![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2017\/08\/468231932_10162321454327938_7673385301643593502_n.jpg\")
<\/a>probably be the church, since it incorporates many of the historical trends that explain this island.\u00a0 The original site housed a \u00a0\u00a0Greek temple, and the enormous Doric columns serve duty today as pillars for the church.\u00a0 The city was founded by colonists from Corinth (in Greece) and is a reminder (for me) that Greece was a civilization, rather than an empire.\u00a0 Unlike Rome (which copied a lot of Greek customs, changing the names of the gods, but not their duties\u2014the temple of Athena here, partly reconstructed, became the temple of Minerva when the Roman rulers replaced the Greeks), Greece seems to me best understood as a series of related cities ranging from Asia Minor into the western Mediterranean, Siracusa being a case in point.<\/p>\nIn addition to incorporating the columns into the church, subsequent Norman conquerors incorporated crenelated tops into the building.\u00a0 And of course, later Italian (and Spanish) rulers built more traditional items into the architecture.\u00a0 An earthquake in the 1690s resulted in a magnificent baroque renewal, making the fa\u00e7ade a delightful expression of that architectural style.<\/p>\n
Another church on the square has a Caravaggio (I have a feeling we\u2019re going We had a free afternoon, so after bringing Carolyn back to the boat, I took Our program director, a Florentine, gave us a few extra treats today.\u00a0 One was an introduction to a Granite (shaved flavored ice), but one of the Incidentally, puppet in Italian is pupi, pronounced just like you think.\u00a0 My 10 year old grandson would probably giggle.<\/p>\n August 8, 2017 I had a pupi day in Siracusa (read and see why). We\u2019ve sailed nearly a hundred miles north to 37 degrees north of the equator, to the port of Siracusa in Sicily (translated Syracuse, though the one in New York is the Orangemen; here, the city uniform is green). If I were … Continue reading “A pupi day in Siracusa”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malta-and-italy-august-2017"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1613"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8537,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613\/revisions\/8537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>to see a lot of him).\u00a0 His work in Malta was from his short stint as a knight. He apparently got into a scuffle and was kicked out of Malta, fleeing to Siracusa long enough to create another masterpiece. The church is on the spot where Santa Lucia was martyred–she was a 21 year old brutally killed for being a Christian.<\/p>\n<\/a>the on-and-off bus, determined to see what else I could in the city.\u00a0 Although it has been in the upper 90s (35 or so to Europeans who measure in Celsius), <\/a>I was determined to see the outdoor architectural ruins and the archaeological museum.\u00a0 The museum was a real treat, with a surprising amount of locally-found artifacts from mostly the Greco-Roman period (that was, after all, over a thousand years!), but the ticket taker urged me to hurry to the coin collection, which was closing in half an hour. I\u2019m glad I paid heed, since the coins took the entire first floor, and served as a substitute introduction to history of the island. Every ruler issued coins with his picture on it, from the tyrant Dionisius to Victor Emmanuel (who was the first king of reunified Italy in the mid 19th<\/sup> century).\u00a0 It would have been fun had I had several days to try to put together the various tribes who conquered the island\u2014including the Arabs (who probably converted the temple of Apollo to a mosque, only to have the Normans repurpose it to a church). Half an hour was scarcely sufficient to get acquainted with the history of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the other predecessors of the Sicily of today.\u00a0 Perhaps I\u2019ll have a chance in the next few days as we cruise up to the Straits of Messina.<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>cultural attractions of Sicily is a kind of puppet show, and there is a puppet maker and museum, that he took some of us to visit.\u00a0 We saw the puppets being made, talked with the cast, and saw a play in Italian which pitted good and evil.\u00a0 When asked if they could come to the United States, the puppeteer quipped that he \u201ccan\u2019t bring the Moors.\u201d<\/p>\nIt was a pupi day.<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"