Ortygia Syracuse
— fresh water that rises at the edge of the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The old island at the tip of Syracuse, where Sicily faces the Ionian Sea. The whole Greek city began here in 734 BC, on a piece of limestone barely a kilometre long, and the island never threw anything away. A Doric temple to Athena still stands inside the walls of the cathedral. Down at the water, a freshwater spring called Arethusa rises a few steps from the salt, papyrus leaning over it. People come for the evening, when the stone goes the colour of a banked fire and the streets empty toward the sea.
Ortygia Syracuse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Ortygia is the small island that holds the oldest part of Syracuse, on the southeastern coast of Sicily in the province of Siracusa. It covers about 146 hectares and runs barely a kilometre long, joined to the mainland by two short bridges across the harbour. Corinthian colonists led by Archias founded Syracuse here in 734 BC, and the island stayed the city's religious and political core through Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, and Spanish rule. The streets follow no grid; they wind the way the centuries left them. In 2005 UNESCO inscribed it, together with the rock-cut necropolis of Pantalica, as a World Heritage Site.
The clearest record of those layers stands in Piazza Duomo. The cathedral was built around the Temple of Athena, a Doric temple raised by the tyrant Gelon after the Battle of Himera in 480 BC; its columns are still set into the church walls, the gaps between them walled up by Byzantine builders who turned the temple into a church. A short walk north, the Temple of Apollo from the 6th century BC is among the oldest Doric temples in Sicily, having served in turn as church, mosque, and barracks. At the island's southern tip, Castello Maniace was raised under Frederick II around 1240. The Baroque faces along the streets came after the 1693 earthquake levelled much of southeastern Sicily.
At the island's western shore, a few steps from the harbour, the Fountain of Arethusa is a freshwater spring that surfaces almost at the level of the sea. Papyrus grows in its round basin, as it does along the Ciane River a few kilometres south, the two of them rare European stands of a plant more at home on the Nile. The Greeks read the spring as the nymph Arethusa, who fled the river god Alpheus across the sea from Greece and rose here as fresh water. Writing in the 1st century BC, Cicero counted the spring among the wonders of Syracuse. Ducks and grey mullet move through the water now, the open sea only a low wall away.