taxonomy pagination 404

I know something similar has already been discussed as I spent the last two days reading and testing but I can’t make it work. I have a custom taxonomy, declared as Page (not post, this might seem to be the big difference from everything I found), but the pagination doesn’t work. First page is ok, from second on it returns a 404 error. Nothing fancy in declaring the taxonomy, nor in the permalinks structure: there is something like url/news/city, where news is the taxonomy slug and city is the end page. url/news/city/page/2 does not work.

What I noticed is that writing something like url/news/city?page=2 works fine, so I guess the pages exist and there is no problem with posts_per_page number or total number of posts. The main problem is that the usual $paged variable (defined as $paged = (get_query_var(‘paged’)) ? get_query_var(‘paged’) : 1; ) always returns 1. I’ve also tried get_query_var(‘page’) as one suggested, but it still doesn’t work.

Must I say that I also use a custom taxonomy declared as post and pagination works fine.

So the question is: is there any other way to get the $paged variable other than the usual way, using get_query_var(‘paged’)?