On playing football with the Boys of Taormina…
I have never been attracted to German boys. They can be among the most beautiful, but the language itself has always struck me as cold and harsh. Yet Severin, from Bremen, changed all that. He has been with me for a week now, sleeping beside me in the small hotel on Via Don Giovanni Bosco. Alfio, the receptionist, seemed rather taken with him and turned a blind eye when I asked whether Severin could stay until he got settled. His new job as a waiter has been delayed for another week, though the restaurant promised that his room would soon be ready.

I learned that Severin had a boyfriend, a Spaniard called Estaban, who had remained behind in Turin. He spent a great deal of time on the phone to him, usually trying to reassure him that, although he was sharing a bed with another guy, nothing had happened.

That was partly true. We had both once been Pietro’s “boys”, and there was a reluctance on either side to go where a dead man had already been. It was as though Pietro still maintained some hold over us; we might almost have been brothers, and anything sexual felt faintly incestuous. Yet every morning, when I woke, I would find Severin with his arm draped around me, cuddling, it seemed, with someone he trusted.

Severin is easy to be around: always a few steps behind me wherever I go, yet never overstaying his welcome. He has told me much about his homeland, where his father taught at the University of Bremen and his mother at the University of the Arts. Bremen, he said enthusiastically, was a working-class city that had built its fortune on its port and shipyards — a fact not lost on the Allies during the Second World War, when the city was heavily bombed.

After leaving school, Severin worked at Beck’s Brewery, but was dismissed after being caught having sex with a fellow worker on the bottling line. His abrupt departure prompted him to travel across Europe, eventually ending up in Turin, where he met Pietro and became, in effect, a kept man.

Pietro had obviously singled Severin out for his Nordic looks — a twenty-first century vision of the Aryan “master race”: blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin. There was also the fact that Severin was athletic, and a devoted supporter of Werder Bremen.

Severin discovered that I too liked football and had once played competitively when I was younger. That discovery prompted him to buy a cheap football and seek out a patch of wasteland where we could have a kickabout. Before long, local boys began drifting over to join in, and soon we found ourselves playing fierce, high-intensity matches, with slabs of concrete serving as goalposts.

It became an Italo-Anglo-German affair, proof that football can be loved by everyone, regardless of nationality. Alas, the Italian boys put Severin and me to shame; too many years of smoking, drinking, and inactivity had rendered us ineffective against the tireless boys of Taormina. But it made me feel like a young boy again – innocent and carefree.

The focus is the big phallus…
Alfio had a night off and promised to take us to Castelmola, a picturesque medieval hilltop village perched directly above Taormina. “It will be the perfect night for you guys,” he said with a wink, though it seemed more likely that he fancied his chances with Severin, who remained entirely oblivious to his advances.

Alfio ordered a taxi, and a journey that should have taken ten minutes was completed in half the time. The dusty Mercedes hurtled up the steep, narrow, winding road, revealing breathtaking glimpses of Mount Etna and the Ionian coast below.

We arrived in a small square, from which Alfio led us up a short flight of stone steps into Bar Turrisi. Judging by the greetings he received, he appeared to know everyone there.

Alfio explained that Castelmola had grown around the ruins of a tenth-century Norman castle, its streets narrow, ancient, and full of charm. Bar Turrisi, however, was something else entirely. Opened after the war and passed down through generations, it was said to have been founded by descendants of families who had migrated centuries earlier from Pompeii, bringing with them the city’s ribald fertility symbols. The restaurant, Alfio told us with evident delight, still celebrated that inheritance.

At first, the significance of this escaped both Severin and me, but we soon understood. Across all four storeys, there were penises everywhere one looked: wall paintings, well-endowed statues, phallic liquor bottles, shot glasses, lamps, mirrors, even the plumbing fixtures above the bathroom sinks. The food menu itself was shaped like a penis.

“I knew you would be impressed,” Alfio said, guiding us towards a table overlooking Taormina below. “The people here never wanted to be part of Taormina. They value their independence. But Castelmola was founded to watch over and protect the town.” Unfortunately, night was already beginning to fall, and the views slowly disappeared. The blue sea darkened into a black mass, though the lights of Taormina still sparkled beneath us.

“They filmed The White Lotus at the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Taormina,” Alfio told us. “The cast used to come here regularly. They started calling this place ‘the penis bar’.”

Alfio ordered a Sicilian pizza, its ingredients largely a mystery to me apart from the cheese, though it tasted wonderful. We washed it down with a local almond wine, supposedly an aphrodisiac, which Alfio clearly hoped might improve his chances with Severin. As for me, I seemed excluded from his ambitions, though he nevertheless ordered another bottle — this one in a distinctly phallic shape, decorated with traditional Sicilian artwork — and insisted that I drink a generous amount of it.

As my stupor deepened, I found myself wondering how one might write about an overdose of penises without making it sound tacky — which, strangely enough, it was not. “They are symbols of sexual potency and fertility,” Alfio explained smugly, once again for Severin’s benefit, “and also of the virility of Sicilian men.” Severin, meanwhile, remained blissfully unaware of the attention directed at him.

It was only when yet another bottle of almond wine appeared, and Alfio insisted that I finish most of it, that I finally grasped his strategy: get me drunk enough, and he might have Severin to himself. By then, however, it was too late for me to do much about it.

The next morning I woke with a punishing hangover, Severin’s arm once again draped around me. My head throbbed, and Severin seemed in no hurry to wake himself. Still, I managed a smile. Alfio’s attempt to seduce him had failed.

On hearing a story that amused me…but shouldn’t have
At a restaurant in Taormina, an old man told us the story of his brother, Salvatore, who, back in 1958, had been abandoned by the woman he was supposed to marry. The humiliation drove him into such despair that he swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. He was taken to hospital in Syracuse, where, still determined to end his life, he hurled himself from a window — only to land on a balcony below. Bruised but alive, he was carried back upstairs. Three hours later, he climbed to the very same window and jumped again. This time he missed the balcony and died.

“Oh,” I laughed awkwardly, “third time lucky.”

The old man responded by banging his walking stick sharply against the table, which suggested that my attempt at humour had not been appreciated.

On not upsetting a Sicilian…
“The Cosa Nostra is still active in Sicily,” Alfio told us. “But these days it is discreet. Drugs, the pizzo, infiltrating businesses — that is where the money is.”

“What is the pizzo?” I asked.

“Protection money,” he replied. “Money extracted through intimidation or extortion. It comes from the Sicilian word pizzu — ‘beak’ in English. To let someone ‘fari vagnari u pizzu’ — ‘wet their beak’ — means to pay them off.”

The warning beneath Alfio’s explanation was perfectly clear: do not offend the Mafia. Fortunately, that seemed unlikely. I would soon be leaving Sicily — and leaving Alfio and Severin behind with it.

“But honour can be dangerous too,” Alfio continued. “Even an ordinary man in the street feels the need to defend his honour. So you must be careful not to insult him.”

Severin then recalled an unsettling story he had once read online, one that seemed to confirm Alfio’s point.

In 1993, a father, unable to bear the shame of having a homosexual son who worked as a prostitute, allegedly paid for him to be murdered. The son was shot in the stomach while soliciting clients in Messina. His father was later jailed for hiring an eighteen-year-old assassin to carry out the attack.

“There, you see?” Alfio said triumphantly. “That old man in the restaurant — the one whose brother needed three attempts to kill himself — was offended by your joke. But he only banged his walking stick on the table, when he could just as easily have paid someone to shoot you.”

And then he laughed.

On finding old illustrations…

On the cute and willing…