Dior’s first permanent spa in Sicily opened in June, four cabins set into the terraced gardens of the Grand Hotel Timeo. The Greek theatre is below. Etna is to the right.
The Grand Hotel Timeo holds the lip of rock above Taormina, immediately beside the Teatro Antico. Belmond has run it for years and has spent the past two seasons adding to it rather than rebuilding it. On 22 June the hotel handed part of its historical gardens to Dior, and the maison opened its first permanent spa in Sicily there.
Four treatment rooms, and no more than four. They are called Diorazur, Diorama, Rosa dei Venti and the Isola Bella Suite. The last is built for two, with a beauty room for make-up sessions and an infrared sauna off to one side. The other three work singly.
The cabins
The hotel’s Sicilian mosaic floors carry into the rooms. Dior brought stone, onyx and pale woods, the material vocabulary it uses in its Paris spaces, and left the older surfaces where they were. The gardens are terraced, so the cabins sit at slightly different heights along the slope. From the garden path very little of the build announces itself.
Dior Spa, Grand Hotel Timeo, A Belmond Hotel, Taormina · Courtesy of Belmond
The spa runs daily, ten in the morning until eight at night, and it takes people who are not staying at the hotel. That is less common than it sounds at a property of this size. In August it counts for something, because the town fills and the Timeo does not have enough keys for everyone who wants to be inside it.
The menu
The signature treatment is called Talisman of Vitality. It borrows from lithotherapy and from Ayurveda, and it starts with the guest choosing a semi-precious Sicilian stone to keep through the ritual. The therapist works around the chosen stone. The premise is loose; the hour is long and the hands are good.
The face protocols are the ones Dior runs everywhere: KobiDior, Golden Aura, and the Hydrafacial collaboration, with the treatment logic shaped by the facialist Hadda Akrim. Body work covers New Look, DTissue, Constellation and 9 Moons. The house calls all of it Haute Wellness, a blend of hands and machines.
There is a longer programme on top, Dior Wellness Villeggiatura, built with the Pilates specialist Byrony Deery and Rose Ferguson, a nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner. It runs across several days and moves out of the cabins into the gardens and the hillside. Belmond files the same instinct under Slow Luxury.
The gardens were always the best part of the Timeo. Dior did the sensible thing and built into them.
The Splendid EditItaly
Christian Dior worked in Italy often, and the country fed his eye in a way Paris did not. The gardens at the Timeo carry an echo of the Château de la Colle Noire, the Provence house he kept for himself. The Teatro Antico supplies the theatre. Taormina has been a set for a century; Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon both passed through, and both later belonged to the Dior story.
The view holds. Etna sits to the right, usually hooded, and the Ionian Sea runs below the terrace toward Calabria. The gardens keep the spa inside them, a few minutes from the main terrace where everyone else is having a drink before dinner.
The pattern
Dior opened its first Venetian spa at the Hotel Cipriani this spring, in gardens running down to the lagoon. Sicily is the second in Italy. Belmond holds the addresses, Dior holds the treatment menu, and the two houses answer to the same owner in Paris.
Book the Isola Bella Suite if there are two of you and the afternoon is free. Walk up through the garden afterwards. The theatre will still be there, and so will the mountain.
The Dior Spa at Grand Hotel Timeo, A Belmond Hotel, Taormina opened on 22 June 2026 and is open daily from 10:00 to 20:00 to hotel guests and to the public. Details through belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Grand Hotel Timeo, Taormina