Gayle Brennan Spencer – sending random thoughts to and from South Austin
Above: Detail of a side altar of Templo Santo Domingo de Guzman
Spare words are being offered. We have visited Santo Domingo so many times through the years, yet we are still always gob-smacked by her beauty.
Many others are as well, making the dawn-of-the-17th-century Baroque church a magnet for destination weddings. A four-year age-defying face-lift undertaken in the 1990s successfully masks her age.
Continue reading “Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Santo Domingo wears her age well”
Above: Façade of the Duomo di Siracusa, or Cattedrale della Nativita di Maria Santissima
The chapel where some of Santa Lucia’s relics, featured in a recent post, are housed in the Cathedral of the Nativity of Mary Most Holy. A statue of her reigns up high on its façade to the right of the Virgin to whom the church is dedicated. Up on the left is San Marciano of Siracusa with San Pietro and San Paolo flanking the entrance down below.
Over the past 2,000 years, the history of Saint Marcian of Syracuse has become somewhat muddied. One version is that he was a follower of Peter the Apostle, who dispatched him to Sicily to preach in the year 40. His conversion rate was so high that the ruling Romans deemed him dangerous, and he was put to death. San Marciano became known as the first bishop of the city and is the patron saint of the archdiocese.
The “new” façade of the cathedral dates from after the 1693 earthquake and reflects the style categorized as High Sicilian Baroque. But the rest of the building has much deeper roots. The site was occupied by a 5th-century BC temple of Athena, possibly constructed under Dionysius I. Thirty-six substantial columns surrounded the outer perimeter of the temple – columns so substantial they withstood the devastating earthquake and can still be viewed on the north side of exterior and within the cathedral itself.
Continue reading “Postcard from Siracusa, Sicily: Sturdy columns of Greek temple recycled by several religions”
Above: Spaghetti a scoglio at Cod da Saretta
It must be frustrating to a traveler who only wants meat to visit Sicily where seafood dominates. For us, that was heaven. We were surprised we didn’t frequently order some of the dishes we expected to devour almost daily. Too many other temptations popped up on menus.
The first was pizza. Every city anywhere we have been, we are always on the lookout for Neapolitan-style pizzas. We even eat pizza in Austin once a week.
But despite the fact that Sicily has great pizzas exactly the style we love, we only consumed about three in two months. One reason was that the best restaurants and pizzerias, perhaps an over-simplified generalization, only offer it at night; the ones featuring it at lunch time tend to be tourist-oriented and often not as good. We tend to eat a main meal at lunch, one so substantial that’s it for the day. No room for late-night pizzas.
Continue reading “Postcard from Siracusa, Sicily: Celebrating the bounty of the sea”
Postcards from Barton Springs 