Sicily - late March

• Traveling
• Syracuse Overview
• Getting Food
• Restaurants
• Culture Part 1
• Culture Part 2
• Passegiata

Emilia-Romagna - early April

Tuscany, Florence - April 8

Umbria - late April

Impressions of Syracuse, Sicily

For the first three days in Syracuse, we pretty much wandered and slept (I slept quite a lot more than Dawn), so I'll start with impressions and then tell some specific experiences in the next few days. First, as far as we can tell, Sicilians* spend almost all of their time strolling about, chatting and admiring one another, or eating/drinking/smoking, or, for a few, racing about on motorcycles, scaring the tourists. Since we arrived on Easter Weekend, this is probably only a holiday pattern, but it's made for some great people-watching. More about that later.

Our apartment is quite comfy and beautifully located--no more than two blocks from gelato in any given direction. We are in an old, old (well, probably 15th centry) building that has been redone into about 15 apartments. Ours, Bila 13, is on three levels--the door in from Floor 2 (with 0 as the ground floor) enters the bedroom, sort of a cave, looking out (IF you open the curtain) on the elevator shaft. Then up a dozen steps to the bathroom--all the mod cons, including hot water and a bidet; matching bidet grab bar, towel holder and tp holder. Another dozen steps to the bright, open, kitchen/living room and a tiny little patio with enough room for a table and chairs and a view of the sea and picturesque tile roof tops, some new, some collapsing in on themselves.

The roof tiles here are mostly brown and beige rather than red. Most of the occupied buildings have pots of plants -- cacti, fern, ivy, geraniums (probably real) and other flowers (probably plastic)--on the roofs and balconies. Very nice. But also pretty much the only vegetation we see. Oh, and there's a gorgeous lemon tree on a balcony just outside our kitchen window. But, as far as we can tell, the whole island is paved over--cobble-stoned, really. We haven't been inside any courtyards, so there may be grass or plant beds there, but nothing in the public spaces, except a few trees in pots or bricked-in beds. And the poor doggies have to poop on the street. The place is pretty clean, though, so someone must come around in the night and sweep up. The balconies are also quite frequently decorated with laundry, but we have been forbidden to dry ours off the patio. Darn!

Besides the gelato, we are also close to over half the antiquities in Syracuse, most notably the Arethusa Spring, only a block and a half away. The Spring, mentioned by Cicero, was made famous by Ovid. According to the story, Arethusa was a nymph, lusted after by Alpheus (yes, they were Greeks). She ran away to Ortygia, but he followed and Artemis turned her into a Spring. Of course, that didn't work. Alpheus turned himself into a river so he could "mingle with her forever," as it is described. (In some versions, he was already a river god when she came to bathe and enchanted him.) At any rate, poor nymph. But the view out across the Ionian Sea is spectacular and the fountain is respected as a reminder of the island's millenia-long Greek ties. A sign and a sculpture, a healthy stand of papyrus, some white ducks and some fat fish complete the scene.

Reading this over, I can see I haven't been quite clear. We are in Syracuse in southeastern Sicily on the Ionian Sea. Syracuse itself is not particularly attractive, but the area we are in, Ortygia, is an island (connected to the mainland by three bridges) just chock-a-block with palaces and churches, mostly Baroque or Romanesque, although many periods are represented and the Greek bits are also accessible and in pretty good shape. There has been a lot of recent restoration on the island and it is still ongoing, with construction cranes and/or crews every third or fourth street.

The island is about two miles long and 3/4 mile wide and we have walked most of the streets--some on purpose, some by mistake. One of the times that I was sleeping and Dawn was not, she found an Internet cafe with wireless connection, free for the price of an espresso or a glass of wine once an hour or so. So we're set on that front. I only need to figure out how to turn my messages into e-mail and how to send them from my Palm, which is behaving pretty well.** Enough for now, hope you are all well.

* When I first worked on this, I wrote "Italians" not "Sicilians". But after seeing more of Italy, I concluded we weren't really in Italy when we were in Sicily.

** The Palm continued to behave "pretty well," but it, my inability to make it do tricks and trying to access my mail server from Italy meant I never did get the mail to work reliably. But you knew that.

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