The highlight of the day was waking to a video of William singing at a karaoke with his Nana and Papa, Brooke’s parents. It was so cute, making us think that the Irish in him was coming out and that he may well be following in his Great-Granda’s footsteps, Elaine’s dad.
After breakfast, Elaine cut Roy’s hair, since he was starting to look rather bedraggled, following which we dinghied ashore to enjoy our morning, strolling the streets of Syracuse, or indeed of Ortygia Island, primarily to see the statue of Archimedes that sits over the water between the bridges that join Ortygia Island to Sicily.
The base of the statue was designed to depict the stomachion with 17,152 different possible arrangements of the pieces, one of the first studies of geometrical combinatorics, the branch of mathematics that studies the enumeration, combination, and permutation of sets of elements and the mathematical relations that characterise their properties; one of Archimedes’ main research tools.
Engraved in the base were the symbols that represented Archimedes’ most famous theories, including Pi, the symbol of squaring the circle, encapsulated in Euclidean geometry and the relationship between the circumference and the diameter of a circle.
Linked to this was one of his greatest intuitions concerning the problem of irrational numbers and being able to carry out calculations with very large numbers, for example in astronomy, becoming a pioneering prototype of modern measure theory, as he states that: “Any arbitrarily large or small quantity can be measured starting from any unit of measure”.
In the symbol of Archimedes' planetarium, also linked to the field of astronomy, he developed a theory on the distance of the planets, calculating the apparent diameter of the moon, the sun and the dimensions of the earth.
“The truncated icosahedron symbol, Archimedes' most famous non-regular polyhedron, contains the laws of stereometry and a vision of the world through a geometric texture. This is undoubtedly the most popular solid, the classic soccer ball; an almost spherical surface made up of 12 pentagons, surrounded by 20 hexagons.”
From there we strolled back to “La Piazza Duomo”, to people-watch over a coffee and baked delight. At least, this time, Elaine had something to eat that she recognised; a chocolate filled pastry similar to a croissant.
Wandering back to the marina, we passed Mazzone, a “Specialità Dolciaria” (Specialised Confectionary), where we couldn’t resist the nougat and “nut brittle”, the former the most authentic confectionery tradition in Sicily, made using ancient knowledge handed down from generation to generation by the masters and containing ingredients that are exclusively typical products of the island: almonds, pistachios, honey, egg white and sugar.
When we returned to Paw Paw and following another perusal of the weather, we spent the rest of the afternoon finalising our new route and anchoring options.
That left time before dinner to call Elaine’s folks then Justine and Paul; it had been a while, so there was plenty to catch up on.
And, with that, our day came to a close.
