The name was Caravaggio's. Reaching Syracuse in 1608, the painter was taken down into the quarry by the local historian Vincenzo Mirabella, looked at the tall curving slit and called it a donkey's ear; the cave has been the Ear of Dionysius ever since. The legend Mirabella told him had the tyrant Dionysius cutting the cavern to hold prisoners and listening in on them from a chamber above. Geology says otherwise: this is an artificial cut in the limestone of the Latomia del Paradiso, below the Greek theatre, 23 metres high, 5 to 11 metres wide and 65 metres deep, and its S-bend began as a water channel dug along the top, from which the quarrymen worked downwards and out to the sides. It stored water for the city until an earthquake left it useless.
What to see
The mouth is narrow and tapers upward like a teardrop. Pick marks still run across the walls and the air stays cool in July. Sooner or later everyone who walks in claps or sings: tradition credits the cave with amplifying sound up to sixteen times, and the echo is still there, even though the focal point where the tyrant supposedly listened can no longer be reached. Look up towards the far end and you can make out the thin channel of the old aqueduct where the whole excavation started.
The cave sits inside the Latomia del Paradiso, an open quarry now planted with citrus. A few steps away is the Grotta dei Cordari, worked for centuries by rope makers because the damp kept the fibres soft: a hall on improbably thin rock pillars, partly closed off because of falling stone. Half of Grand Tour Europe came through here. In 1625 Pietro Della Valle credited the work to the mind of Archimedes; around 1770 Jean-Pierre Houel drew the cave and tested its acoustics with a horn, a gunshot and a drum; Vivant Denon set out to check the legend and concluded that the sounds pile up until nothing can be understood. Jules Verne mentions it in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864; in 2023 it played the tomb of Archimedes in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Visiting
You go in through the Neapolis archaeological park on viale Paradiso: one ticket covers the Greek theatre, the Altar of Hieron II, the Roman amphitheatre and the quarries. From the theatre seating it is a five-minute walk downhill in the shade. You will spend only a few minutes inside, where the floor can be wet and the far end unlit; the rest of the park needs a couple of hours, almost all of it in full sun. Closed shoes and water, especially from June to September.
Our editors' tip
Come at opening time or in the last hour of the afternoon, once the headset groups have moved on: the Ear is meant to be heard in silence, and a single handclap tells you how long the sound takes to come back. We walk to the middle, wait for the place to empty, then look up at the aqueduct channel: it is the detail that dismantles the legend and makes the cave more interesting than the legend ever was.