My one goal while I'm in Sicily is to swim every day. While I'm here in Siracusa, I shall swim in the Ionian Sea. When I'm up in Cefalu next week, I shall swim in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Che bello! Here is the beach that is 50 meters from my apartment:
I swam out a ways and I was astonished how clear the water is. It is a sort of greenish blue, like Persian turquoise. I kept swimming out and out, thinking, gosh, it's so shallow. I can see the bottom clearly. At one point I thought I would put my feet down and stand. But oh no, my darlings. It is not shallow. I think it's quite deep, actually. So I made my way back in, bobbed up and down in the buoyant salt water for about an hour. And it took everything I had to get out of the water.
By the way, here is my front door. It is literally one door down from San Martino.
After my swim, a wander up to the open-air market to buy some glorious fruits and vegetables. I passed the statue of Archimedes which is in the middle of the two bridges that lead into Ortigia.
If you've ever wanted to jump out a window because you decided to take calculus, this is the guy you need to blame. During Siracusa's time as a leading city-state of the Greek world, Siracusa's main man, its native son, Archimedes was working some serious magic....err... um... science and math. After a long night of drinking, he invented the "Archimedes screw," ahem, and he was know for brilliance in naval engineering. Massively creative, it is said that he set fire to an entire Roman fleet with mirrors reflecting the sunlight. Whaaaaaa????? He discovered a way to measure the density of precious metals with water displacement in a bathtub. Upon doing so, he ran through the city naked, screaming, "Eureka" which is Greek for "I found it" and then he fainted. He also did all sorts of math and calculus stuff. He was killed by a Roman legionary. Probably someone who had to take calculus as a Gen Ed core class.
Then I walked over to the Temple of Apollo, darlings. The FIRST Doric temple in Sicily, this dates from about 580 BC. It predates the Parthenon in Athens by 130 years. It is the oldest peripterus stone temple in Sicily. It had a second row of monolithic columns on the main façade; the cell was divided into three naves. Over the centuries, the temple was transformed into a Byzantine church, an Arab mosque, a Norman church, and a Spanish military barracks, until the Fascist period, when it was stripped of all that and brought back to the original.
A Sicilian-style pizza with mortadella, fresh mozzarella and pistachios. Wine from Mount Etna.
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