How Was Syracuse Built

Syracuse is built from one material and rebuilt repeatedly out of itself.

The local limestone

The soft white limestone of the Hyblaean plateau cuts easily, hardens on exposure and weathers to a warm honey colour. Everything here is made of it: the Greek temples, the theatre cut into the hillside, the baroque palaces and the sea walls. The latomie — the quarries it all came out of — are themselves among the sights, sheer-walled pits now planted with citrus, one of them containing the tapering cave that Caravaggio is said to have named the Ear of Dionysius for its acoustics.

Reuse rather than replacement

The cathedral is the clearest case anywhere in Sicily: a Doric temple turned into a church by filling the gaps between its columns and cutting arches through its cella wall, leaving the fifth-century BC structure doing the work. The Temple of Apollo at the island's entrance, one of the oldest Doric temples in Sicily, went the other way — church, then mosque, then church, then barracks — and survives as a skeleton.

After 1693

The earthquake levelled much of the south-east, and the rebuilding gave Ortigia its baroque face: curved balconies on carved corbels, deep window surrounds, and Piazza Duomo laid out as a single theatrical space paved in pale stone.

Cut from the bedrock

The Greek builders often did not stack stone at all but carved down into the living rock: the theatre's seating rows, the tomb chambers, and the Altar of Hieron, nearly two hundred metres long and the largest altar of the ancient world, of which the base survives because the base is the hillside itself.

Castello Maniace

Frederick II's square castle of the 1230s closes the tip of the island. It carries the name of George Maniakes, the Byzantine general who briefly retook the city two centuries earlier, and its hall is a single vaulted space on slender columns.