Welcome to Syracuse!

So first things first - Where am I? No, not New York - I'm in Italy! You have probably heard of some well-known cities such as Rome, Venice, or even Florence or Milan, but perhaps not Syracuse. 

Well, to fill you in, Syracuse is located in southern Italy on the island of Sicily (see the arrow on the map). This city, founded in 734 BCE by the Corinthian Greeks, soon became a prominent in the region of Magna Graecia. Sicily later was captured by the Romans and became part of the vast Roman empire. Because of Sicily’s prominent position in the center of the Mediterranean, many other peoples wanted control of the island and occupied Sicily after the Romans, so Syracuse is swimming in history!

I live right in the heart of ancient Syracuse on the Island called Ortigia. My apartment is on one of the ancient main streets of Ortigia, about a minute away from my school if you go north, and two or three minutes away from the Mediterranean if you go south. You can see both from my balcony.  

The view north from my front door!

The view south from my front door!

MCAS!

I have just finished my first week of classes at the Mediterranean Center for Arts and Sciences. I am taking Italian 101 (like most of the people in my program), Volcanology (we get to explore Mount Etna!), Latin (all by myself), Art and Archaeology of Ancient Sicily (from the prehistoric to the Roman period, with an extra course module on Digital Archaeology), and the Sicily Core course (where we learn about Sicilian heritage and culture). Starting Monday I will be volunteering at the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico at their archive.

Food here was one of the things I have been worried about because we don’t have a meal plan. However I have been eating better here than I ever have before. There is one supermarket type store on the island and a bigger one on the mainland that I explored the other day - but still even the big one was much smaller than any Kroger’s I’ve seen. You can get things like sugar, large containers of fruit juice, vinegar, Nutella, olive oil, and tomato sauce in the stores, but almost everything else people buy at the open air market. Fresh bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, and fresh cheese! You can get a large loaf of bread for 60 euro cents. Cheese was more expensive, at 4 euros for a ball of mozzarella, but the free samples you get every time you go to the cheese man as well as the phenomenal taste of fresh fresh cheese is worth every euro you spend. My usual lunch is bread, cheese, and fresh tomatoes with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and oregano. I usually have a kiwi or an orange on the side and blood orange juice to drink. I have fallen in love with blood oranges (Arancia Rossa), which apparently are native to this area and taste sublime.

There are bars on almost every corner where you can get espresso, alcohol, pop, or fruit juice as well as small snacks like stuffed croissants or fried cones full of rice and cheese and often sweets and gelato. These places often have free internet. However my favorite place like this, Café Minerva, has been closed for the past four days and no one can figure out why. Pizza places don’t serve pizza for lunch – after much confusion, we found out it is a dinner thing. Pizza places are all over the island and serve very good pizza for very good prices. We found three Chinese restaurants on the island and a few places serving gyros and kebabs. There are also many more expensive restaurants, but we haven’t checked very many out. We did eat at a homemade pasta place which was excellent – I got pasta with shrimp, mussels, something with claws that looked a bit like a miniature lobster, and squid.

Our street door.

 My apartment is one of the older ones in the area. It has stone floors and high ceilings. We have two bedrooms, an entryway, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a laundry room, and two balconies over the street. The entrance is off of a courtyard, like many of the apartments around here, and so you need two keys to get in. My only complaints about the apartment would be about the lack of any kind of storage space – my roommate and I only have one small closet between us – and the problems with drainage in the bathroom. The limiting factor for taking a shower is not how much hot water you get (maybe 3 or 4 minutes at most) but how long you go before the shower overflows! This first week here we have had lots of fun with water in the bathroom – first our toilet flooded the bathroom and part of the kitchen, then the shower overflowed, and then the top of the shower totally broke off at the top and sprayed the rest of the bathroom that hadn’t already been flooded (walls and ceiling included) with water. Unfortunately once the shower was fixed (which gave us normal water pressure) we have even less time before the shower overflowed. However everything else seems to work fine so far. We have not set ourselves on fire with the gas stove and did manage to figure out how to work the washer.

The weather here has been wonderful, and I am constantly mesmerized by the sun, sky, and sea. These following pictures are for Alex.

More to come - lots more pictures, what I have been up to, what I am planning, and other thoughts!