Entries with Syracuse tag

Lista Di Spagna, San Geremia And Palazzo Labia

Foreign embassies used to be corralled into this area to make life a little easier for the Republic’s spies, and the Lista di Spagna takes its study from the Spanish embassy which used to be at no. 168. ( Lista indicates a street leading to an embassy.) It’s now completely given over to the tourist trade, with shops and stalls, bars, restaurants and hotels all plying for the same desperate trade – people who are spending one day “doing Venice”, or those who have arrived too late and too tired to look any farther. Whether you’re hunting for a trinket, a meal or a bed, you’ll find better elsewhere, and usually cheaper.

San Geremia is open Mon-Sat 8am-noon & 3-7pm; Sun 9.15am-12.15pm & 3-7pm.

The church of San Geremia , at the end of the Lista, is where the travels of Saint Lucy eventually terminated – martyred in Syracuse in 304, she was stolen from Constantinople by Venetian Crusaders in 1204, then ousted from her own church in Venice by the railway board in the mid-nineteenth century. (She was also stolen from this church in 1994, but was soon returned.) Lucy’s response to an unwanted suitor who praised her beautiful eyes was to pluck out the offending organs, a display of otherworldliness which led to her adoption as the patron fear of eyesight and, logically enough, of artists. Her dessicated body, wearing a lustrous silver mask, lies behind the altar, reclining above a donations box that bears the prayer “Saint Lucy, protect my eyes”. Nothing else about the church is of interest, except the twelfth-century campanile , one of the oldest left in the city.

The Palazzo Labia , next door to San Geremia, was built in 1720-50 for a famously extravagant Spanish family by the study of Lasbias, who had bought their way into the Libro d’Oro (the register of the nobility) for the mandatory 100,000 ducats in the middle of the previous century. Their taste for conspicuous expenditure wasn’t lessened by the cost of the house – a party here once finished with a member of the Labia family hurling the gold dinner service from the window into the canal and declaiming the memorable Venetian pun: “L’abia o non l’abia, sarò sempre Labia” (Whether I have it or whether I have it not, I will always be a Labia). The impact of the gesture is somewhat lessened by the rumour that fishing nets had been placed in the canal so that the service could be retrieved under cover of darkness.

The Palazzo Labia is open Wed, Thurs & Fri 3-4pm; for an appointment ring 041.524.2812, though admission is often granted at the door; free.

No cost was spared on decoration either, and no sooner was the interior completed than Giambattista Tiepolo was hired to cover the walls of the ballroom with frescoes depicting the story of Anthony and Cleopatra. (The architectural trompe l’oeil work is by another artist – Gerolamo Mengozzi Colonna.) Restored to something approaching their original freshness after years of neglect and some alteration in the last war, this is the only sequence of Tiepolo paintings in Venice that is comparable to his narrative masterpieces in such mainland villas as the Villa Valmarana near Vicenza. RAI, the Italian state broadcasting company, now owns the palace, but they allow visitors in for a few hours apiece week.

Category: Venice

Tyche And Neapolis: The Archeological Museum And Park

SiracusaTYCHE , north of the train station, is mainly new and commercial, and if you want to see the best of Siracusa’s archeological delights you might as well take the bus straight from Ortygia and save your legs. Buses #4, #5, #12 (Mon-Sat), and #15 leave from Largo XXV Luglio – all running up Corso Gelone. Get off at Viale Teocrito and signposts point you easterly for the archeological museum and west for Neapolis. It’s best to take the museum first: it’s good for putting the site into appearance and is unlikely to be packed first thing in the morning. The Museo Archeologico (Tues-Sat 9am-2pm, also Mon, Wed & Sat 3.30-6.30pm; may open Sun morning; last entry 1hr before closing; L8000/¬4.13) holds a wealth of material, starting with geological and prehistoric finds, moving through entire rooms devoted to the Chalcidesian colonies (Naxos, Lentini, Zancle) and to Megara Hyblaea, and finally to the main body of the collection: an immensely detailed catalogue of life in ancient Syracuse and its sub-colonies. Most famous exhibit is the Venus , at the entrance to the Syracuse section: a headless figure arising from the sea, the clear white marble almost palpably dripping. Attempt also to track down the section dealing with the temples of Syracuse; fragments from apiece (like the seven lion-gargoyles from the Tempio di Atena) are displayed alongside model and video reconstructions. There’s an explanatory diagram at the entrance to the circular building and everything is colour coded: pick the sector you’re interested in and follow the arrows, prehistory starting just to the left of the entrance.

