Nothing happens in the cathedral square and it is the best thing in Sicily.
I mean that precisely. There is no attraction in it. There is a church on one side and a run of pale facades on the other three, and a great deal of empty limestone paving in the middle, and no cars at all. That is the entire specification.
At nine in the evening it fills, and I have not been able to stop thinking about why.
The practical version of all this, the tickets and the timings and where to sleep, is in my complete guide to Syracuse. This is the other thing.
I went out at half past eight the first night, too early, and had it almost to myself.
The lighting here is done from below, which is a decision somebody made and which I approve of enormously. The carving on the facades throws its own shadows upward and the whole square turns the colour of the inside of a shell. The paving has been walked smooth over about four hundred years and it holds the light like water.
For about twenty minutes there was me and two waiters setting out chairs.
Then it started.
Not an event. No music, no announcement. Just families, arriving from four directions at once, at the speed of people with nowhere to be.
By half past nine there were perhaps three hundred people in that square and not one of them was doing anything.
Children ran the length of it, which is a thing children can do here because there is no traffic and the parents can see the whole distance. Older couples walked arm in arm from one end to the other, turned around, and walked back. Teenagers arranged themselves against the church steps in that way teenagers do, angled to be seen. Three men in their seventies stood in the middle of the open paving talking, for well over an hour, about something that from a distance appeared to be extremely serious and was probably football.
Nobody was drunk. I want to be clear about that because it is the thing that most distinguishes an Italian square at ten at night from any English town centre.
They were simply out.
I sat on the steps with a granita and watched it for an hour and a half, and I have been trying since to work out what I was actually looking at.
Here is where I have got to.
The square works because it is useless.
Every other public space I can think of has been assigned a purpose. It is a route to somewhere, or it is a place to buy something, or it has been landscaped into features that tell you where to sit and where to walk. This one has none of that. It is a large flat empty room with beautiful walls, and because nobody has told anyone what it is for, the town has decided it is for standing about in.
I do not think you could design this. I think you can only fail to develop it for four hundred years.
My grandmother’s village has a version, much smaller, a square of dust with plane trees where the same six men have sat every evening for as long as I have been alive. I always assumed it was a thing about small villages. It turns out it is a thing about squares.
The other half of it is the light.
All this stone is the same honey limestone the whole town is made of, and in daylight it can be brutal. At noon in August the square is a white glare you cross quickly with your eyes down. But it holds warmth the way a body does, and at night, lit from underneath, it gives it all back.
You are standing in a warm room with no ceiling.
I went back the second night and the third, and on the third I stopped taking photographs of it, which is how I know it had actually landed.
Later I walked out to the channel between the island and the mainland, which is where the fishing boats are moored and where nobody goes at midnight.
The water there is completely still. There is a line of lamps along the quay and each one had its double lying underneath it, and above all of it a moon doing the thing moons do over water, which is to make a path that follows you along the bank.
Two men were sitting on the harbour wall with lines out. I do not think they were catching anything. They had a radio on very low.
Behind me, four hundred metres away, three hundred people were still standing in a square doing nothing in particular, and it occurred to me that they were also fishing, in a sense, and were also not expecting to catch anything.
This is a town built on a rock that has been continuously occupied for three thousand years. The cathedral has a Greek temple inside it. There is a theatre up the hill where Aeschylus put on plays while he was alive to see them.
And the best thing here is that at nine in the evening everybody comes outside.
I do not think that is a small finding. I think it might be the whole thing.
V.
