A Painter's Cave and a Sorcerer's Elephant

The name "Ear of Dionysius" is younger than it sounds. The limestone quarry-cave had been there for over two thousand years, but it was the painter Caravaggio, touring Syracuse in the early 1600s with a local scholar, who first pointed at the S-shaped grotto and said it looked like a giant ear — then spun the idea that the tyrant Dionysius I had it carved so he could crouch outside and eavesdrop on whispers from prisoners locked inside. The story stuck so well that it's still the cave's official name, even though modern acoustic testing shows the shape amplifies sound but garbles it too badly for eavesdropping to have actually worked.

The lava-stone elephant anchoring Catania's Piazza del Duomo has an even stranger backstory attached to it. Medieval legend credited it to a nobleman-turned-sorcerer named Heliodorus, said to have carved the statue himself and ridden it through the air between Catania and Constantinople before being burned as a heretic. Historians now trace the elephant to a much older, unglamorous origin — an ancient talisman locals believed protected the city from Etna's eruptions — but the sorcerer's name won anyway: Catanese still call the statue "u Liotru," a garbled mispronunciation of Heliodorus that's outlived the true history by centuries.