Add More Culture to Your Cruise with Azamara’s AzAmazing Celebrations

There’s a lot of competition out there for your travel dollars, even just within the world of cruises. No matter where you want to sail there are multiple options available, whether it’s a family-friendly trip to the Caribbean, a trek through Asia, or an intensive journey around Italy and other countries that border the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. Your choice will come down not just to price, itinerary, and amenities, but to the little extras and bonuses that cruise lines offer to their guests. For Azamara Cruises, a boutique cruise line with four ships circling the globe, that includes a program of cultural explorations known as AzAmazing Celebrations. 

We recently enjoyed an AzAmazing Day in Siracusa, the Sicilian city founded by Ancient Greeks several hundred years before Christ. With four different cultural experiences located throughout the city, AzAmazing Day was a wonderful supplement to our trip, adding a memorable touch of elegance to our day in Siracusa without distracting from the city’s real-world charms or significant historical sites. 

Here’s what you can expect from one of Azamara’s AzAmazing Celebrations. When we disembarked our ship in Siracusa that morning, Azamara handed us a small map of the city, with three dozen notable locations marked on it. Those included the regular major sites you’d likely target if you were a tourist in Siracusa, from the Fountain of Diana in the Piazza Archimede, to the gorgeous and awe-inspiring Duomo di Siracusa. There were also lesser-known locations on the map, like the Museo dei Pupi, a small museum devoted to the city’s long history of puppet shows, and the Museo del Papiro, about the many uses of papyrus throughout Siracusa’s history. Amid all those dots were four set apart in a different color, clustered relatively closely to each other in the heart of the city. Those dots represented the four AzAmazing Day events, and the map included the various showtimes for each of them, making it easy to plan your morning in Siracusa. 

The first one we came upon was an opera singer performing alongside the Duomo, in a walkway that led to the plaza in front of the church. She sang an aria with spare musical accompaniment, her octaves-spanning voice echoing between the church and the building next to it. It was a beautiful presentation of one of Italy’s original artforms, in the shadow of a breathtaking building whose origins date back well before the birth of Jesus. It echoed the monumental history of Italy—a Renaissance art in front of an ancient building that had been rebuilt and rededicated and renamed however many times—within the majestic voice of one artist, and although it was arranged specifically for Azamara guests, it was open to and enjoyed by a large public of both tourists and Siracusa residents. Workers in the offices across the street could be seen at their windows, taking photos and film as much as the retirees cruising from America and Canada. This was an ideal introduction to what Azamara aims for with its AzAmazing Celebrations, and an absolute highlight of our 10-day cruise.

Another AzAmazing Day event in the nearby Teatro Comunale di Siracusa—the Municipal Theater—rivaled the first in terms of beauty and power. This enchanting, luxurious theater was opened in the 1870s for opera and other live performances, and reopened within the last several years after a decades-long restoration process. With several rows of private boxes stacked high to the ceiling, and an immaculate painting looking down on everything from the center of the roof, the Municipal Theater is a monument to taste and class. (Fitzcarraldo would lose his mind over this place.) After a short introduction from the theater’s director, two violinists and a pianist took the stage for AzAmazing Day and played an exquisite, elegiac piece that was every bit as beautiful as the building we were in. 

Elsewhere on AzAmazing Day, in a courtyard within the cathedral complex, we snacked on canapes and various local favorites while enjoying prosecco, wine, and a small band playing instrumental music that evoked Italy’s 20th century. Azamara guests could return to the locations throughout the day, with this one making the most sense—you could grab a quick bite and drink before heading off to explore the rest of the city, and maybe hear a bit of Nino Rota’s Godfather score while you were there.

The last of Siracusa’s four AzAmazing Day experiences was perhaps its most ambitious, and the trickiest to pull off well. At the Fonte Aretusa—the Fountain of Arethusa—an actress performed a monologue about the myth of Arethusa and Alpheus. Performing in front of a statue of the nymph and the river god that overlooks the fountain itself, the actress told the ancient story of Aretusa trying to escape the constant, pleading advances of Alpheus, until both were eventually turned into nearby bodies of water that never touch. It’s a thoughtful, distinct way to relate one of the foundational stories of Siracusa, and the presentation, with a spare musical introduction on a woodwind instrument and the actress’s period garb, will transport you back to the classical era. The script might be a little over-written, but that’s a matter of taste, and it would be in keeping with how so much ancient literature and mythology has been translated into modern languages over the centuries. It might not have had the power of the opera performance or the Municipal Theater, but it’s the most directly educational of AzAmazing Day’s four events in Siracusa, and that should be commended.

AzAmazing Days, as with other AzAmazing Celebrations, are an excellent complement to one of Azamara’s destination-intensive cruises. The cruise line already tries to immerse you in the local culture and history of the areas you visit more than most cruise lines, with several possible excursions per stop and on-board lectures from experts about your destinations. We had already organized our trip to Siracusa to see as many of its most important sites as possible, and the four extra events we were able to experience under that AzAmazing banner added more beauty and nuance to an already wide-ranging day. It’s one of the many reasons we greatly enjoyed our Italy intensive cruise on the Azamara Quest—a trip we’ll be writing about at length over the next two weeks at Paste.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.