Page 344 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Lined with Fascist-era palazzi housing clothes and shoe shops, Corso Matteotti leads

uphill from Largo XXV Luglio to Piazza Archimede, its centrepiece a twentieth-
century fountain depicting the nymph Arethusa (the symbol of Ortigia) at the moment
of her transformation into a spring. The square is surrounded by restored medieval
palazzi, while down the skinny Via Montalto you can admire the facade of the

Palazzo Montalto, graced by immaculate double- and triple-arched windows, and a
star of David cut into the stonework. This is one of the few buildings in this style to
have survived the 1693 earthquake– an inscription dates its construction to 1397.

Arkimedeion

Piazza Archimede 10 • Daily 10.30am–7pm • €6 • 0931 61 121, arkimedeion.it
Occupying two floors of the recently restored Palazzo Pupillo, the high-tech

Arkimedeion museum is devoted to Siracusa’s most famous son, Archimedes. There
are replicas – many of them interactive – of his inventions, including a parabola
microphone in the courtyard, or you can try your hand at the Tangram-like

Stomachion puzzle, with 536 solutions. Replicas of his most famous inventions –
including a catapult, a human lever and the hydraulic screw – are due to arrive in
2014.

Piazza del Duomo

Ortigia’s most impressive architecture belongs to its Baroque period, and nowhere
does this reach such heights as in the city’s (some would say Sicily’s) loveliest
square, the Piazza del Duomo. It’s been gloriously restored, and the traffic kept out,

so that the encircling seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings are now seen at
their best from the pavement cafés, notably the Municipio (corner of Via Minerva) and
the Palazzo Beneventano opposite.

The Duomo

Piazza Duomo • Usually daily 8am–7pm; may close earlier, and at lunchtime in winter • €2

The great age of Siracusa’s Duomo is first glimpsed from around the side in Via
Minerva, where stout Doric columns (part of an earlier Greek temple) form the very
skeleton of the structure. The site was already sacred when the Greeks started work on
an Ionic temple to Athena here in about 530 BC, though this was abandoned when a
new temple was begun in thanksgiving for the victory over the Carthaginians at

Himera. The extravagant decoration that adorned this building spread its fame
throughout the ancient world, and tantalizing details of it have come down to us
through Cicero, who visited Syracuse in the first century BC and listed the temple’s
former contents as part of his prosecution of the Roman praetor and villain Verres,
who appeared to have walked off with a good proportion of them – part of the booty