{"id":380,"date":"2014-05-16T12:47:44","date_gmt":"2014-05-16T12:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/?p=380"},"modified":"2016-01-23T10:58:07","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T10:58:07","slug":"legend-of-messina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/legend-of-messina\/","title":{"rendered":"Print the Legend: The Strait of Messina"},"content":{"rendered":"

In ancient mythology the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy was the home of Scylla and Charybdis, two fearsome monsters of the kind the Greeks loved to come up with \u2013 both were female, and both, at least in several\u00a0versions of their story, had previously been renowned\u00a0beauties, who were turned into scabrous horrors only after setting off the jealousy of goddesses, to spend\u00a0the rest of their days venting their rage on\u00a0any sailors who dared\u00a0to make their way\u00a0through the Strait. Scylla lurked in\u00a0a cave\u00a0amid the\u00a0rocks and crags\u00a0on the mainland side, ready with her six snake-like heads and twelve feet to pounce out and devour the crew of\u00a0any passing ship. On the Sicilian side was Charybdis, often half-hidden\u00a0beneath a fig tree, but who when the fancy took her would leap\u00a0into the sea to swallow down\u00a0huge quantities of water, creating a terrifying whirlpool that sucked\u00a0whole ships down to their doom, before belching\u00a0the same water back up again.<\/p>\n

\"Messina-4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Because of the narrowness of the Strait \u2013 famously ‘only an arrow-shot in width’ \u2013 any ship trying to pass\u00a0through it\u00a0had\u00a0to expose itself to one monster or the other. Jason and his\u00a0Argonauts only made it through because they were aided by the goddess Thetis. In Homer’s Odyssey<\/em>, Odysseus\/Ulysses is warned of the dangers of the two by the goddess Circe. Considering Charybdis the worse threat, he sails his ship closer to the mainland, only to see six of his men carried off by Scylla, one by each head. This myth was the source\u00a0of phrases like ‘to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis’, meaning having\u00a0to choose between two equal dangers. This in turn was supposedly the origin of the modern idea \u2013 now that scarcely any of us\u00a0automatically ‘gets’ Classical quotes any more, and they usually\u00a0sound pretentious \u2013 of being ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’.<\/p>\n

\"Charybdis'<\/a>
Charybdis’ haunt, on a quiet day<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So the Strait of Messina comes with a pretty awe-inspiring build-up. And 18th-century artists, no doubt\u00a0conscious of an audience who’d all read their Homer, often showed the place conveniently\u00a0drama-ed up, adding in jagged rocks where there are none and unusually fierce, restive\u00a0waves. Truth is, though, that if you go there today the Strait is one place on earth\u00a0that seems peculiarly distant\u00a0from\u00a0its ancient billing. It is certainly surprisingly narrow: despite the huge size of the island of Sicily, at Messina it’s\u00a0closer to the Calabrian mainland than the Isle of Wight is to England, separated from it by just\u00a03\u20135 kilometres or 2\u20133 miles of water, but this narrowness only accentuates the Strait’s\u00a0unthreatening, tranquil\u00a0ordinariness, criss-crossed by constant\u00a0ferry traffic. A prosaic, everyday thoroughfare.<\/p>\n

The mountains on the Calabrian side are at least suitably abrupt and lofty, but Capo Peloro or Punta del Faro north of Messina city, the northeasternmost point of Sicily and so supposedly the lair\u00a0of Charybdis, is a narrow, scrubby sand-spit, backed by a few downmarket beach clubs and discos used by the\u00a0Messinese<\/em>\u00a0on summer weekends, but\u00a0closed up and deserted\u00a0most of the year. On an island full of astonishing\u00a0landscapes, and villages perched incomprehensibly in death-defying clifftop locations, the\u00a0plainness of this legendary\u00a0spot\u00a0seems almost perverse.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/a>
One of Italy’s least-remembered castles<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scattered around it\u00a0are the stubby, neglected remains of a medieval castle, and a coastguard station, but the cape’s biggest ‘sight’\u00a0is a huge 1950s electricity pylon, one of the world’s tallest, with over 1,200 steps to the top. For many years electricity was carried to Sicily via\u00a0this pylon from its twin\u00a0on the Calabrian side. Their role has long\u00a0been supplanted by underwater cables, but because of their size the\u00a0now cable-less pylons have been kept, as monuments. When in power Silvio Berlusconi also repeatedly proclaimed his intention to build a similarly immense, deity-defying bridge across the same location, but now that the Cavaliere<\/em> is feigning concern for Alzheimer’s patients in a Milan hospice this project seems to have been definitively shelved. Because of the narrowness of the Strait it is apparently true that there are unusual\u00a0currents and flows within it that do indeed often create small whirlpools near the Point, but nothing big enough to represent a hazard to shipping, even for ancient Greek wooden galleys. There is quite a nice beach, which, since nearly all Sicilians regard it as inconceivable to go anywhere near a beach except in July and August, whatever the sun is doing, you can often have to yourself.<\/p>\n

A good place to sit in contemplation, look out for whirlpools, and\u00a0fill in the legends for yourself as well. For\u00a0the ancients obviously embroidered a whole\u00a0lot in search of a good story. But then, that’s what imagination is for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In ancient mythology the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy was the home of Scylla and Charybdis, two fearsome monsters of the kind the Greeks loved to come up with \u2013 both were female, and both, at least in several\u00a0versions of their story, had previously been renowned\u00a0beauties, who were turned into scabrous horrors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[54,34,40,41,6],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-italy","tag-italy","tag-landscapes","tag-mythology","tag-sicily","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nick-rider.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}