Giardini-Naxos is a small tourist town a few kilometers from the most famous Taormina. Formerly called Naxos, as the homonymous island in the Aegean Sea, it was founded in 734 BC. of the Chalcidian colonists and is known to be the first Greek settlement in Sicily. .
During the Peloponnese war Naxos sided with Athens and for this reason the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius the Elder had it razed to the ground and had Tauromenion (Taormina) built on the hill above.
