Città dei Gatti

Ok, I have given up. I have spent the last few days trying to write something brilliant, funny and pithy.  No luck. You’ll just have to lump it.

After a normal-horrible flight, we arrived in Siracusa, which is at the bottom righthand corner of Sicily, looking out onto the Ionian Sea.   When we drink enough black Sicilian wine, we imagine that we can see Greece.

Siracusa is divided into two parts: a modern city on the mainland and the old city of Ortygia on a small island 100 meters off the coast. Like most old cities in Europe, Ortygia is a charming, medieval warren of narrow streets and even smaller alleys.

Yesterday we went to the regional art museum and saw a large wooden map of Siracusa from the 18^th century.  It was the same map the tourism department hand out today. Nothing appears to have changed in 300 years.

Then, we went to the anthropology museum and saw a map of Ortygia from the fifth century BCE.  Again, the layout of the streets was the same, only their names have changed depending on which empire held the city in any given century.

Oh true, Greek temples were converted to Roman ones, then transformed to early Christian churches, then to mosques, and then to Byzantine churches, synagogues, Norman churches, Spanish churches, and finally, ornate Italian churches.  But the street alignments and the property lines are forever.

One of the benefits of the narrow streets is that traffic (where it exists at all) moves at a slow pace, and alleys are restricted to a slow swarm of Vespas and light motorcycles.

This quiet, calm space has in turn engendered an explosion of street cats on every corner.  Cats are everywhere: hanging out at churches, cruising restaurants, sleeping on car rooves, hissing at one another, and telling lies about their love affairs.

They don’t appear to be feral, at least not like the feral cats at home, as they don’t run from humans.  I expect that quite a few have human families that work to support them and keep them in flea collars.  But for the most part, humans are simply scenery to be dismissed whenever possible.

Undoubtedly, the same tribe of cats met the Greeks when they founded the city some 2,700 years ago, as there are a few things that are permanent in the world: streets, property lines and the distain of cats.

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