Tempio di Apollo

Before Ortigia gives up its baroque squares, it shows its credentials. Straddling the island's entrance at Piazza Pancali stands the Temple of Apollo, the oldest Doric temple in Sicily, raised in the sixth century BC when the Greek city was still young. Temple, church, mosque, church again, then a barracks — few ruins anywhere have lived so many lives.

Why it matters

Every great Sicilian journey begins at a Greek temple, and Syracuse's begins with this one. Both authoritative descriptions anchor the monument at once: the regional tourism portal calls it the oldest Doric stone temple in Sicily and places it at the exact crossing onto Ortigia, the city's ancient heart, while the UNESCO citation for Syracuse and the Rocky Necropolis of Pantalica (inscribed in 2005) sets the temple of Apollo in the sixth century BC, among the most ancient monuments of the Greek West. Its importance is technical as well as chronological: standard references describe it as one of the first temples of the West built entirely of stone, marking the passage from the wooden architecture of the earliest colonies to the peripteral stone temples that would define Greek building for centuries. Its columns were monoliths, some forty-two of them, probably shipped to the site by sea. What survives today is a silhouette of broken pillars in a small garden enclosure — yet that fragmentary frame, standing in traffic and evening light at the island's gate, may be the most eloquent single argument for Syracuse's antiquity that a traveller will meet.

What to notice

Look first at the geometry. The temple's stylobate measured about 55 by 21.5 metres, with a perimeter colonnade of six by seventeen columns — squat, closely spaced and slightly irregular, the hallmarks of an experiment conducted before the rules hardened. On the top step of the eastern side, seek out the inscribed block: an archaic dedicatory text in which, as the references render it, the builder celebrates the pioneering character of the construction. Writing on a temple in this way is all but unknown in the Greek world, and the stone is worn now, but the idea — an architect signing his ambition into the building's very steps — rewards the effort of finding it. Then widen the view: the temple fronts Piazza Pancali, and its position means you see it three times in every visit — in daylight against the traffic of the crossing, at dusk when the floodlight warms the limestone, which the regional portal singles out as the monument's finest hour, and from the bridge where the island's towers and domes pile up behind it.

Context and history

The temple's afterlife outdoes most buildings' lives. With the Christianisation of Syracuse it became a Byzantine church, its steps and doorway reworked for the liturgy; under the Arab emirate it served as a mosque; after the Norman conquest it was reconsecrated for Christian worship as the church of the Saviour. Its long religious career ended in violence of a different kind: in the sixteenth century the ruins were swallowed by a Spanish-era barracks under Charles V's military programme, with private houses pressing against the columns — an eighteenth-century traveller described capitals standing between a resident's bed and the wall. The temple was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century inside the barracks compound and brought back to light through the excavations of Paolo Orsi, the great archaeologist of Syracuse, whose finds from the site — terracottas, gutter fragments, akroteria — are kept in the Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi. Few monuments anywhere compress so complete a history of the Mediterranean: Greek dedication, Byzantine liturgy, Islamic prayer, Norman reconsecration, Spanish barracks, modern archaeology, all legible in one colonnade.