This summer, 10 Students and two faculty members are traveling to Italy to examine the Etruscan, Greek, Roman, medieval, renaissance and modern footprints on the Italian peninsula and in Sicily. Please enjoy this blog post below from Skylar ’27 where she recounts a fun-filled day in Siracusa and Ortigia, featuring souvenir shopping, pasta and arancine, a playful museum bingo challenge, and a powerful performance of Elettra in an ancient theater.
Hi! I’m Skylar ’27, and I will be sharing with you all the adventures of our day! First, we had some free time to explore Syracuse (Siracusa) and the island of Ortigia. My friends and I began the day doing some laundry, and then went out to explore. We found some cool shops to buy a couple souvenirs to bring home. I purchased an authentic Italian pistachio creme, and some of my peers purchased socks and hats. We also took some time to look at the Mediterranean sea from the bridge connecting Syracuse and Ortigia. Later on, my friends Chelsea ’27, Emily ’28 and I set out to find a place for lunch. We settled for this Italian restaurant near the bridge. At the restaurant we all ordered pasta, and shared an arincine, which is a fried ball of rice stuffed with cheese and spinach. It was very tasty!
After lunch, we all grouped together, to visit the Archaeological Park & Museum of Siracusa. Sophia, our tour guide, gave us a challenging bingo game to find different artifacts around the museum with a grand prize of gelato! At the museum, there were many cool statues of people and animals. Unfortunately, no one completed the bingo, but we all still got gelato in the end! After the museum, we visited a nearby archaeological site. At the site, we read a text from Virgil’s Aeneid about Odysseus’s men and the cyclops. Afterwards, we saw the play “Elettra,” which translated to “Electra” in English at an ancient theatre at the archaeological site. The production was amazing, and while we couldn’t understand the Italian, we were able to abstractly understand the concepts of the play through the raw human emotion of the actors and actresses.
