Messina: History and myths

The famed port of Messina has seen more than its fair share of disasters and mythological monsters

Shakespeare may have set his lovable farce Much Ado About Nothinghere, but Kenneth Branagh made a wise decision to film his movie version amid the vineyards of Tuscany (actually, you can stay where he filmed it) rather than in this workaday port city, rebuilt time and again after disasters both natural and man-made.

Most famous was the earthquake of 1908, which likely measured about a 7.8 on the Richter scale. It created a 40-foot-high tsunami, destroyed more than 90% of the city's buildings, left more than 70,000 people dead (that's just in Messina; between 100,000 and 200,000 dead total), and killed one of antiquity's most famous "sea monsters" (more on that in a moment).

The town was just getting back on its architectural feet when Allied bombs flattened Messina during World War II.

Yep, Messina's history has long been a tale of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

In fact, the Straits of Messina contained the original "rock" and "hard place" that gave rise to that very expression.

Odysseus's dilemma and the death of a monster

In Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus needed to sail through the treacherous Straits of Messina, barely two miles wide. To do so, he had a difficult choice to make.

Should he keep to the west of the strait and the Sicilian shore (where Messina now sits), which would put him within range of Charybdis, a ravenous undersea monster with a gigantic maw that could swallow ships whole?

Or should he hew closer to the eastern side (what we now call Calabria) and risk the half-dozen snapping heads of Scylla, a Hydra-like monster that lived on the Calabrian shores just opposite Messina?

Going straight up the middle wasn't an option, since to be clear of one monster was to be within the range of the other.

His options were grim: risk losing the entire ship, or losing just a few men. Like that old nautical exprssion, he truly was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Odysseus made the only decision he could. Heeding Circe's advice, he sailed closer to the Calabrian side, and sure enough, the lightning-quick heads of Scylla snaked down from the cliffs and picked off six members of his crew, one by one:

"...they writhed
gasping as Scylla swung them up her cliff and there
at her cavern's mouth she bolted them down raw—
screaming out, flinging their arms toward me,
lost in that mortal struggle."

Finally, though, the ship and its survivors were through the treacherous path, and they could continue on their famed adventures.

Here be monsters?

The monster "Scylla" was, in reality, a metaphor for the dangerous undersea shoals and rock pillars off the toe of the Italian boot in Calabria—there's still an ancient fishing village named Scylla perched above the site.

"Charybdis" was actually a giant whirlpool that formed from time to time in the swiftly eddying currents that coursed through this narrow sea straight.

In other words, Odysseus was the first one to have to make the choice between a rock (Scylla) and a hard place (Charybdis).

Which begs the question: Why do contless ferries cross this treacherous body of water with impunity today?

The 1908 earthquake changed the very topography of the Straits of Messina, sinking the surrounding coast 19 inches into the water. This changed the sea currents, in effect destroying Charybdis, one of the most fearsome monsters in western mythology.

What mythology can teach us—if we'll listen

There is a long-term plan to build a bridge across the Straits of Messina, connecting Italy to the mainland for the first time in human hisotry and making the tedious and time-consuming use of ferries unneccessary.

Many have championed the bridge as being the single best way to solve the Sicily's eternal economic problems by allowing for a faster, freeer flow of commerce (read: trucks and other commercial traffic). It might, indeed, help.

But the earthquake of 1908, while notably devastating, was far from an anamoly. If there's anything that the hisotry of Sicily has shown, it's that the island of Mt. Etna is a land of constantly rumbling earth and shattered cities (just ask the descendants of the folks who used to live in Noto Antica, or any of dozens of other cities that had to be abandoned after the quake of 1963).

The Straits of Messina do follow a fault line after all, where the Tyrrhenian sub-plate is subducted under the Ionioan one. (Sicily itself marks the spot where the massive African plate grinds under the massive Euraisian plate, which is what causes all that spectacular vulcanism around Mt. Etna.)

Not even a modern bridge could withstand a tremblor of the sort that wrack Sicily with distrubing frequency—and not just the infamous mega-quakes of 1693 and 1908.

Sicily and its surrounding waters suffer an earthquake of around 4.4 every few months. That's right: there are mid-sized earthquakes in Sicily several times each year. Most are deep, or offshore, but you never know.

Every few years, a quake of 5.0 or more breaks buildings, injures citizens, and usually kills a handful of people.

In other words, building a bridge across the maw of Charybdis is probably just asking for trouble. One day, the monster might again awaken and swallow the thing whole.

After all, hubris was Odysseus's one major character flaw—and even he knew better than to take on Charybdis.

Modern Italian politicians might be wise to heed the warnings of Homer and not fall prey to a fatal dose of hubris of their own.

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