Easter Sunday in Syracuse

This is the day we should have gotten into the car and driven south and inland to Noto and Ragusa. It seems, however, much more tempting to just continue our dawdling around this lovely place. First decision is to beat the breakfast crowd, and we throw on some clothes and are amongst the first in the empty dining room, where tiny chocolate eggs have been placed on every place setting, and the splendid breakfast display as yet unravished:

Then we decide it's time to see the mainland part Syracuse, and, when Victor is awake, we set out on foot to cross one of the bridges, passing on the way a street fair with a truck full of cheeses and cold cuts

 and an improvised tasting of ouriços - sea urchins - with the scraped out orange innards, which can't be seen here, served in little plastic cafezinho cups :(

We've been told it's a 25 minute walk to the Parco Archeologico della Neapolis, and so it is, uphill the Corso Gelone, crowded with the families, which have spilled out of church in their Sunday best. We finally find the entrance and see the Anfiteatro Romano, used for gladiatorial combats and horse races - you can still see the walkways beneaths the seats - in some way reminiscent of the Plazas del Toros that I recently saw in Seville and Ronda.

Further on lies the massive pleasteau of the  Ara de Nerone, a sacrificial place, where up to 450 oxen could be offered at the same time. Then we wander into a valley to see the huge grotto called the Ear of Dionysos,

 

because it was said he could listen to his prisoners, 7000 Syracusians, trapped in a limestone quarry beyond its walls - the acustics are perfect in the 23m high space. Finally we find the Teatro Greco, still in use for the plays of Aeschylus, played in the early spring. We'll just miss a performance.

Out again on the road we follow the fence along an immense gorge, now filled with flowering trees and blackbirds singing, but which was used as the prison for the losers of the 413BC war between Athens and Syracuse. We're looking for Archimedes grave as marked on our map, but only find abandoned excavations behind rusty fences.
We find a cab to take us back to Ortigia (15 euros - almost Danish prices!) and resolve to have pizza and a beer on the Piazza de Duomo, doing some people-watching, in fact seeing many of the people that were in the park, pass by us.
An ice-cream beckons, mine pistachio on a stick covered with white chocolate and chopped pistachio nut. Divine.
Victor resolves to walk home along the sea to work, and Oswaldo and I go in seach of the puppet museum. We find it, and wait and wait for it to open, but it never does, and then we too go home for a long and deserved nap. There is no way we can eat a single thing anymore and stay in, sipping  a little Don Corleone red wine and chatting with a Japanese looking Victor, who has just finished all 1500 pages of Hurakami's Kafka on the Shore.

We've passed the middle of our trip and leave tomorrow for Taormina, possibly via Noto, which apart from being a pretty baroque town is renowned for having the 2 best icecream places in the world!