We finally got to Siracusa!!! This is probably my favorite city in Sicily. It’s right by the ocean, is not TOO touristy but is still lively and breathtakingly beautiful. Here’s a picture of four of us the day we arrived!!

We stopped by at a really amazing amphitheater that was all carved out of one large piece of stone/mountain. Apparently they still have performances there!

During our free time, three of my classmates and I walked along the water talking about how great the trip had been up until that point and how far we had gotten with our speaking ability. That walk was probably one of my favorite moments of the entire trip. The weather was perfect and the sunset was making the water look like a multicolored jewel.

My favorite part of the day was our short stop at Modica. We were only given an hour and a half and my class and I were determined to make the most of the time we had. The town was on a hill so we had to climb SO many flights of stairs to get to the top. We were pretty excited at how pretty it was so we ended up running up. Here’s Adam running ahead of the group.

We went to the center and found a lovely piadina place where we got lunch to go, bought some Modica chocolate (which is SOOOO good) and ran back down. On the way down, Adam found out that he got an internship at a Foundation in D.C. so we celebrated with hugs and love and continued our way back to the bus.

On Day 6, we went to Agrigento where we visited the home of Luigi Pirandello. Again, another fangirl day for me. His house was full of handwritten letters, manuscripts, and drawings by Pirandello and his family members. What was really memorable though was learning about the author’s death. Before the trip, Anna and I had to translate lines from Pirandello’s death wish and we read them aloud at Pirandello’s tomb. My part was:

“When I am dead, do not clothe me. Wrap me naked in a sheet. No flowers on the bed and no lighted candle. A pauper’s cart. Naked. And let no one accompany me, neither relatives nor friends. The cart, the horse, the coachmen, e that’s all. Burn me.”

What ended up happening though since Pirandello was such a celebrity, was that none of these wishes were actually met. There is so much more to the story that I would probably butcher if I tried to recount it, so I won’t.

But I did snag a sweet picture of his death wish (attached is the picture!).

Maybe my problem with Palermo was that I felt unsure of the scale/proportions of the place. A general rule of thumb I try to follow when in new places is to find the highest spot I can in order to get a lay of the land. Going to Monreale allowed me to do that and get a better handle of the Sicilian landscape. The cathedral itself was also amazing. The thing that struck me was the relative age of it. The building was completed in 1182, 150 years before the building of Notre Dame. Obviously Monreale is not on the same scale, but the ability to build such a grand building at that time tells you something about the wealth of Sicily.

From there, it was a slow but breathtaking trip to Segesta. Carmelo, our bus driver, took us through some small Sicilian towns and rocky hills. Our big bus could barely fit on the road a lot of the time. The great thing about Segesta (and a lot of other places that we went to) was that there was nearly nobody else there. We were free to explore the Greek temple and Roman theater without being surrounded by other tourists. In the theater, my group had the opportunity to recap the first four books of the Aeneid to our classmates sitting up high. Segesta is where the Athenians sent envoys to before their Sicilian Expedition. On the site of the Roman theater that we were in was an older Greek theater that the Athenians might have been in while they listened to the Segestans make their argument for an alliance. It was special to be able to perform for my classmates in a thousands year old theater. Now that we are out of Palermo, things, at least for me, are really starting to get interesting.

  

“Sons of the Greeks, advance! Deliver your country, deliver your children and your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, the tombs of your ancestors. Now is the contest which decides all!” (p.52 – 3)
So Aeschylus, the great Athenian tragedian wrote in his classic work The Persians. This tragedy chronicles the heroism of the Greeks, with the Athenians at the prow, in defending Greece against the invading Persian armies. The same words were recited in the great Greek theater of Syracuse only a matter of decades before the few survivors of the failed Athenian expedition were imprisoned in the adjacent quarries. They highlight the change in the Athenians from heroic defenders of freedom to doomed invaders seeking hegemony. The irony is not lost on the modern observer, and likely was not lost on those unlucky Athenians. Pictured here is the theatre as it looks today.