We visited the city of Syracusa (Syracuse) today, a pretty old city settled by original Stone Age wanderers, then Greeks, then conquered by Romans and by Spanish people and poooossibly also by a few others, in a trip that was led by the navy base. Our first stop was a mixed Greek religious, Roman entertainment site, so here's where you get tickets and express your tourist-ness:
Here's a Roman amphitheatre, which used to be above the canopy height but the Spaniards sacked it, also apparently it used to have a pool in the middle:
Now you can see we're in the limestone quarry, which was dug down from ground level, which you can see at the top of the photo, and that slit was a vein of really good limestone they dug out. The roof of the quarry fell in about three hundred years ago, so they turned it into a really pretty garden:
The touristas and I taking photos in the 'cave':
And then we went into the city proper, here are mere and Bill at the ruins of a temple dedicated to Apollo:
We visited a cathedral:
(Altar:)
That was interesting because the walls of the modern structure used the standing columns of a temple originally built by the Greeks to Athena, and you can see the columns here on the left:
Oh and here you can see that the historic bit of the city is actually on an island, Bill fed the fish some crackers:
So yeah, good day. Nothing more to report other than the cannons that keep going off and tripping the fuse box or whatever the slang is a few more times today.
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