Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

A fist of land with the thumb downturned, ORTYGIA stuffs more than 2700 years of history into a space barely one kilometre long and half a kilometre across. The island was connected to the mainland at different times by causeway or by bridge: today you approach over the wide Ponte Nuovo to Piazza Pancali, where the sandstone remnants of the Tempio di Apollo sit in a little green park surrounded by railings. Erected around 570 BC in the colony’s primeval years, it was the first grand Doric temple to be built in Sicily, though there’s not much left to make the senses: a few column stumps, part of the inner sanctuary surround and the stereobate can be prefabricated out. Follow Via Savoia towards the water and you fetch up on the harbour front, an active place overlooking the main harbour, the Porto Grande. Set back from the water, a curlicued fifteenth-century limestone gateway, the Porta Marina , provides one entrance into the webbed streets of the old town. The achievement uphill ends on a terrace looking over the harbour, from where you slip down to a piazza encircling the Fonte Aretusa , probably the most enduring of Siracusa’s romantic locations. The freshwater spring - incidentally now neither fresh nor a spring - fuelled an captivating Greek myth: the nymph Arethusa, chased by the river god Alpheus, was changed into a spring by the goddess Artemis and, jumping into the sea off the Peloponnese, reappeared as a fountain in Siracusa. Actually, there are natural freshwater springs all over Ortygia, but the landscaped, papyrus-covered fountain - complete with fish and ducks - is undeniably pretty. Admiral Nelson took on water supplies here before the Battle of the Nile, though you’d be better advised to sip a coffee in one of the cafés nearby.

The old town’s roads lead on, down the “thumb” of Ortygia, as far as the Castello Maniace on the island’s southern tip. Thrown up by Frederick II in 1239, the solid square keep is now a barracks and is off-limits to visitors. Back on the main chunk of Ortygia, the severe thirteenth-century Palazzo Bellomo houses the Museo Regionale d’Arte Medioevale e Moderna (Tues-Sat 9am-1.30pm, also Wed & Fri 2.30-6.30pm; L5000/¬2.58), an outstanding collection of medieval art. There are some wonderful pieces in here, including notable works by the omnipresent Gagini family and a dilapidated fifteenth-century Annunciation by Antonello da Messina, the museum’s most famous exhibit.

Ortygia’s most obvious attractions, though, surround the Piazza del Duomo , the island’s most appealing spot (though currently undergoing immoderate maintenance work). The piazza is an elongated space from which impressive buildings alter out up either flank, including the seventeenth-century Municipio with the remains of an primeval Ionic temple in its basement. This was forsaken when work began on the most ambitious of all Siracusa’s temples, the Tempio di Atena , which was raised in the fifth century BC and now forms the basis of the duomo. In the normal run of things it might be expected to have suffered the eventual ruination that befell most of the Greek temples in Sicily. Yet much of it survives, thanks to the foundation in the seventh century AD of a Christian church which incorporated the temple in its structure - thus keeping the masonry scavengers at bay. The Duomo itself makes the grandest statement about Ortygia’s continuous settlement, with twelve of the temple’s fluted columns, and their architrave, embedded in its battlemented Norman wall. Inside, the nave of the Christian church was formed by hacking eight arches in the cella walls.

Buses run from Largo XXV Luglio over Ponte Nuovo and into ACHRADINA , the important commercial centre of ancient Syracuse. Although nowadays there’s little of interest here, you may find yourself staying in one of the hotels scattered around its modern streets. The Foro Siracusano was the site of the agora, the marketplace and public square, and there are a few remains still to be seen - though the dominant feature is the war memorial in its garden, a Fascist monument of 1936. The only other ancient attraction left in the area is the Ginnasio Romano , off Via Elorina behind the train station: not a gymnasium at all, but a small first-century AD Roman theatre - partly sunken under moss-covered water - and a few pieces of a temple and altar.