This is the magnificent fortress, the Castello Maniace, at the entrance to the Porto Grande of Siracuse. Behind it you see the beginning of Ortigia from the east. This is the 'old town', built on its eponymous island and the ancient heart of the city. In fact, the area was badly shaken by an earthquake in 1693 and rebuilt in beautiful, elegant Baroque.
Siracuse has been high on our list of places to visit. For 250 years the city rivalled Athens in power, and is the only Sicilian town ever to have been a major player across the Mediterranean. Here the Tyrants ruled, followed by the Roman imperium, then the Arabs came back and held the island till the Normans took it away. After them more northern Europeans (Swabians, actually), and then the Spanish, before Garibaldi invaded on his way to the unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Some Sicilians, allegedly, see Italy as another in this millennial history of foreign occupiers; whether this is fair or not, Sicily has its own language, gastronomy, architecture and volcanoes, but has not the tradition of ardent separatism that characterises Corsica.