SYRACUSE LAST DAY - DAY 11

Wakening quite early on our last full day in Sicily, I was treated to this lively sight from our hotel window.

The clear sky gave us the promise of a beautiful day, as one lonely fisherman returned with his morning catch.

We had made plans with our new friends to take a boat ride around the island, so we walked down to
bridge where we were to find our boat and captain.

Seeing the Island from the water gave us a whole new prospective.  This was one of the beaches which we had not seen from land.

We visited several natural caves carved into the porous limestone, this one that looked like a heart.

The interior of some were very colorful, purple near the water with shades of green and lavender nearer the ceiling.

Our captain seemed to enjoy his job.

We passed the site of our hotel with its green shutters and restaurant on the upper floor.

We passed the Castle Maniace which stands on the tip of the island of Ortygia, where it was built in the first half of the 13th cent. by Frederick II.  It was one of the places we had hoped to tour, but never found it open.

We passed the waterfront where we had walked our first day looking for a place to have lunch.

Under the low bridge and back to the mooring,

Where the fisherman was still working at repairing his nets. 

One of the things I had noted while on our boat ride was a lot of kayaks lined up on the shore.  I had to walk back to see what was going on.  We watched a group of young people getting into their kayaks, with great difficulty, with the help of their instructor who gathered them all on the water for their lesson.

A walk through the market provided many subjects for my camera, such as these packets of spices and nuts and bowls of olives.

And these freshly caught fish. The upsetting thing here for my husband was the dark ones in the foreground, labeled tuna.  As sport tuna fishing off the New Jersey coast, babies this size are always returned to the sea to grow full size, and hopefully procreate.

We stopped, on our way back towards the hotel, at the Archimedes Museum, a wonder hands on museum about the man in Syracuse who almost 2,000 years before Galileo and Newton had intuited
most of the pillars that support today's mathematics and science.  This display represented the legend of how, during the Roman siege of Syracuse Archimedes arranged huge mirrors in a parabolic curve to concentrate the sun's rays on the Roman ships to burn them.

This old bicycle fascinated me with the explanation that "before chains, cogs and gears were invented, it was firmly believed that the bigger the diameter of the wheel, the more the bicycle would move forward.  Hence, the huge wheels of early bicycles."

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We walked back through Cathedral Square where I spotted a building I had not noticed earlier.

And sitting on the Cathedral steps,

was another bride and groom about to have their photo taken by a professional photographer, and me.

Back on the waterfront for a nice lunch we watched a waiter work on a whole fish that had been baked in salt.  It was quite a job breaking into the crust and pealing it away, but no doubt it was delicious - as was everything in Sicily.  It was a wonderful trip in every way!!!