Festival of Santa Lucia

(She is in focus if you look large)

It was just chance that I emerged from my lazy morning (having intended to spend the rest of my day with Archimedes, born here in 287 BC), at 11.20, thus seeing a bunch of uniformed musicians gathering on the corner. It was just curiosity that made me hang around for... who knew what?

Would things, whatever they were, start at 11.30? Mid-day? Stupid question. Things start when they start.

I spotted the tourist information office, closed the previous times I've been past, and wondered if they could help with the impenetrable bus system so that I don't have to carry my bags all the way back to the bus station tomorrow. They could, in Italian at my level, then the person helping me followed me out, saying she was going to watch the 'Santa Lucia procession, very beautiful'. 

By the time I was back in the street, the musicians had moved to its other end, by the Piazza del Duomo, and a load of medieval 'nobles' and 'peasants' were lined up behind them. On the cathedral steps were priests in elaborate vestments. There were carabinieri everywhere, with their blood group soberingly embroidered large on their shirts. There were polizia, who all seemed to have donned green velvet hats for the occasion. None of whom appeared very interested in managing a good-natured crowd.

I did a bit of googling and learnt that on the first Sunday in May Syracusans celebrate their patron saint, Lucia, commemorating the miracle of 1646 when the people prayed to her to save them from the famine in the city. Soon a dove alerted the faithful that ships loaded with grain were arriving. The people survived.

Apparently, over the last few weeks the relics of Santa Lucia have been welcomed in various parishes of the diocese and today I watched as they were carried out of the cathedral along with a huge silver statue.

The priests led a service from the cathedral steps, ending, 'andate in pace,' which to me felt much more genuine than when it's a familiar trite phrase that has been heard a million times. Probably because, even though I know what it means, my brain has to process the language. As one sign of going in peace, the 'peasants' distributed bread from the hessian sacks over their shoulders.

Then the weighty statue of Santa Lucia was very slowly and extremely carefully carried down the cathedral steps and, with many resting places, across the piazza to the Church of Santa Lucia de Badia accompanied by various groups each with their own banner. One totally flummoxed me: 'The Confraternity of the Immaculate'. What combination of gender and Catholic lenses might make sense of that for me?

I moved further down the square towards the church and spotted a lot of bird cages on a roof. Set camera to S and watch! But there was a great deal else to watch and I turned out not to be in as good a position as I thought I was: my dove pics are all dire but at least I was well placed to see Santa Lucia carried into her other church backwards.I felt very lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.

So, back to Archimedes. There are two museums with models of his inventions and I was planning to go to the nearby one. But the tourist information person made it clear she preferred the one two miles away so I decided to see whether I could start to understand the bus system. Success, given that I was prepared to go with the flow and walk from the unexpected place it dropped me off. 

What an utterly astonishing person Archimedes was. Discovering pi and unlocking the properties of circles, ellipses, parabolas and spheres (incidentally also showing that numbers other than integers were important) would have been more than enough for most of us, but he was also a prodigious inventor of both military and peaceable machines. Our guide got some children to set fire to a branch using concave mirrors focussed on a point, to catapult (soft) boulders against the enemy, and to swing a battering ram. Archimedes moved water uphill, realised you could work out the density of an object by putting it in a bath and shouting 'Eureka', and showed how levers and compound pulleys could be used to achieve tasks that would otherwise be beyond human strength. Firstborn and I 'reinvented' his pulley system two years ago when I set up my washing line. It probably took us longer than it took Archimedes to work it out in the first place.

The 1:1 (mostly) scale models in the museum garden were fascinating. I adored my afternoon.

I had to wait an age but I managed to get a bus back to where I wanted. On public transport, I have mostly been faced with massive unhelpfulness: being given wrong information, being sold the wrong ticket, not being allowed to change it, being told that someone else can change it, someone else telling me they can't, being told I can travel on an earlier bus than the time on my ticket, being turfed off that bus, being told that because my wrongly dated return ticket had been issued on the same piece of paper as my outbound ticket I would have to go to my journey's origin to get it changed, being told that no buses go to X then discovering that loads, run by three other companies, do... After all that, I was touched today to see a man try to wave down my bus in a traffic jam, to see the driver trying to signal that the bus stop was further back then, when the man obviously didn't understand, to see the driver open the door to explain, and the man climb uncomprehending onto the bus. The driver smiled, shrugged, sold him a ticket and later helped him off at his stop. Kindness. Andate in pace.

Extras
- Manoeuvring the statue down the cathedral steps
- Candle guards
- Nobles
- Two nuns and a priest
- The temple-cathedral - just look at it!
- Archimedes' mirror for setting fire to things