Italy · Sicilia · Siracusa
Epipoli, Siracusa — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Epipoli means above the city, a Siracusa quarter on the limestone plateau northwest of Ortygia, walled by Dionysius I in 402 BC.
About Epipoli
Where to stay in Epipoli
Not every neighbourhood fits every trip — here's what each one is good for.
Epipoli is villa and apartment ground, all of it in Villaggio Miano and Pizzuta, built for people who live here rather than visit. Viale Epipoli carries the traffic down the southern flank to Neapolis, and Ortygia lies out beyond it, so a car counts for more here than anywhere else in Siracusa. What the plateau gives back is space, olive trees, and dry-stone walls around the old masserie.
Belvedere, the frazione at the plateau's west end, keeps the parish churches of Santa Maria della Consolazione and Santa Maria del Paradiso. If you are driving Sicily and want a base off the seafront, this end suits you. Miano floods when it rains.
About Epipoli
What are the main landmarks in Epipoli?
Epipoli carries the Dionysian wall circuit, raised between 402 and 397 BC and the most extensive city wall of the classical world. A gate of it stands on the southern side, on the line of viale Epipoli. Castello Eurialo closes the western apex, in the frazione of Belvedere, where the two wall lines converge; three ditches cut the approach and five square towers front the keep.
The circuit fell in 1693. Lion-head gutter spouts off that keep are held at the Museo Paolo Orsi, and the Galermi aqueduct runs through this ground. A tower thought to be 16th-century survives inside a masseria at Pizzuta.
What is the history of Epipoli?
Epipoli was the ground the Athenians had to hold, and in 414 BC they took the cliff from Diomilus. Demosthenes struck the counter-wall by night, breached it, then broke against a Boeotian line, and men went over the cliff in the dark. Dionysius I answered by walling the plateau, and Diodorus puts sixty thousand men on the work, one architect to every stade, and thirty stades of wall finished in twenty days.
Rome took the plateau in 212 BC. Grazing held the plateau into the twentieth century, then the 1950s brought public housing and the villas that named Villaggio Miano. Epipoli was the third of nine circoscrizioni until Siracusa abolished them in 2018.
Where is Epipoli?
Epipoli is the upland quarter of Siracusa, running west from Neapolis and Tiche across the plateau to the scarp above Belvedere, where the ground tops out at 147 metres. Villaggio Miano faces that drop. Viale Epipoli holds the southern flank, above the ground falling toward the Porto Grande.
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Updated September 2026