With my eyes closed, I would know I was near Mount Etna. When the season is right, the delicious scent of la zagara - the blossom from thousands of citrus trees growing around its base - hits you as you step off the plane in Catania. In winter and spring, the east coast breezes are delicately fragrant, in chromatic contrast to the area’s lava-black streets and buildings. There is such fertility in the volcanic soil that orange trees and wisteria grow wild along the autostrada to Taormina.

I’ve become a volcano-lover since moving to Italy. Mount Etna is Europe’s largest active volcano and, like Vesuvius, it always conjures images of Grand Tour travellers overcoming every physical inconvenience to chronicle its fiery workings, by pen or paintbrush.

Today’s digital camera-bearing trippers have an easier time. Though I would love to have been carried up to the craters in a sedan chair in all my finery, as women in Dickens’s era were, it’s a lot simpler by Jeep or cable car, wearing comfy old sneakers and a warm windbreaker. Then, after an exciting but dusty day on the volcano’s moonscape, it’s heaven to swim in a smart coastal hotel before venturing out for an aperitivo. This part of Sicily has long been geared to discerning tourism, so choose from family-run farms (agriturismo) or comfortable hotels at the seaside or in Taormina.

It’s no wonder D.H. Lawrence found inspiration at Taormina for Lady Chatterley and her lover. The very pretty high town, with its idyllic Greek amphitheatre and Roman ruins, offered a picturesque blend of sea and multicultural exoticism, with the volcano as its dramatic backdrop. The Sicilians turned a blind eye to the antics of liberated literati and émigrés. Or did they? Word has it that Lawrence’s ‘gardener’ was based on a Sicilian farmer who taught the British woman a thing or two about freedom of expression.

Today’s Taormina is distinctly touristy, yet holds its charm: the narrow winding streets and staircases are set out on the hillside like a game of snakes and ladders, to be explored on foot, as traffic is always congested. Flowers are everywhere; Gothic villas and vast palm trees in the Giardini Pubblici recall North Africa more than Italy.