Fonte Aretusa

Few springs carry a myth two and a half millennia old and still flow within a city. On the low waterfront of Ortigia, the Fonte Aretusa gathers freshwater into a half-round pool thick with papyrus, a breath from the salt sea. Cicero marvelled at it; poets from Pindar to D'Annunzio sang it; today it remains free, open and quietly astonishing.

Why it matters

The Fonte Aretusa is where the myth of Syracuse is still wet. The city's own cultural office opens its account of the spring with Cicero's first-century description of a source of sweet water of incredible size, full of fish, held back from the sea by a mass of stone — and the water behind that wall has never stopped being fresh. Ancient Syracusans saw in it the nymph Arethusa, who called on Artemis as the river god Alpheus pressed his pursuit, was turned into a spring, and sank beneath the Ionian to rise again on Ortigia while her pursuer tunnelled after her, his waters mingling with hers. The story made the spring a literary celebrity: it was sung by Pindar, Moschus, Ovid and Virgil, later by D'Annunzio, set to music by Karol Szymanowski, and struck on Syracusan coins by the engravers Cimon and Eveneto — the images by which the Greek city announced itself across the Mediterranean. Botanically, the pool is a phenomenon in its own right: stands of papyrus grow directly out of its water, and this unusual grove is one of the natural features closely associated with Syracuse.

What to notice

Stand at the basin's stone rim and read the water in layers. Freshwater fish move beneath the arched papyrus stems; on the seaward side, a few steps away, the harbour laps salt against the same rocks — the old writers noted you could catch sweet-water fish on one side and sea fish on the other, thanks to the mass of masonry that keeps the two apart. On rare occasions when harbour water clouds, locals speak of the occhio della Zillica, the eye through which, in the myth, Alpheus surfaces beside his beloved. Then look outward: the belvedere in front of the spring is the remnant of an old bastion razed at the end of the nineteenth century, and the palm-backed walk along it frames the great harbour to the north.

Context and history

The spring's civic story is as layered as the myth. For most of Ortigia's history the water lay outside the fortifications, reached by a steep stairway from the upper city; nearby opened the Saccaria gate, through which, the city's historians relate, the Romans would enter Syracuse. In 1540, when Charles V strengthened the island's military architecture, the spring was folded inside the new defences. It received its present open form after 1847, when the site was liberated from its military enclosure, and the frontage you see today belongs to that nineteenth-century remaking. The myth itself did constant cultural work: Pausanias reported the oracle that guided the Corinthian founder Archias to the islet where the mouth of Alpheus mingles with beautiful Arethusa's spring — making the fountain, in effect, the founding sign of Syracuse, and the reason the nymph's head appears on the city's ancient coinage. Few places in Sicily bind geology, myth and civic identity so tightly.