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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Syracusa: Paolo Orsi and the Ruins

After our night on Mt Etna, we took a route south to the town of Syracusa. Syracusa is both a modern and an ancient city. The modern city houses the Paolo Orsi Museum, full of Sicilian artifacts. We spent the morning visiting the museum and its extensive collections of Greek and roman artifacts. Statuary and pottery predominated the nonetheless varied collections. After the museum in the modern city, we were ready to visit the ancient city nearby.

As we approached the entrance, we saw the Altar of Hieron, a long raised platform, which was used in the ritual sacrifice of large numbers of animals.



After entering, we made our way to the Greek amphitheatre. The amphitheatre, rather than being built up from cut stone, was carved into the hill itself. In parts it has quite eroded, but in others is in surprisingly good shape.

Behind and above the amphitheatre runs a portion of ancient road, and niches in the rock, which were sepulchers, and possibly some also food vendors for audiences attending the plays below. One little niche even had water routed through it by the Greeks to form a beautiful grotto, and that water continues to flow today. As the road winds away form the amphitheater into restricted areas, it is rutted with ancient wagon wheels.




In addition to the ruins of structures, there is also an ancient quarry here known as the Quarry of Paradise, because withing this large pit's walls grows an abundance of tropical plants today. A path leads down into the quarry, which once served to trap Greek prisoners who mined the rock.



Towards the back of the quarry lies the curiously carved ear of Ear of Dionysus referring not to the god but to a ruler who was said to have put his ear to the trumpet-like cave to hear the plotting of the prisoners below.



Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Home of BigFoot

A trip to New Orleans lives up to all expectations. As we headed down south towards the city, we stopped first for a visit to Honey Island Swamp near Slidell, Louisiana. The tour took us up the river in search of alligators, of which we saw several. Some came close to our boat for the treat that the boats were offering: marshmallows. along the edges of the water and flying overhead we saw herons and egrets. We turned down a narrow oxbow of the main river, and eventually arrived within sight of some housing for the natives. Small, shanty like homes whose only access was by boat, accompanied by a house boat that had been overwhelmed by the Katrina flood waters, and lay half submerged, which was nothing compared to the entire home that lay out in a marsh, having been carried there by the storm surge from its foundations further upstream. After that, our boat turned up into a narrow channel, where the water was covered with duckweed, and Spanish moss hung down in streams from the trees. While there had been ample wildlife out on the open river, it was strangely silent among the knob kneed cypress trees. We finally returned to dock, and we were on our was south to the Big Easy.