Travelogue

South Italy 2026

Day 23: Tuesday 13 October 2026

Syracuse – Catania

Today we visited the world famous Syracuse Archeological Museum. Then we took a bus to Catania.

First time for everything: a mathematical symbol as street art. Celebrating Archimedes’ attempts to define pi by limits. To do this, he drew tangents around a circle, and other lines touching the inside of the circle, and measured their lengths. Then he halved these lines, and measured them again, knowing that with each halving he was getting closer to the value of the circumference. Although the outside lines gave a value that was too large, and the inner one too small, they were approaching a common value, which was the limit of the degree to which he could halve the lines. This limit was pi.

A pygmy elephant skeleton in the Archeological Museum of Paolo Orsi, Syracuse. The cavity in its forehead is for breathing, but since it could be mistaken for a single eye socket, when these bones were first discovered they gave rise to the legend of the cyclops, as in Ulysses and the Odyssey.

Door slab from Castelluccio – tomb 31. Early Bronze Age, 22nd-15th century BCE.
The relief on this door slab is thought to be a diagrammatic representation of the sexual act.