Above is the Messina Harbor on the Strait of Messina as seen from a hill overlooking the town. Our hotel roof is in the foreground (if you read backwards you could figure out the name of the place; if you do everything backward, you should have come with us and helped us with the the plumbing at that ****place). We were able to watch ships (mostly ferries) go by all night from our room. (OK, we didn't have much night life other than eating dinner with new friends on the tour, but that was primarily because the trip was pretty well structured and forced us to eat in the sponsoring chain's hotels each night).
The strait itself, of course, separates Italy from Sicily and are in some places no more than about 2 miles wide. In my days as a Latin teacher (too many, too long ago), I used to force Vergil and Homer on complaining seniors who had to learn about Scylla and Charybdis, mythical characters represented by troublesome rocks on the Sicily side (Scylla) which gave sailors (like Odysseus) a hard time with her 6 heads and 6 dogs on her body. Of course, they can't avoid Scylla in the narrow strait because the eddy (Charybdis) will suck them in on the mainline side.
We stayed too little in Messina, a gritty town which keeps getting wiped out (usually by earthquakes) and then rebuilt. In this century (20th) it has been banged up pretty badly in 1908 (the worst earthquake/tidal wave to ever hit Europe wiped out 90% of the town and about half the population -- around 100,000 people.) and during WWII with intensive bombing raids before George Patton and the seventh Army took it in 1943. In a sense, Messina is an early site for the Neutrino bomb as the bubonic plague entered Europe for the first time through its port.
Our sightseeing was confined to the cathedral square at dusk so most pictures failed to come out except for the clock tower below which replaces several others destroyed by earthquakes. This version was created in 1908 after the earthquake; in 1933 the archbishop ordered some animated mechanisms (astronomy, local history, religion, etc.) from Strasbourg which, unfortunately, we did not get to see.
Some day we will go back and see all the sights of Messina that we missed including being at the clock plaza at noon when all of this hardware starts dancing.
The next morning, we were off to our first ruin of the trip at Tindari, please join us by clicking here.
Question: No, we didn't see her and this is not a picture of Pietrina in her younger days (as if she doesn't look this good now!), but what is this woman's picture doing here????
Answer: Of course, it's the star of Il Postino, Maria Grazia Cucinotta who was born and raised in Messina. Obviously she didn't get bombed during WWII and we'll spare any earthquake jokes about did the earth move. (After all, our tour guide warned us the first night that we'd be charged extra for "naughty" movies.)
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