Syracuse

April 1, 2007

Syracuse, Italy

Today was a great day, and the only thing that marred my experience of Syracuse is a nasty head cold that I have been nursing ever since we have been Italy. There are several of us on the trip that are hacking and coughing, and with the close quarters and constant travel it has been impossible not to communicate germs. So all day today I have been coughing and sneezing, and the wonderful Italian food has been rather tasteless because my tastebuds have been clogged with mucus. I only hope that I can get better before we get to Rome, I don’t want my whole experience to be colored with thoughts of my sore throat.

Today we had a nice breakfast, albeit lacking the custom order coffee, and hopped on the bus to go downtown in Syracuse. Syracuse was one of the largest colonies in the Greek world, established by Corinth, although Greek activity in Italy dates back as far as Homer, and even as far back as the Mycenean period. Syracuse itself is notable for its involvement in the Sicilian expedition undertaken by Athens in 415-413 BC, near the end of the Peloponnesian war, during which the Athenian navy was firmly routed, effectively marking the beginning of the end of Athenian dominance. The first place that we went was the Castello Euryalo, established during the period when Syracuse was ruled by tyrants. The study walls of the Castello line the edge of the peninsula that overlooks the old part of the town, on a peninsula that thrusts out into the sparkling water. We moved around the place, which had a number of stairs and passages cut into the limestone rock.

We moved back from the peninsula and walked down the passages, going into a dark passage and emerging amidst towering walls, punctuated by carved holes and staircases, a labyrinth in and out of the sunlight. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, a strange riddle set forth by a sorceress that needs to be solved, but the passages run into each other or lead nowhere or turn around and lead back to the entrance, and we had fun playing peekaboo with each other as we popped in and out of the holes.

Then it was onto the bus and to the archaeological park of Syracuse, the site of a number of ancient ruins including a theater, a ampitheater, and rock quarries. The theater was again, one of the largest in the Greek world and the largest in Sicily, with a diameter of 140 meters. Although like many other theaters it was originally simply incorporated into the slope and hill of the landscape, the Romans with their desire for earthworks and structure took over and added stone seating. Because Syracuse itself was such a prominent site in the Greek world many playwrights including Aeschylus journeyed here to perform their plays, including Aeschylus who performed The Persians. The bowl of the cavea stood bleached white and open to the bright spring sky, and at the top a ring of stone led to a recess with a burbling fountain, in front of which we all took pictures, and then looked down the rows of seats to the treeline, with the harbor of Syracuse slightly visible in the distance, through the pine needles.

Then we descended from the top of the theater and continued our jaunt, around to the rock quarries. This is a place where the limestone has been excavated since the time of Homer, and the cliffs have been stripped away in a regular manner, leaving a series of terraced walls. The bottom of the quarry has since been allowed to green from the silt that has washed down from above—lemon and mangrove trees line the shady walks, and the lemons hung ripe for picking. Tomazou even climbed into a tree to get us some, surprising a crowd of German tourists.

But the quarries were not always pleasant. This was the place where, after the Sicilian expedition, a number of Athenians were held captive and died from heat and exhaustion and lack of food after being captured by the Syracusans, the groves that now ring with the sound of birds must originally have been torn with the groans of shattered and dying men. At the far end of the quarry is a place that looks like the pointed arch on a gothic building, a cave that descends deep into the cliff from a tear at the mountain face. Called the “ear of Dionysus”, the cave was visited and written about by Caravaggio during the Italian renaissance. We went inside, journeying down the echoing passage, dwarfed by the immense cavity above us, until the passage turned out of sight of the entrance, and 65 meters into the rock terminated at a dead end, the pointed top of the chamber rounding out into a hollow high above our heads. It was a spooky place.

We reemerged into the blinding sun and exited the park, making our way to a nearby site that contained a Roman Amphitheater, the first we have seen on the trip. This particular one is notable for its unusual method of constructions—instead of being built up in a series of arched vaulting a la the Colisseum in Rome, this was carved down out of the limestone in the manner of the Greeks. However, it is clearly Roman—arched vaulting poked its way out of the crumbling seats—an entire vaulted passage circumnavigated the arena floor, allowing for the entrance of the gladiators, perhaps. The arena in general did not have a single entrance, but two major ones at the North and South ends where the halves of the amphitheater came together, surmounted by a big arched passageway. However, there was evidence in the eroded stones for multiple entrances, arches led from the outside of the arena almost all of the way down to the dividing wall that separated the spectators from the blood sports going on in the sandy circle. Already there is a level of organization that is not present in the Greek theater, down to the multiple entrances and the arched tunnel that led to the arena floor. In the center, a pit supported by columns looked like it may have allowed performers or beasts to rise up from the center to surprise the audience. Roman spectacle at its finest… Toumazou told us that we were going to see a large number of amphitheaters from here on out, so he did not give us very much information about this particular one.

