“I saw for the first time the grandiose landscape of Syracuse at the moment when the sun was about to set, illuminating the whole district from the Ionian Sea to the mountains of Ibla, with those warm hues, which can only be seen under the sky of Sicily. I could not express in words the impression that such a sight produced on me. Not even at the top of Mount Etna, from where one can see the whole island, three seas, the coasts of Italy, did I not feel shaken as in seeing amidst the deep silence of a beautiful evening, these wide and dead fields of Syracuse”

Ferdinand Gregorovius