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A Greek temple
The cathedral began as a temple of Athena in the 6th century BC
The great Greek Temple of Athena was built on this site in the 6th century BC. It was a Doric building with six columns on the short sides and 14 on the long sides, and Plato and Athenaeus mention it. Cicero, in 70 BC, named the looting of its ornament as one of the crimes of the governor Verres. Excavations by Paolo Orsi between 1907 and 1910 showed that the temple stood on even older foundations.
Church and mosque
It was a church, then a mosque in 878, then a church again
The present cathedral was built by Saint Bishop Zosimo of Syracuse in the 7th century. The battered Doric columns of the original temple were built into its walls and can be seen inside and out. The building was converted into a mosque in 878, and converted back after the Norman count Roger I retook the city in 1086. The roof of the nave and the mosaics in the apses are Norman.
1693
A baroque façade replaced the old one after the earthquake of 1693
After the earthquake of 1693 the cathedral was rebuilt, and the architect Andrea Palma redesigned the façade between 1725 and 1753. Its style is High Sicilian Baroque, with a double order of Corinthian columns and full-length statues by the sculptor Ignazio Marabitti. Inside are a font of the 12th or 13th century, a ciborium designed by Luigi Vanvitelli, and a Madonna della Neve of 1512 by Antonello Gagini.
Saint Lucy
A silver statue of the patron saint is carried through the streets twice a year
The cathedral holds relics of Saint Lucy, the patron of the city: bone fragments, a robe, a veil and a pair of shoes. Twice a year, on the first Sunday in May and on 13 December, her feast day, a silver statue of the saint made by Pietro Rizzo in 1599 is brought out of the cathedral and paraded through the streets. It holds three fragments of her ribs in its chest.
Day 5, afternoon
It comes after Greek Theatre of Syracuse.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Cathedral of Syracuse, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.