Madonna of Tears (cont'd)

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Later, I got to voice my discontent at the archaeology museum. After going through what I could tell were normally some of the best collections in all of Italy of prehistoric and Greek-era artifacts, I approached the guest book, which invited me to leave comments. So I told it that a museum which has loaned almost every single major piece in its collections out to special exhibits elsewhere and has stuck in their places just photographs has no right to charge the full admission price. I could even cite you the (more conscientious) Italian precedent of the archaeology museum in Taranto, Apulia, which is currently charging half price since half the galleries are closed for rearrangement.

I spent the later afternoon tramping about the Siracusan farmland, bushwhacking through reeds and Dr. Seussian papyrus plants, fording streams, jogging down the middle of railroad tracks, and broad-jumping over irrigation ditches in what turned out to be a two-hour fruitless attempt to follow the Ciane River all the way to it's source. The source is called the Fonte Ciane, where the nymph Cyane — who rooted for Persephone during her the abduction by Hades — was turned into this very stream by the angry underworld god. Either that, or (other myths say) it's where Pluto plunged back into the ground to take his newly acquired bride back to hell after bursting out way up in Lake Pergusa near Enna and grabbing up Kore as she picked flowers.

(Siracusa is full of these things; down near the docks on Ortigia, the island core of the city, is a very pretty little natural fountain and pond planted with papyrus and swimming with ducks. It was formed, so they say, when, way back in the Peleponesse, the nymph Arethusa was bathing in the river governed by Alpheus, and the River God took a liking to her. As he grabbed her by the hair an began trying to rape her, she pleaded for mercy and Artemis heard her. In pity, Artemis turned Arethusa into a spring, and the nymph plunged underground, racing away from her captor.

Alpheus, not to be deterred, took on watery form himself and followed her under the earth. When Arethusa burst back above ground, she had made it all the way under the Mediterranean and popped out here in Siracusa, gushing from a grotto as she still does today. Alpseus was hot on her heels though, and he swiftly came flowing out of the grotto too, mingling his waters with her for eternity. This, to the Greeks, was romance. They used to think if you tossed a chalice into the river Alpehus in Greece it would eventually come bobbing up in this pond in Sicily.)

But anyway, back to other watery nymphs and the Ciane, all this tramping around activity only served to bring back my chronic heat rash with a vengeance, so I am hobbling around again, experiencing both intense pain and embarrassment simultaneously. Back at my hell-tel and after a welcome shower in a bathroom I survived only by shutting my eyes to the squalor, I returned to my room to regroup my energies and clamp a freezing bottle of Gatorade between my thighs in an attempt to find some rash relief (this was an extraordinarily delicate procedure, requiring me to ice certain parts of that general region while keeping other, neighboring bits of my anatomy from any contact whatsoever with the icy glass, for obvious reasons).

I got in free, thanks to the nice tourist office lady, to a show tonight in a medieval church with no roof but lots of hibiscus and flowering vines spilling off the wall tops and down the columns of the nave open to the stars. The entertainment consisted of an actor performing monologues from various Shakespeare plays, then a baritone (accompanied by piano) singing the operatic version of the same scene from operas by Verdi and other based on the plays. Interesting concept; it was weird to hear Shakespeare in Italian.

Odd day, in all. Late pizza dinner under dwarf palm trees and now a small beer at a pub while I compose this message. I think I am now sufficiently tired be able to return to my hotel room and fall asleep quickly so as not to spend much time conscious in that place. Tomorrow morning I transfer to what can only be happier quarters.

Copyright © 1998 by Reid Bramblett
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