DOWN DAY

     I had nothing much planned for today, which is just as well, since it wasn't all sun and blue skies. In fact, it turned

Open doorway at breakfast

out to have what the English used to call “sunny intervals,” and these appeared between the rainy intervals. So, Bob did not throw open the doors to our balconies first thing this morning as he usually did; instead, he settled for the view from our breakfast table.

     And since I had no fixed agenda for the day, guess what? He let down his guard and got walloped by his old nemesis, BFS (Bob's Fatigue Syndrome). That meant that right after breakfast, he went back to bed and slept for two hours, and then he slept again for another two or three hours in the afternoon. Between naps, we did manage to wander about to do some detective work, run some errands, and snap a few candids of the city.

At Museo Bellomo

     The detective work was to find the one Caravaggio painting that the city owns. I'd been led to believe that it was in the Museo Bellomo, so that was our first stop. The building was quite handsome and included a marble staircase that reminded me of ones in some of the French chateaux we saw a few years back. But the museum's holdings, although well displayed, were sparse and consisted almost entirely of medieval to renaissance religious paintings and sculptures. Our impression was like that of a knight as portrayed on his tomb: Ho hum.

Ho hum...

But to be fair, there was one striking work, a well-lit face of an old man (identified as JC, but it could have been any/every man). Its emotional impact (I'm done with the suffering, thank you very much, and I'm yearning for release) was like that of Donatello's wooden carving of Mary Magdalene in Florence.

JC in Ortigia

Mary Magdalene in Florence

     

Although there were paintings by “friends of Caravaggio” in the Museo Bellomo, the famous one by the master himself was not there. I knew that the city would not have displaced such a famous painting. In fact, one place on Piazza Duomo is trying to cash in on the painter's brief stay here by having a special exhibit to honor him (and pull in some extra bucks).

When I checked to see what the exhibit included, I discovered that it had only ONE Caravaggio painting, which was on loan from someone in London, plus two paintings by "friends" of his. We passed.

Chiesa di Santa Lucia alla Badia

     Finally, I gave up and asked a lady at the Bellomo where the Caravaggio was.

     “Oh,” she said (at least I think she did, since her response was entirely in Italian), “it's in the Church of St. Lucia alla Badia on Piazza Duomo.”

Piazza Duomo

  

      So, back we went to the Piazza to check out the church, and sure enough, there it was over the high altar. However, it is set so far back that it was hard to see even though the painting itself, the Burial of St. Lucia (1608/9), is huge. One version of history claims that Lucia, a wealthy woman

 who gave all she had to the poor, so pissed off her betrothed by all by her generosity that he turned her in. They tried to burn her at the stake, but she turned out to be flame retardant, so in the end, a soldier cut her throat. Caravaggio's dramatic scene, with it realism and dramatic lighting, shows Lucy's last hour before shipping off to eternity and becoming the patron saint of Syracuse.

      Having solved the mystery of the missing painting, we ourselves slipped off during our interlude between Bob's naps to buy some acetaminophen and toothpaste, a process worthy of a Mr. Bean pantomime. We also withdrew some money from an ATM, had a gelato (white chocolate), and snapped some random photos to remind us what a handsome area of Syracuse this little Island of Ortigia is. Tomorrow is a travel day to Ragusa.