2. Sicily - Syracuse and the south east

covering 7 May to 9 May 2019

Syracuse from the old town

There’s a good motorway standard road system here in Sicily which is mainly near the coast and a good dual-carriageway one too so it is possible to get from and to some places quite quickly.  The normal inland standard road system is however often poor with too many potholes and like many old road networks covers the country in a meandering manner.  So on some days we seemed to drive quite a distance but on others we covered hardly more than a handful of parasangs before we were at our day’s destination.

Quite a number of filling stations here have a member of staff to handle the pump for you and we nearly got caught at one.  There are different prices for self fill and attended fill and before we’d noticed the difference had pulled up at the wrong pump.  It was Heather who noticed, fortunately because it was thirty cents a litre more expensive !  That’s an extra twenty euros on a tank of fuel and we’ve seen one since that charges forty cents a litre to fill the tank for you.

breakfast in an orchard - lovely

We used that fast motorway link I mentioned above to whizz south to Siracusa, known as Syracuse to us English speakers and we settled ourselves on a real old-style country campsite.  It was set in what had been an old olive/cherry orchard with a number of ancient gnarled old olives still standing.  There were no marked pitches, it was just stop where we wanted to.  The ground was a thin soil over limestone which broke the surface in a number of places and meant it was a really solid place to stop.

Temple of Apollo

Now Syracuse was a delight.  The old town is set on an island called Ortygia and is linked by a couple of bridges to the mainland which was all of fifty yards away.  It was the usual rabbit warren of an old Italian town with a lot of narrow pedestrianised roads and decorative car paint scrapes on tight corners.  It was also a very easy place to lose a sense of direction.  Even so, we found a very elegant and pleasant place to sit outside and have lunch just off the cathedral square.  Decorations were blue and white set off with fresh lemons.  The cathedral square wasn’t anything like a square, more of a giant slice of orange with the cathedral towards the end of the curved side facing west.  The whole aspect was very pleasing to the eye.  The cathedral itself was built on the remains of a fifth century BC Greek temple and has re-cycled Doric columns visible in the structure.

Cathedral Square

Syracuse was possibly the greatest city in the Greek Empire, part of Magna Graecia and a match for Athens.  Archimedes lived and worked here and was killed here too when invading Romans stormed the city.  Legend has it that Archi was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t hear a Roman enter his room and he was run through with a Roman sword.  Allow me a slight digression here for a moment.  I have at least one Classics Scholar who receives this blog and I ask to be cut a little slack on my details.  She was certainly in our minds as we wandered around Syracuse. 

Medusa having a bad hair day

after trying the ironing with Man Ray's iron

Syracuse - Greek Theatre

that cave - The Ear of Dionysius

Apart from the old town, the big draw here is the archaeological complex a couple of miles inland. This has a 16,000 capacity Greek Theatre cut out of the rock, some spectacular natural caves with such good acoustics that prisoners were left here and their conversations listened to, plus a modest sized Roman Amphitheatre.   The Greek theatre was just so impressive and I had to keep thinking “it’s over two thousand years old”.  In fact two thousand years plus as much as Shakespeare’s time to now. That old.  The Roman Amphitheatre could only to be looked at from the edges and had wild flowers blooming all over it.  It looked beautiful and being quite small, quite cosy.  I speak of course in a position of not being one of the main attractions in Roman times.  I remember reading once that the Colosseum in Rome was used to grow crops for many years after the fall of the Empire because the ground was so fertile.  Of course it was all that blood spilled over a period of several centuries.  

the overgrown amphitheatre

The spring festival of plays in the Greek Theatre was taking place while we were here and Heather was keen to go but old stick-in-the-mud me made the point that it was a Classical Greek play in Italy so we wouldn’t understand  what was going on.  We were told later by an Italian camp site owner that a translation is provided. 

By then we were settled in a place called Noto and took an excursion into the interior to see some Sicilian hill towns.  They are photogenic and ‘romantic’ but you do have to wonder what it’s really like to live in one, with the crumbling walls and rust, narrow streets and traffic.  These towns do tend to merge together in my memory unless there’s something really outstanding to grab my attention.

The following day we cycled to a local Natural Reserve which was split into an agricultural part and a wilder part, so to me it seemed like standard farmland with part of it wild.  There may be restrictions on the agricultural activity but who knows ?   We did see some more Flamingos and Spoonbills but were much more taken with Sardinian Warblers, Hoopoes and Turtle Doves (all both seen and heard).  It was fifteen kilometres to get there, much further than we thought and just as we were starting off back to the van we got the thunderstorm.  Only one of us had a waterproof (me) and then about halfway back I got a puncture.  A completely flat one but only on the bottom.  Heather cycled back to the van to drive out and collect me and she customised the side of the van against a metal security banner which just insisted on not getting out of the way.  A few days later we saw a bike shop and called in to get a new inner tube.  I’d converted the size to metric and the man in the shop couldn’t make any sense of it so I took him out to see the bike.  Back in the shop he immediately got out the right tube which to my surprise was sized in inches.   He asked if I wanted it fitted.  Yes please.  It took him no more than three minutes, and the cost for a new inner tube and the fittings – 5 Euros !

flowery meadow near the Nature Reserve

*it was a bit of a joke to include it but which of you looked up parasang ?