Hello, Arethusa

February 11-12

I woke up on the 11th thinking it was Sunday. Joanna was astonished that she had lost track of a full day.

But no, it was Saturday after all. Harry’s the one who loses track.

We had done a lot of walking Friday, so we took a cab to Archimedes’ old neighborhood, the old town on the island of Ortygia. 

This is where the city stood behind its walls. It’s also the place where most of the interesting stuff is, like the cathedral and most of the restaurants.

We had the cab drop us off at the Piazza Duomo, a square surrounded by buildings dating to the 17th century and perhaps earlier.  

People at a cafe across from the cathedral were drinking coffee and listening to a man play the accordion. The cab driver gave us some orientation, but he spoke Italian, so I only got a tiny bit of it. 

I did catch the word “barroca.” We walked over to the Baroque church dedicated to Santa Lucia, who Joanna told me is the patron of Syracuse. Although her bones have been distributed all over Europe, she lived and died in Syracuse.

We saw a sign point the direction to the Arkimedeion, a museum devoted to Archimedes. I had read about it. It is supposed to face a square called Piazza Archimede.

We started wandering the narrow winding streets to see if we could find it. There is not much left from Classical times, but many buildings date back to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

Most of them seem to be occupied and in use.

And it’s a place built to wander. No wonder Archimedes loved it.

We walked around the square but couldn’t find the Arkimedeion. We did have coffee and pastry at a cafe on the Piazza Archimede, though, and also saw a sign pointing to the Fountain of Arethusa.

The walk to see Arethusa took us to the seacoast side of the island and then led us to the harbor side.

The fountain sits near the harbor. Indeed, the water at the foot of the retaining wall seems to be disturbed by the stream from the fountain. 

Arethusa was a nymph dedicated to the virgin goddess Artemis (Diana in Latin). In order to avoid the advances of Alpheus, a river god, she appealed to her goddess for help. 

Artemis tried a couple of stratagems and finally turned Arethusa into an underground stream that flowed out of Greece and came up at Syracuse. In ancient times this was holy ground.

Walking north from the fountain brought us to the marina, so we followed a broad esplanade on the bay shore and then re-entered the town. Eventually we came to a wide area with the excavation of the Temple of Apollo.

We had seen a model reconstruction of this temple at the archeological museum. It was fun to compare the remains to the model.

It’s at least two miles from Arethusa’s fountain to the hotel, and we had done a bit of other walking besides. There is a cab stand across from Apollo’s temple, maybe to take pagans back to their hotels. 

Maybe not.

In any case, we took a cab back to our hotel.

On the real Sunday, we found that the Paolo Orsi museum and the Archeological park were scheduled to close early. So we decided to take a walk.

I had directons to the Basilica San Giovanni, where the catacombs and St. Marcian’s tomb are. You can only go in with a guided tour, and one was just starting when we arrived.

The church, which may have been the city’s first cathedral, is a ruin with no roof and few internal details. It was built in early Christian times, destroyed by Arabs, rebuilt by Normans, and finally done in by earthquake. 

According to the guide, Marcian (Marziano in Italian) was the first bishop of Syracuse, appointed by St. Peter. There is disagreement about that. According to Catholic Online, “documentation places him in the third century,” which would rule out his being a contemporary of St. Peter. 

No one challenges, though, that Marcian was martyred. 

As usual with the burials of saints, the remains have been removed.

Most of the Byzantine paintings on the walls of the tomb have been defaced. Perhaps by Moslem conquerors.

The catacombs are a seeming endless maze of open and empty crypts. Most of the structure is unmarked, with an occasional inscription. One was a Byzantine emblem, a rho that forms a cross to make chi-rho, the first two letters of “Christos.” 

I’m glad we had a guide. Otherwise, I’d still be down there. 

The San Giovanni bar is across the plaza, so we went there. We tried some local sausage for the first time. It was all right, but I’m still not sure if it’s as good as the sausage we can get back home.

I wasn’t a fair trial. It had been sitting on a steam table with no steam, so they microwaved it. 

Actually, the bars here are really gelato and pastry shops that sell coffee and drinks. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had no influence on European culture.

We went back to the hotel for a nap. A little flare-up of arthritis or gout, in only one knuckle of my right hand, has been enough to tire me out faster than usual. If you have to have gout, though, you want it in your hand instead of your foot or your knee. 

I used some of the time for Internet research. The Arkimedeion is closed permanently, so we can stop looking for that.

Joanna has found the address of a museum in Ortygia devoted to Leonardo da Vinci that has a section on Archimedes. Maybe we’ll get to go there.

The hotel restaurant is closed on Sunday. The reception desk gave us a few recommendations. Apparently most of Syracuse’s restaurants are in Ortygia.

That’s why we are going to move to the old town when we leave the Villa Politi on Thursday.

We took a cab to Ortygia, but our restaurant, Dionyso, was on a side street reachable only on foot, or maybe motorbike.

The driver pointed the way we were to go, but I didn’t get it right. 

We were supposed to take a fairly broad street for a few blocks and find it on the left. I went the wrong way.

We finally asked a lady walking a dog (the sign of a local), who called a friend. The two of them with their dogs walked us to the street, Via Arezzo.

The restaurant is a fine little place. There was a key in the door when we got there.

Is the place closing? Is there another door? Doesn’t seem like it.

Then it hit me. The key is on the outside. You have to turn it to open the door.

A man greeted and seated us.

We shared a few glasses of wine, mostly blends of Sicilian grapes,. One was Nero d’Avola with Frappato, which was OK, but with a little sweet edge that I didn’t really care for. Another, from Messina Province, mixed two of the Nerello grape varieties that play a big part in the Etna wines. That one also included (I think) Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. 

They were both good, but I liked the second better because it had a more complex flavor.

The pasta course was spaghetti with fried anchovies. Second course was squid stewed in tomato with capers.

The flavor of anchovies was very strong in the spaghetti, but that’s all right. I like anchovies.

The stewed squid was the subtler dish. Thin slices of squid were wonderfully tender. the sauce was tasty and very dark, almost brown.

I don’t now what’s next after we go to Ortygia later this week. We have some time to kill, and I want to put it to good use. On the way down, we didn’t see anything on the peninsula that invited a stay until we reached Reggio.

Train travel is difficult because the luggage is a challenge. The stations have no elevators or escalators and you must go down a long set of stairs and climb another to reach different platforms.

At the last minute, our train to Syracuse was switched from track 1 to track 2. We had maybe five minutes to make the change. A young man helped me with the bags. If he hadn’t, we would have missed the train altogether and would have had to wait a couple of hours at Taormina.

The cars and platforms are the old step-down style, so the bags have to be handed into the car one by one. There are idiots who feel compelled to shove their way past me while I’m doing that. 

It seems that the idea of going up the steps of the adjoining car, a distance of about three feet away, is too sophisticated for them.

Anyhow, I’m trying to work out an itinerary that requires as few changes of trains as possible.

All in all, though, that’s not a serious problem. Wherever we go is going to be colorful.

Be well, all. And remember to stay out of catacombs without a guide.

Harry