is a delight. A fine selection of Sicilian wines and excellent Spanish-style tapas. Friendly and enthusiastic owners make a visit here a must. Piazza Raggia, tel. 094 223996

The Wunderbar on the Corso is a Taormina land-mark. Made famous by Liz Taylor's and Richard Burton's patronage, the bar is all plush velvet, pelmets and modern art on the walls.

La Griglia restaurant on the Corso, good food and professional service.

Etna Discovery. Guided tours by four-wheel drive to the remote and untrafficked parts of Etna. Tel. 095 309648. They can incorporate a meal in Case Perrotta, Sant'Alfio, tel. 095 968928, a refurbished farm house specialising in local produce. The restaurant serves Sicilian specialities in the old wine ware-house.

Rent da Paolo on Vulcano. Hire your two-wheel transport and explore the island. Tel. 098 52112

The Saturday morning market in Giardini Naxos. A great place to buy Sicilian specialities like pistachio nuts, almond paste, dessert wine from Lipari, blood oranges and olives.

How to get there. Premier Sicily are the Sicilian specialists, with direct flights from Dublin to Catania. They can arrange stays in comfortable three-star hotels right up to the opulence of the five-star hotels like the Atlantis Bay. They can also arrrange fly-drive and self-catering holidays for the adventurous.
Tel. 00 353 1 433 1055