Syracuse historical timeline

For several centuries Syracuse was the most important Greek city outside Greece, and the rest of its history is the long consequence of that.

The Greek city

Settlers from Corinth landed on Ortigia in 733 BC. The city grew to dominate Sicily, fought Carthage repeatedly, and in 413 BC destroyed the enormous Athenian expedition sent to take it — a defeat that crippled Athens and changed the Peloponnesian War. The survivors were imprisoned in the quarries. Under Dionysius I in the fourth century the city was the largest in the Greek world and its fortifications ran for kilometres.

Archimedes and Rome

Archimedes was born here around 287 BC and spent his life in the city. When Rome besieged it from 214 BC he designed the machines that held the fleet off for two years; when Marcellus finally took Syracuse in 212 BC Archimedes was killed, against orders, by a Roman soldier.

Byzantine and Arab

Under Rome the city declined into a provincial capital. The Byzantine emperor Constans II moved his court here in the 660s, briefly making Syracuse the seat of the empire, until he was murdered in his bath. The Arabs took the city in 878 after a long siege, and the Normans in 1086.

Earthquake and baroque

The earthquake of 1693 devastated south-eastern Sicily. Syracuse was rebuilt in the baroque of that reconstruction, which is why an ancient island is faced almost entirely in eighteenth-century stone.

1943

Syracuse was the first major objective of the Allied landings in Sicily and fell on 10 July 1943. Eight weeks later the armistice taking Italy out of the war was signed at Cassibile, a few kilometres south of the city, on 3 September.

Modern

From the 1950s a large petrochemical complex was built along the coast north of the city, around Augusta and Priolo — it brought work and lasting pollution, and the stretch is still designated an area of high environmental risk. The old city went the other way: Ortigia emptied and decayed for decades before its restoration. Syracuse was inscribed by UNESCO in 2005, together with the rock necropolis at Pantalica.