Vistas in Sicily

by Arthur Stanley Riggs

From the island of Ortygia the city spread up the hilly mainland in four new boroughs—Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis and Epipolai—making a mighty pentapolis; a community which was not only the foremost of all the Greek cities in the island, but much the greatest in physical extent of all the Greek cities in the world, and for a time the greatest city of Europe as well as of Greece. This naturally made Athens jealous, and in 415 B. C. the pent up force of Attic wrath loosed itself in a tremendous blast against Syracuse. But Athens’ traditional enemy, Sparta, sent the island city help, and the Athenian arms went down in one of the most appalling defeats of all history. After this vivid chapter, governments and tyrants rose and fell again as before, deliverers came and conquered in the name of the people, and passed, and at last the young giant Rome stepped in with brazen legionaries and put a period to the brilliant story.

To-day, as in the beginning, the city is on Ortygia, the houses crowding together behind the old walls like birds on a roost, and you wonder why, when there was such ample space on the shore, the people huddled together so. The streets, moreover, are amazingly shifty. On foot you set out to explore the town and encircle it by keeping as close to the walls as possible—a matter of a mere hour and a half, with plenty of time to idle by the way. According to the maps this should be no great feat, but try as you may, it seems impossible to lay a true course, and becoming discouraged after slipping off one street four or five times, you abandon yourself to the vagaries of these astonishing high and byways—they fade into one another without sign or signal, they vanish on front doorsteps, end after half a block in blind alleys, terminate in bastions which lead one to suppose that the sea must be below on the other side, only to turn up somewhere else in most mysterious fashion, and not always running in the same direction as their beginning.

There is little that is up-to-date about Syracuse. To a great extent it lives in medieval seclusion and its people are simple, genial folk so wholly out of touch with the world that whatever is essential for comfort or convenience is proper in public. On one street, for instance, I saw the economical wife of a small shopkeeper wash her baby’s only frock—a slim little red calico—and button it to dry over the bulgy part of a lamppost, which looked choked and uneasy as the tiny slip fluttered in the wind. Meantime the piccola signorita disported herself amiably in the street—and all her frolicking in the dust could not hurt what she wore.

Near the center of the city stands the Cathedral, a queer combination of battlemented Moorish castle, ancient Greek temple and modern Christian structure. Nearly thirteen centuries ago Bishop Zosimus of Syracuse began the work of turning the ruined temple—built early in the sixth century B. C.—into a Christian church, filling in the peristyle with a solid wall in which some of the Doric columns are still visible. The Saracen invaders turned it into a mosque in the year 878, and for two centuries muezzins chanted the names of Allah and Muhammad from its walls. With the Norman conquest in the eleventh century the building again became a Christian house of worship, and though the earthquake of 1693 destroyed a part of it, the damage was soon repaired and it has ever since remained the diocesan church of Syracuse. Like many of the often restored cathedrals of Meridional Italy, its interior is barren and uninteresting, but its exterior, with Greek entablature and columns, Saracenic frieze and battlements, and hideous Renaissance façade and portico is unique among Christian churches.

There seems some doubt among the archæologists as to the deity worshiped here in pagan days. It was formerly ascribed to Diana, but the authorities now generally believe it was the shrine of Minerva, though Cicero’s glowing description of the Temple of Minerva (Athena) places that structure in a location apparently different from the site of the present Duomo. The orator says he saw a temple on whose apex was “...a great brazen shield overlaid with gold, which served as a landmark to sailors on entering the port. The folding doors of ivory and gold were also adorned with a marvelous golden head of Medusa.” Most of these magnificent treasures were stolen. The Roman prætor Gaius Verres, a gentleman with a highly cultivated taste in works of art, stripped Syracuse—and all Sicily, in fact—absolutely bare of everything the Roman armies had overlooked. And when at last he was brought to book for his crimes, he fled into voluntary exile with his plunder rather than face the scathing invective of Cicero.

The archæologists’ dubiety regarding the name of the temple has no room in the minds of the street arabs, however, who vociferously proclaim it the “Tempio di Diana,” and will not suffer you to leave until you have paid for this volunteered information.

Diagonally across the Piazza Duomo is the externally unimposing Museum. Its collection, however, is both interesting and intelligently arranged. It covers the civilization of Sicily from the bone and flint implements of the extinct prehistoric Sikels, through the transitional Greek period of the metopes from Selinus, to the splendid coins and vases of the city’s supremacy as an Hellenic center of culture and art. In fact, the profile of Arethusa, on coins signed by Evanetus and Kimon, is considered the most exquisite Greek head known to us. In those days coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, accustomed to signing their work, like painters and sculptors, and these two, Evanetus and Kimon, have left us a noble set of coins in which the Greek conception of divinity appears at its best. The most beautiful marble is a Venus Anadyomene, discovered in 1804, and preserved almost intact save for the head and one arm.

Not very far away there are ruins of another and very remarkable Greek temple, formerly called for Diana, but now generally considered to have been dedicated to Apollo—the archæologists seem to have a grudge against the virgin huntress! There is not much else that is Greek, but as you wander through the narrow streets, scattered bits of mediæval architecture appear in the most unexpected places, like the splendid Sicilian-Gothic and Saracenic windows of the Montalto and Lanza palaces, all the richer and more wonderful because of the surroundings from which they look down upon the squalid streets and out-at-heel people. The later Palazzo Municipale, or City Hall, is a fine example of the architectural spirit of the seventeenth century, its type that of a private palace, a baronial mansion rather than a public building. During this period great attention was paid to ornamental ironwork for decorative purposes upon the façades of buildings; and all about us are delicate and satisfying window balconies, some of which plainly testify to their Spanish origin.

The first of the Greek settlers brought their home legends with them to Sicily, where they found a friendly soil, attaining their fullest perfection in the sympathetic hands of the Latin poets. Some of the most beautiful weave through the story of Syracuse, and the most delightful walk in the city—one you will want to take often—leads you straight along the edge of the Great Harbor, on a wide, tamarind-bordered esplanade, with the town wall rising behind, to the picturesque, papyrus-fringed little pool accounted for by one especially gracious tale, and called the Fountain of Arethusa.