From there, we walked back in the sun to the bus to head toward the very center of the old town, located on what was once an island that has been subsequently silted up and now is separated from the mainland only by a series of canals and bridges. We stopped the bus outside—it would never survive the tight crowded streets, and walked over the bridge and into a piazza with the hunkered down columns of a temple fenced in the center, and shops and restaurants around the outside. Several of us, Chris, Jess, Ambrice and I had brought our lunches, so we settled ourselves on a bench in the middle of the square and people watched. I stopped in at a local café, grabbing a caffe latte and bringing it back into the sun where tourists in their khaki vests and Italians with their high boots and leather jackets walked past. We had spotted a Versace store on the way in, so Ambrice dragged me inside. I felt like a big intruder in my hiking shoes, patched pants, and tshirt but the employees were nice and allowed us to look at the clothes, stopping only to gawk at the price tags.

Then it was on with the day—the temple that stood in the middle of the square was a temple to Apollo, dated to 570 BC, a squat temple of the Doric order with fat columns and bulging capitals. Although only a few of the columns remained standing, a reconstructed plan showed a massive entablature; the area above the columns was about as high as the columns themselves, which made the building look like it was ready to fall forward onto its face. Moving around to the side of the temple, we could see places where the cella walls had been punctured to make room for the entrances to a church, now removed, and other ghosts of the temple’s former incarnations. It was really cool to see this, a distinctly Greek building, dropped down in the middle of a modern Italian city, and I stopped to admire the juxtaposition between this and a tall scrolled venetian-looking catholic church that sat right next door, Mary looking down out of her sculptural niche at us. Masculine and feminine sat side by side, the old and the new, that which came before and that which followed.

Then we moved on, up a narrow street with balconies that hung right above our heads to the center of a piazza with a wonderful neoclassical fountain, the water throwing up diamonds into the sky and letting them cascade down over the nymphs and figures that paraded around the bottom. Horses stood at attention, all facing the central figure of a beautiful woman, that stood serenely over the scene. The sky was blue and the surrounding buildings all had an air of stateliness that proclaimed that we were there! We were in Italy.

For the last stop of the day we came to the site of another of the Sicilian temples of the early period, this one in particular was dated to 480 BC, when Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse, built it in celebration to his victory over the Carthaginians following the battle of Himera. Originally containing six columns on the front side and 14 along the sides, it has been embedded into the fabric of a catholic church. From the outside, we could see the fluting and the capitals of the columns protruding from the stone walls that surrounded the temple. On the entrance of the church, the austerity of the Doric abruptly changed, to the flowery Corinthian capitals and the volutes that laced their way up the façade to the top, surmounted by a big cross and filled with classicizing sculptures of saints and the virgin, as always, occupying a place in the center niche. The front contained the broken and recessed architraves characteristic of post-Greek experimentation with temple orders, creating a sense of rhythm and a pattern of light and dark in the strong afternoon sunshine.

We walked under the flying cherubims and past a column snaked with floral tracery and into the church itself. It was beautiful, not in an overwhelmingly gilded and painted way as in the orthodox churches, but in a simple yet elegant manner, with strong vertical lines surmounted by a dark wood open raftered ceiling. Opulence was reserved for the stained glass windows in the upper clerestory, that contained brilliantly colored portraits of saints, and at the apse, where a white and gilded altar stood, framing the dark oil portraits of Mary and John, and Jesus occupying the center oval. Above, a slender dome rose in white simplicity, pierced by one round window with bright stained glass. From the ceiling hung circular chandeliers, heavy with iron rings, that resided low over our heads, in between the spaces where cella of the temple had been carved away to form three aisles, and the outer walls had the other halves of the Doric columns, breaking up the stark regularity of the otherwise unadorned stone walls.

It was a quiet, hallowed place. The church has been continuously used for worship since its establishment so many thousands of years ago, and I could practically hear the echoes of the many prayers as I moved among the dim lights of the church and listened to the pregnant silence.

Then it was out to the bright sunlight and the sounds of accordions in the piazza, where people enjoyed a late lunch in the open air cafes or sat and played guitar on the steps of the church. By that point, however, I was exhausted and feeling really ill, so we walked along the waterfront to the remains of the Spring of Arethusa, where according to mythology a nymph pursued by Altheus was transformed into a spring in order to escape his attentions. The spring was right on the waterfront, and the sun glittered off the water, dotted with a sailboat or two and tinted a brilliant blue. We walked along the waterfront and into a shady park with trees that had spiral trunks and whose branches hung low over the ground. In between these fantastic and venerable trees, date palms rose, competing for the sunlight, loaded down with their fruit.

We rested for a while, and then took the bus back to our hotel, where I had a long long nap, woke and picnicked, checked our email standing by the side of the road outside the hotel, and then promptly fell asleep again. I was feeling pretty bad so I was happy to sleep early.