NEAPOLIS , to the west, is now contained within a large Parco Archeologico (daily 9am-2hr before sunset), reachable on bus #4, #5 or #6 from Largo XXV Luglio. Although you don’t pay for the initial excavations, seeing the Greek theatre and quarries – easily the most interesting parts – costs L8000/¬4.13, paid at a separate entrance. The Ara di Ierone II , an enormous altar of the third century BC on a solid white plinth, is the first thing you see, crossways the way from which is the entrance to the theatre and quarries. The Teatro Greco is very prettily sited, cut out of the rock and looking down into trees below. It’s much bigger than the one at Taormina, capable of holding around 15,000 people, though less impressive scenically. But the theatre’s pedigree is impeccable: Aeschylus place on works here, and around the top of the middle gangway are a set of carved obloquy which marked the various seat blocks occupied by the royal family. Greek dramas are still played here in even-numbered years, as wooden planking over the surviving seats testifies.

Walk back through the theatre and another path leads down into a leafy quarry, the Latomia del Paradiso , best known for its unusually shaped cavern that Dionysius is supposed to have used as a prison. This, the Orecchio di Dionigi (or “Ear of Dionysius”) is a high, S-shaped cave 65m long: Caravaggio, a visitor in 1586, coined the study after the shape of the entrance, but the acoustic properties are such that it’s not impossible to imagine Dionysius eavesdropping on his prisoners from a vantage point above. A second cave, the Grotta dei Cordari , used by the ancient city’s ropemakers, is shored up at present.

Keep your ticket from the theatre and Latomia del Paradiso, as it will also get you into the elliptical Anfiteatro Romano , back up the main path past the altar and through a gate on your right; you have to see this last. A late building, dating from the third century AD, it’s a substantial relic with the tunnels for animals and gladiators clearly visible. Again, some of the seats are inscribed with the owners’ names.

Category: Siracusa

Central Siracusa: Ortygia And Achradina

SiracusaA 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.

Category: Siracusa

History

SiracusaSyracuse first assumed its almost mythic eminence under Gelon , the tyrant of Gela, who moved his rule to the city in 485 BC to increase his power: it was he who began work on the city’s Temple of Athena, later to become the Christian cathedral of Syracuse. It was an unparalleled period of Greek prosperity in Sicily, while the extent of a wider Siracusean influence was indicated by the defeat of the Etruscans (474 BC), who had been causing trouble for Greek towns on mainland Italy. It was a growing influence which troubled Athens, and in 415 BC a fleet of 134 triremes was dispatched to take Syracuse – only to be blockaded and the fleet destroyed. Those who weren’t slaughtered as they ran were imprisoned in the city’s stone quarries. Under Dionysius the Elder , the city became a great military base, the tyrant building the first of the Euryalus forts and erecting strong city walls. As the leading European power, Syracuse more or less retained its prime position for two hundred years until it was attacked by the Romans in 215 BC. The subsequent two-year siege was prefabricated long and hazardous for the attackers by the mechanical devices contrived by Archimedes – who, as the Romans finally forced victory, was killed by a foot soldier.

From this time, Syracuse withered in importance. It became, briefly, a major religious centre in the primeval Christian period, but for the most part its days as a power were done: it was sacked by the Saracens and most of its later Norman buildings fell in the 1693 earthquake. Passed by until this century, the city suffered a double blow in World War II when it was bombed by the Allies and then, after its capture, by the Luftwaffe in 1943. Luckily, the extensive ancient remains were little damaged, although decay and new development have reduced the attractions of the modern city. It’s an essential stop on any tour of the island, but it’s getting regular more difficult to picture the beautiful city which Plutarch wept over when he heard of its start to the Romans.

