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 5th 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 6th or 7th 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.