Marcian was born in Antiochia around the 1st century and was a martyred bishop, venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. According to local legend, Marcian was the first bishop of Syracuse, where he was sent by St. Peter to preach the Gospel and found the Christian commu...

The Sicilian poet Salvatore Quasimodo spent many of his days walking along the steep paths of Pantalica. In fact, the nature and colours of this place inspired his poetry, like the poem Albero (Tree, translation by Jack Bevan): "From you a shadow melts\making mine seem dead\though with its motion i...

Publius Vergilius Maro, commonly known as Virgil, was a Latin poet and writer. He was born near Mantua in 70 BC and died in Brindisi in 19 BC. He is known for his literary works the Bucolics and the Georgics, but mainly for the Aeneid, which recounts the origins of Rome. The third book of the Oper...

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor belonged to the Suevian noble Hohenstaufen family and was the last ruler of this dynasty to reign in Sicily. He descended on his mother's side from the Normans of Hauteville, conquerors of Sicily and founders of the Kingdom of Sicily. Known as the stupor mundi ("the...

Plato was an Athenian philosopher who lived between the 5th and 4th centuries BC. He mainly wrote dialogues that delved further into Socrates' philosophy and developed a philosophical concept based on the relationship between "things" belonging to a physical reality and "ideas", conceptual models ...

The peristasis, from the Greek for "enclosure", is a porticoed colonnade, mostly quadrangular in shape, surrounding the temple's shrine....

Aeschylus was a Greek poet and playwright who was born in 525 BC to an aristocratic family from Eleusis. After moving to Athens to try his hand at dramatic agonies, he lived for a period in Sicily, at the court of his patron, tyrant Hiero I of Syracuse. It is likely that during his stay in Sicily, ...

The illustrious Syracusan novelist Elio Vittorini was inspired throughout his life by the places of his birthplace, which became a sort of sentimental route even within his novels. In fact, the Sicilian writer always wandered between two places in Via Minerva: the more frequented Minerva bar and th...

In his 1980 Viaggi e scritti letterari (Travels and Literary Writings), Cesare Brandi dedicates a chapter to Pantalica entitled "Quella fata Morgana chiamata Pantalica" (The Fata Morgana named Pantalica), in which he gives an evocative account of his journey through the Anapo valley, discovering a s...

The first Christian tombs were extremely simple and poor. Following Christ's example, corpses were wrapped in a sheet with no coffin. Different types of tombs can be found in the catacomb of San Giovanni. The tuff walls were dug into for loculi, rectangular niches enclosed by tiles, marble slabs o...