SIRACUSA

"… so we go to Siracusa, city 'fatale', city of destiny, as Greek as Greece, still marvellous despite the building eyesores. And who hasn't felt happy all of a sudden as they stroll round the old city of Ortigia, blooming with mullioned windows as slender as lily-stalks, and then with papyrus plants in the Fountain of Aretusa?

Nothing spectacular: a walk raised above the sea, a walk with the poets, and in the distance, the magical Fountain, so simple, a fountain with those strange fan-shapes of the papyrus, like green hair. Yet in Egypt where they came from, the papyrus is no more, it no longer grows, and here in a replacement habitat, they are beautiful, flourishing, a very symbol of the written word, a vehicle of history and poetry.

Then there is the theatre, so famous yet never disappointing, and Castello Eurialo, a country walk, between olive trees and cypresses, and in the distance the sea and unfortunately also industrial plants, which could have been put elsewhere so as not to disturb this pastoral serenity, this place of eclogues and idylls; here we might say that Theocritus walked; here if you listen very carefully, you can still hear the chattering of the Syracusan girls.

Here too, at Siracusa, Caravaggio disembarked as a fugitive from Malta, and left a masterpiece, the first of a series of Sicilian paintings which time ruined and that the Istituto Centrale di Restauro has now restored."

Cesare Brandi, da Sicilia mia, 1989