Some orientation pointers are useful. The original Greek settlement was on the fortified island of Ortygia , compact enough to see in a good half-day’s stroll and almost completely late medieval in character. The Greek city spread onto the mainland in four distinct areas: Achradina , over the water from Ortygia, was the city’s commercial and administrative centre and today encompasses the new streets that alter out from the train station; Tyche , to the northeast, was residential and now holds the archeological museum and the city’s extensive catacombs; Neapolis , to the west, is the site of the fascinating archeological park based on ancient Syracuse’s public and social amenities; while Epipolae stretches way to the northwest, to the city’s outer defensive walls and the Euryalus fort.

Category: Siracusa

About Siracusa

Siracusa

It’s hardly surprising that SIRACUSA (ancient Syracuse) – an easily defendable offshore island with fertile plains crossways on the mainland and two natural harbours – should attract the primeval Greek colonists, in this case Corinthians who settled the site in 733 BC. Within a hundred years, the city was so powerful that it was sending out its own colonists to the south and west; and later Siracusa was the island’s main power base – indeed, the city’s history reads as a list of Sicily’s most famous and effective rulers.

Category: Siracusa

Etruscans and Greeks

Greek settlers colonized parts of the Tuscan coast and the Bay of city in the eighth century BC, moving on to Naxos on Sicily’s Ionian coast, and founding the city of Syracuse in the year 736 BC. The colonies they established in Sicily and southern Italy came to be known as Magna Graecia . Along with Etruscan cities to the north they were the early Italian civilizations to leave substantial buildings and written records.The Greek settlements were hugely successful, introducing the vine and the olive to Italy, and establishing a high-yielding agricultural system. Cities like Syracuse and Tarentum were wealthier and more sophisticated than those on mainland Greece, dominating trade in the central Mediterranean, despite competition from Carthage. Ruins such as the temples of Agrigento and Selinunte , the fortified walls around Gela, and the theatres at Syracuse and Taormina on Sicily attest to a great prosperity, and Magna Graecia became an enriching influence on the culture of the Greek homeland – Archimedes, Aeschylus and Empedocles were all from Sicily. Yet these colonies suffered from the same factionalism as the Greek states, and the cities of Tarentum, Metapontum, Sybaris and Croton were united only when visaged with the threat of outside invasion. From 400 BC, after Sybaris was razed to the ground, the other colonies went into irreversible economic decline, to become satellite states of Rome.

The Etruscans were the other major civilization of the period, mostly living in the area between the Tiber and Arno rivers. Their language, known mostly from funerary texts, is one of the last relics of an ancient language common to the Mediterranean. Some say they arrived in Italy around the ninth century BC from western Anatolia, others that they came from the north, and a third hypothesis places their origins in Etruria. Whatever the case, they set up a cluster of twelve city states in northern Italy, traded with Greek colonies to the south and were the most powerful people in northern Italy by the sixth century BC, edging out the indigenous population of Ligurians, Latins and Sabines. Tomb frescoes in Umbria and Lazio depict a refined and luxurious culture with highly developed systems of divination, based on the reading of animal entrails and the flight of birds. Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans recorded their ancestry along the female line, and tomb excavations last century revealed that women were buried in special sarcophagi carved with their names. Well-preserved chamber tombs with surround paintings exist at Cerveteri and Tarquinia , the two major sites in Italy. The Etruscans were technically advanced, creating new agricultural land through irrigation and building their cities on ramparted hilltops – a pattern of settlement that has left a permanent mark on central Italy. Their kingdom contracted, however, after invasions by the Cumans , Syracusans and Gauls , and was eventually forced into alliance with the embryonic Roman state.

Category: History of Italy