My needs are many, like everyone else’s. The need to eat, to wear elegant clothes, to leaf through a book, to make love, to receive a kiss, to pray, to listen to music, to enjoy the sun, to walk, to rest. And so on.

But there is a unique need that burns inside me, a deep desire that seems to belong only to me: the need for Ortigia. To lose myself in that city, immersed in its humid and enveloping climate, to blend in with the crowd moving through the streets, squares, and along the Marina, to be enchanted by the suspended beauty of the sunsets and the elegant 18th-century mansions, or by the timeless silence of the Greek temples.

This need is like a hunger, a thirst, an irresistible love, impossible to control. It assails you suddenly, fills your body, and besieges your mind. You must go. It’s a sensation entirely my own, difficult to explain. Perhaps it’s the call of my Greek ancestors, pulling at my trousers from beyond to remind me that I must return home. And yet, in Ortigia, I know no one, I have no houses to visit nor graves to honor. And still, that call arrives punctually, at varying intervals, and invades me until it becomes pressing and urgent. I must go.
Ortigia is a stage of human virtues and weaknesses, an altered state of mind, a hallucinogen for the soul. I don’t know what I’m searching for, but every time I arrive, it feels like the first time, and when I leave, I have the sensation it could be the last, as if I had finally broken the spell that brought me back once again.
“I’m cured,” I tell myself every time I get back in the car to return home. But no. After three months, six months, or a year, the desire for Ortigia returns. It’s a mark that emerges from within, even before I lower the windows. It’s an extreme attempt to hold you in this déjà vu of smells, of suffocating heat, of bewildered people moving like automatons. An unbearable city in the summer heat, a difficult city for its intricate dialect that transforms words. A controversial city for the small mixed craft trades, for the branded luxury produced elsewhere. One goes to Ortigia for an ancestral call or for a need of bewilderment and estrangement.

Foreigners devour Ortigia with their eyes, as if it were edible. You understand that they will never return in their lifetime and want to savor every corner of a chipped house, every piece of a Syracusan boat, every church arch. They do this because they fear that one day Ortigia might disappear, swallowed by the sea or by human neglect, and they want to take a memory with them as if it were a piece of wall or a splinter of an oar.
I have seen the moon, I have seen the dawn, I have even arrived with a small cruise ship through the harbor entrance. Yet I know that there is something I still miss about Ortigia, I feel it in the air when I arrive or when I leave, there is something I cannot explain that tells me I must seek. I don’t know if it’s something beautiful or ugly, important or not, but it’s there, waiting for me and calling me.