The Taormina Ancient Theatre

The Ancient Theatre occupies the ridge of the hill of the same name, in a dominating position overlooking the town. Recent studies have helped to revive interest in this monument. Its cavea (semicircular tiered seating) has a diameter of 109 m. It is, with the exception of that of Syracuse, the largest ancient theatre not only in Sicily, but in the Italian peninsula and North Africa. Its original plan is thought to date back to the 3rd century BC., about 2300 years ago. It could hold 5.000 spectators.

This earliest phase is documented by the remains of a wall built of isodomic blocks (all equal blocks) incorporated into the scaena and by stone seats with inscriptions from the cavea. To the same period belong the remains of a small shrine at the top of the cavea, later obliterated by the enlargement of the latter in the 2nd century AD.

What is visible of the Theatre today belongs entirely to the Roman reconstruction, more particularly that completed under the Emperor Trajan or Emperor Hadrian in the first half of the 2nd century AD. The high back wall of the stage (scaenae frons) preserves the two lateral doors or hospitalia, while the central one or regia has collapsed.
The existing reconstruction of the scaenae frons is due to a nineteenth-century restoration.
The remains datable back to the end of the 1st century BC and the beginning of the 1st AD, that is the Augustan period, are scanty; that Augustus had the theatre rebuilt would seem to be testified, however, by a portrait of Augustus, by some heads belonging to statues of magistrates and by the magnificent heads of Niobe and Artemis belonging perhaps to a statue group forming part of the decorations of the scaenae frons, representing the myth in which Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and her brother Apollo, the sun god, killed the 14 sons of Niobe, so punishing her arrogance, because she dared to boast of having more children of Latona, their mother.
You can admire these sculptures exposed in the Antiquarium.

Between the 2d and 3rd century A.D. the theater was transformed into an arena for hunting games with construction of a ring corridor, closed by a raised parapet, and of an underground area, used as a shelter equipment and perhaps even for animal cages.
At a later stage are, finally, referable some enlargement of the underground area and the porch behind the scene.

That's the Theatre you can see now.