Ortigia
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| Piazza Duomo, Ortigia, Sicily, 2015 |
A excerpt from a longer project I am currently working on:
Ortigia
is a maze of winding, narrow streets.
Three story limestone buildings fill the island, blotting the sun from
most of the interior streets, barely wide enough for a Fiat 500 to pass. Pedestrians step into doorways to avoid being
clipped by a slowly rolling four wheeled piece of Italian design and
engineering. It would be easy to get
lost in the spiderweb of cobblestones if the island weren’t so small. Keep walking and you’ll hit either the Ionian
Sea or a piazza, most likely the Piazza Duomo, where the Cathedral of the
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary dominates.
The cathedral was built, technically
rebuilt, in the early 1700s after the devastating earthquake of 1693 which
destroyed not only Ortigia, but most of eastern Sicily, killing 60,000
people. Baroque was the style in the
early 18th century, so when the town was rebuilt, it was
baroque. Technically, Sicilian Baroque,
flamboyant and ornamental.
But
it wasn’t always that way. Archaeologists
have found pre-Hellenic artifacts under what is now the cathedral. After that, the Greeks built a temple
here. Some of the Doric columns are even
visible today. Then, the Moors built a
mosque on the site which was made into a church when the Normans kicked out the
Moors. Of course, none of them could
compete with the power of Mother Nature who did her best to bring this part of
Sicily to her knees with the devastation of 1693.
Perhaps it
is this cross section of peoples from all over Europe and Africa that have
battled for, won and been pushed out of Sicily, that makes this place a little
more tolerant of arrivals than others. Even so, skin color can be a flash point for anyone who is racist or has an ax to grind with
the Africans who arrive on the shores of Italy every day.
The façade of the cathedral is
massive, stretching hundreds of feet along the piazza. On the steps, teenagers flirt and tourists
crane their necks to take pictures with their phones, undeniable proof that
they have actually been to Sicily. An
accordion player sits on a folding chair nearby, playing for tips and posing
for pictures with the same tourists. An African man walks by all of them to the far end of the façade and puts his
sospiri, a round egg white cake pastry with a white sugar glaze filled with
lemon custard, on the carved limestone railing next to him. He strums his krar, killing time.
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