Page 348 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

canvas are taken up by a bare wall may have more to do with lack of time than
aesthetics, for as Caravaggio was painting it, he was in fear of his life, pursued, it’s
thought, by the Knights of Malta.

The canvas was designed not for this church, but for the church of Santa Lucia across
in the Borgata, scene of the saint’s martyrdom, and home of her tomb (if not her body,
which has been in Venice since the time of the Crusades). Bathed in shafts of sunlight,
dwarfed by stark, scorched bare plaster walls, two mighty gravediggers brace

themselves to lower the corpse of the saint into her tomb, watched by a bishop and
mourners. One tradition is that the bearded gravedigger to the left is a portrait of Alof
de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta – and that painting him in this
role was Caravaggio’s way of taking revenge on the man who had had him
imprisoned. Paranoid and persecuted, Caravaggio slept fully dressed and fully armed
whilst painting the work, and fled from Siracusa as soon as it was finished, not even

waiting for the painting to be unveiled at the feast of Santa Lucia.

HEAR HEAR

The Orecchio di Dionisio owes its name to the painter Caravaggio, who was taken
to visit the cave during a visit to Siracusa in October 1608. Said to have been used

as a prison by the ancient Greek tyrant, Dionysus, the cave’s natural acoustics
amplified every sound, and from their base above a crack at the apex, sentries could
eavesdrop on the prisoners hundreds of metres below. Having just escaped from
prison and fled to Siracusa, Caravaggio was deeply disturbed by this ingenious
quirk. He noted that the cave amplified sound in the same way as the human ear –

which led recent biographer Andrew Graham Dixon to speculate that Caravaggio
saw the “speaking cave” as an image of his own contracting world, where every
movement was monitored by spies, every remark overheard by eavesdroppers.

Fonte Aretusa

Largo Aretusa

Down from the Duomo toward the seafront, the freshwater spring known as the Fonte
Aretusa is probably the next most photographed part of the island. Planted with
papyrus, and filled with bream below the water and ducks above, it’s a compulsory
stop on the evening passeggiata. It’s ringed by cafés, while the terrace above offers
sweeping views across the bay. The spring was mentioned in the original Delphic

directions that brought the first Greek settlers here, and the number of myths with
which it’s associated underlines the strong sentimental links that continued to bind the
colonists to their motherland. This was where the nymph Arethusa rose after
swimming across from the Peloponnese, having been metamorphosed into a spring by