4/13 It’s Wednesday and we have been in Italy a full week now. We are still relearning not only language but little things one doesn’t think about until the need pops up, like, you don’t order a “quarter pound” of prosciutto — you order an etto. Taking the train? Well, if you buy a paper ticket from either a machine or from an attendant, you have to validate the ticket before getting on the train (there are little ticket punching machines on the platforms.) Or, just order online, download your “ticket” on your phone and it is automatically validated! Or, you walk just about everywhere — sometimes that’s the only way to get where you want to go. We are racking up 20,000 steps a day! But the buses are easy to use!

While there are cars everywhere, there are sections of town, like where we abitiamo (reside) that cars are prohibited so if you happen to rent one, you need to think about where you can park it. We did not rent by the way! Or thinking about all the videos you may have seen about cars in Rome and how bad the traffic is, step out into a pedestrian crosswalk and the drivers stop to let you cross! Not once have we stopped into a crosswalk that drivers have not stopped to let us cross.

This morning Jim took another sunrise walk and picked up on a few more beautiful sights here in Siracusa. He’s not quite made it in time to see the sun rise across the Ionian Sea but he is getting closer. Perhaps tomorrow, now that we have made it past the jet lag period, he’ll get up in time to catch the sun coming up on the horizon. This morning he saw the illumination of another church and the castle, Castello Maniace, at the end of Ortigia, the old town of Syracuse, as well as a cat hotel along the way! The Church of Spirito Santo is a baroque-style, Roman Catholic church which has stood since the 4th century, but had been damaged severely by earthquakes.

The Castello Maniace is a citadel and castle in Syracuse. It was constructed between 1232 and 1240 by the Emperor Frederick II. It bears the name of George Maniakes, the Byzantine general who besieged and took the city in 1038.

While not overrun with them, there are quite a few cats in Syracuse and on the island of Ortigia. We have not heard or seen anything explaining their importance here although we do not see any rats running around near the port. But the folks do seem to take care of them, from shelter to feeding. This is just one location where shelter and food and water are provided. You can just see the body of a black cat in the lower left corner of the “facility.”

After returning to the apartment to pick me up, Jim and I journeyed out to visit the cathedral, the Duomo. The Cathedral of Syracuse (Duomo di Siracusa) is an ancient Catholic church and is the seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of Syracuse. It was built where a Greek temple originally stood. The great Greek Temple of Athena was built in the 5th century BC. The temple was a Doric edifice with six columns on the short sides and 14 on the long sides. You saw a photo of the exterior yesterday so today we focus on the interior. In this first photo, you can see the Greek columns mentioned above.

As of 2015, the cathedral holds a number of relics of Santa Lucia, the patroness of Syracuse: a number of bone fragments, a robe, a veil, and a pair of shoes.^[4] Twice a year a statue of Saint Lucy by sculptor Pietro Rizzo (1599) is brought out of the cathedral and paraded through the streets.

This is a photo of the statue of Santa Lucia mentioned above. There is a formal name for these “statues” of patron saints honoring various cities and which are carried through the streets of the honored cities by parishioners on that saint’s day. Santa Lucia’s “day” is December 13th. Long poles are inserted into those square holes at the bottom of the statue and parishioners then hoist the statue onto their shoulders to begin the procession though the city.

We then checked out a few stores and other sights, discovering along the way a cute little cafe where we opted for brunch, in part because instead of only caffe and brioche, it offered pancakes and eggs!

We then headed back to the apartment. Our routine has been to head out for about two hours and then return to the apartment for a little rest and think through what else we need or would like to do that day. Fran decided she would like to prepare a pasta dish for supper so the first order of business became a search for pasta fresca of fresh pasta – NOT from a box. After hitting up two locations Google told us had fresh pasta but do not exist any more, we headed well up into the city. Let’s make that two miles away from the apartment. See how easy it is to rack up 20,000 steps. Of course we did not know at the time that besides being quite a hike, it was all uphill.

On the way out of what we might call the business district, we passed the Church of San Tommaso al Pantheon, a photo of which we showed you earlier in the blog. Well, NOT to our surprise as it happened several times in our 2014 and 2016 visits to Italy, there was a funeral taking place at the church. No, we figured it would be a bad idea to try to tour the church at that time. Maybe tomorrow! Now, how could we tell there was a funeral service taking place? Check out not only the silver, Mercedes hearse but the main indication, the fellows in the black suits, just like every other funeral we’ve happened onto!

We found the pastificio a little further on — make that 25 blocks further on, purchased the pasta, ravioli in this case, and headed back home. We stopped at the supermercato and picked up tomatoes and a few other ingredients so Fran could make her gravy — tomato sauce in some families.

On the way back home, downhill I might add, we passed by the Tomb of Archimedes which we’ll visit along with several other archeological sites later this week.

How did the ravioli turn out? It was awesome, made great I (Jim) might add by Fran’s gravy. The tomatoes here are simply out of this world. We honestly have never had better, whether eating them straight off the farmers’ market stand or cooking with them.

Finally, we are frequently asked about the places we stay. We’ve always had wonderful places and at very reasonable prices. Here are three photos from this apartment just to show that the real thing is as good as any of the pictures used in the AirBNB, VRBO or Booking.com websites showing apartments.

This is going to do it for tonight. Our legs fell off about 15 minutes after we finished that great ravioli and what is left of our bodies is doggone tired. So, a domani, or until tomorrow, buona notte.