View beneath the replacement bridge for Ponte Grande, target of Operation Ladbroke.

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.

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, at the time Purdue University's only professor of archaeology. Gordon was really smart, he could read both Akkadian and Sumerian, 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.

International travel