I’m going to skip over the day that we spent in Ragusa and other Baroque towns mostly because that is not my area expertise. They were beautiful places, and the one story I will tell is that when we had lunch, I accidentally got a sandwich that wasn’t actually a sandwich but some sort of wrap filled with uncooked meat. Fortunately, I was spared any food poisoning.

We got to Syracuse at the end of a long day visting all those Baroque towns, but the back of the bus where the cool kids sat (the Latin class) suddenly sprung to life when we realized that we were approaching Syracuse. The water that is in the picture above is part of the bay called the Big Harbor in Thucydides where many of the naval battles took place. Around the edge of the bay was where the two sides continuously battled and tried to out-maneuver the other with quickly built walls. Now the area looked just like anywhere else. Unlike a more modern battlefield like Gettysburg, the landscape was not dotted with memorials and statues to those who fell there so long ago.

The next day we went to the archeological park where the old Greek theater and the quarries of Syracuse were. We had yet another awe-inspiring moment when Victoria sang part of an opera in one of the caves created in the quarries. The size of the quarry was surprising to me; the rock walls had to have been 100 feet high meaning that there was some real substantial rock being moved. And the theater, still basically the same besides for some erosion after so long, was an exquisite piece of architecture that made even my barbaric self ready to watch a play.

 

What seems like an orange pregnant with a baby orange and may well simply be an interesting mutation in a Sicilian orange (some of which, I found out as I stood outside a display of oranges for sale in front of a gas station, are actually strains of Washington Navels)—I take as a lucky reminder of the distinctive goodness of Sicilian food. Among the new foods I tried, I can remember a grilled horsemeat wrap that tasted maybe like a Big-Mac, pasta bathed in a black squid-ink sauce, and stewed cow spleen in a sandwich. Among the tastiest were the chocolate in Modica and some strawberry granita I had in a Palermo shop owned by a hospitable old gentleman. Experiencing these memorable foods added to the curiosity for cuisine that Bowdoin Dining has helped spark in me. Too, partaking in the special culture around food Italians and Sicilians share—sitting down for longer meals, enjoying the conversation and laughter of good company—definitely served our group well in getting to know each other on a more personal level outside of our lives as academics. When Sue asked Victoria and me to share the weird orange with her, it wasn’t that weird.

Mt. Etna was a fun way to put a top to our trip on our last full day in Italy. In addition to the great and distinct meanings the still-active volcano has inspired among Sicilians over the centuries, including among its Greeks and Romans and its more contemporary writers of modern literature, the significance of the volcano as a geological site was also intriguing to me, since just last semester I fulfilled my INS requirement with an Earth and Oceanographic Science class in which we covered volcanoes. Although I could have benefitted from brushing up on some of the course material or having Cam’s company and his EOS knowledge, I really enjoyed examining some of the rock and seeing the traces of the volcano’s wrath as the bus winded us up toward it. I pondered how exactly the physical and geological aspects of the volcano/mountain have influenced popular and literary perceptions of it, especially considering its geological and cultural connection with Mt. Vesuvius over in Naples.

Although this picture does not do justice to the most proportionally beautiful proportional church façade I’ve seen, it does show the various architectural features that make the Duomo di Siracusa a(n) (out)standing example of the amalgam of peoples who have come to call Sicily home over the centuries. Those Doric columns to the left—fluted, apparently monolithic, and accompanied above by the bottom vestiges of triglyphs—once stood as part of a Greek temple constructed around the 5^th century BC. The temple, which may have originally built to convert an even older religious space, was then converted into a Catholic church in the 6^th or 7^th century, which was converted into a mosque by the Muslims in 878, which was reconverted into a Catholic church by the Normans after 1085. The façade, to the right, with its beautiful columns and intricate designs, flamboyantly displays the Sicilian Baroque architecture popular on the island in the 16 and 1700s; it also suitably cements the cathedral’s (and the Church’s) position as the most prominent part of the plaza del Duomo, the city’s public domain.

Il Valle dei Tempi: Michele, standing on the same massive altar on which I’m sitting, finishes taking a picture of the beautiful landscape behind me (the kind of landscapes the ancient Greeks loved to frame as the backdrop for their monumental buildings); Kim smiles for a picture I’ll guess Sue is taking; some other tourists walk by after having admired the sight; and Prof. Boyd smiles as she calls our attention to begin her lecture on this one impressive temple of several others in the archaeological park. The ruddy color on the inner temple walls persists as evidence to the capture and subsequent burning of the town by invading Carthaginians around 406 BC. One of the defining parts of our trip was having among us two expert scholars—Prof. Boyd and Prof. Gavioli—to enlighten us with their lectures, answer our questions and ask some thought-provoking ones, and point out things that we otherwise would have probably missed. Between them, the juxtaposition of ancient Roman and Greek themes with more contemporary, literary Italian ones, helped to place each topic in better context.