The Academy's spring trip to Sicily conflicted with my trip to Boston and Sean's to Nantes, which we were both initially disappointed about (though the trip turned out to be a disorganized, madcap four-day dash about the island, so we were probably better off). Then we thought about doing our own trip, but were discouraged by the difficulty of renting an automatic car anywhere but Palermo, which even Romans had warned us against driving in. Then we scrapped the idea altogether, until our friends Heather and Larry came to visit us a couple of months ago. They've been living in Siracusa, where Heather started a study-abroad program for her tiny college in Iowa. We'd also just heard rave reviews of the place (or rather its adorable island subsection, Ortigia) from Woody and Leslie after they went. Larry, as he typically does, sold us hard on coming down there, particularly on the food and wine, so we bought tickets. $90, a 55-minute flight from Rome to Catania, and an hour-long bus ride later, we were in Siracusa.
Ortigia itself is pretty adorable. Almost all of the buildings date after a massive earthquake of 1693, so they're in a Sicilian Baroque style when is much more light-hearted than the solemnity of Roman Baroque. There are picturesque narrow streets full of light, balconies, and drying laundry, plus some pretty impressive ruins, like the Temple of Apollo as soon as you cross the bridge onto Ortigia (where just before leaving, we watched a slender black cat toy with, dismember, and abandon in boredom a little lizard). In the main square, the Duomo is formed out of the skeleton of the temple of Athena, by walling in between the columns (visible both outside and in) to form the outer walls, and then excavating arches into the walls of the cella to create a three-nave structure. I've never seen a structure where the original cella is still standing, more or less! The main square also has the entrance to the hypogeum, a series of underground tunnels and cisterns that provided air-raid shelter for Siracusans when the island was getting pounded by the Allies in WWII, and the church of St. Lucy, which holds Caravaggio's Burial of St. Lucy. It's a beautiful, serene place, especially since we came in April when there were plenty of people but not yet the hordes of summer, who, much like in Venice or other places, come on buses from their cruise boats and depart when the sun is setting.
Sean was so happy in Ortigia! Our hotel room had a soft bed and wonderful pillows and the shower was powerful. There were delicious pastries to be sampled everywhere; cannoli, but course, but also fanciful marzipan, ficchetti fig cookies, and the "raviola" pastry filled with ricotta cheese, which we shared with Larry sitting in front of the Duomo, drinking the best blood-orange juice I've ever tasted. Citrus is so plentiful in Sicily that it finds its way into every dish, from the salads to the tiramisu. And oh, the food! Larry did not over-sell it. We had one of the best meals of our lives that first night with him and Heather at Apollonion, which offers a six-course fish menu that just kept coming and coming. I had an incredible pasta dish with crema di pistacchio at La Gazza Ladra, and our last night we went with Larry to Taberna Sveva (I include these names so I know what to recommend if anyone I know goes). We invariably let Larry pick the wines, and were introduced to a new favorite grape, Frappato, which Larry told us we'd be unlikely to find outside of Sicily.
Siracusa proper boasts an archaeological site with a small Roman amphitheater, a large Greek theater, and the famous 'ear of Dionysios' cavern, the acoustic properties of which we could hear being tested by groups of Italian schoolchildren as soon as we entered the site (which is like a half-mile from the cavern). By the time we arrived, there were competing groups of high-schoolers instead, doing various chants and cheers, and holy crap was it loud! As we were leaving, one boy turned back into the now-empty cavern and simply shouted "UMBERTO EC-OOOOO!" Lol. Unfortunately large parts of the archeological park were closed off, and frankly, the theater had nothing on the one at Epidauros. We felt similarly about the museum, even though it boasts a wide-ranging collection of Sicilian-Greek antiquities. Yes, we were being those snobs who have been to "real" Greece and are looking down on the provincials, haha.
Also of interest was the catacomb of S. Giovanni, and back in Ortigia, the mikveh that dates to the 2nd-3rd century CE, the oldest surviving one in Europe. 18 meters below ground, two meters below sea-level, it was infilled with sand by the Jews when they fled in 1493 and forgotten (rather than being purposely destroyed, that is). It was rediscovered only recently, when renovations of the hotel above were carried out. Having just seen the catacombs, the rectangular troughs cut into the rock were very much similar to graves, which makes some sense given the 'rebirth' metaphor common to both.
Although Siracusa was probably the most JV-version of Sicily (tourist-oriented, perfect Italian instead of dialect, incredibly friendly to foreigners), we were incredibly grateful for things that were different than Rome. Different food (ahhh, the fried fish place Larry pointed us to, where 8-euro got you a little box filled with a mix of small whole fish atop a bed of calamari, or the sandwich place in the market, where his buddy 'il Mago di Panino' made us a "breakfast sandwich": wild onion, basil, and fennel, then smoked mozzarella and beef carpaccio, topped with olive oil, blood orange zest, and lemon juice--spectacular!), different things for sale (I bought a printed scarf from India, and a pair of earrings in a boutique), different sights (the sea, with its incredibly clear water). It was good.