Siracusa
Visiting Siracusa
The name of the city is Siracusa and has been since 734–733 BCE when the Greeks established the colony of Συράκουσαι or Syrakousai here. American books tend to instead use the name of the city in the central part of New York state.
Map of ancient Siracusa from a 1903 atlas via Wikimedia, complete atlas at the Internet Archive.
Where Next In Italy?
🚧 = under construction
In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to
scan cuneiform tablets
to archive and share 3-D data sets,
providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them.
I worked on the project with Gordon Young,
who was Purdue University's only professor
of archaeology.
Gordon was really smart,
he could read both Sumerian and Akkadian,
and at least some of other ancient languages
written in the cuneiform script.
He told me to go to Italy,
"The further south, the better."
Gordon was right.
Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome,
but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system
that runs overnight sleepers all the way to
Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners
of Sicily.
So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order,
as they should be.