Into the Heart of Darkness Part 3 - Sicily: Main Intersection of the Old World
Messina, Taormina, Palermo, Ancient Greeks and Romans, Arabic and Norman Architecture, Bar Sottocapo, My Friend Giorgio, and The Decline of the Mafia
Part 1 - Napoli: The Volcano
Part 2 - Reggio di Calabria: “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Upon exploring a new land for the first time, the temptation to pester locals about its history and culture is overwhelming. At the same time, many locals simply aren’t all that interested in talking about its history, particularly if it has been a rather bloody one. For many people it brings up bad memories. Others would prefer to think about the present and the future and find types like me to be odd or a bit ‘off’. Others still would just like to enjoy a drink and chit chat, and maybe have a few laughs. All this is perfectly normal behaviour.
I am often asked by locals in Croatia why I chose to move back. I list the usual reasons such as quality of life and climate, but I also let them know just how much history envelops them in their everyday lives, and how prominent it is visually, especially in comparison to large parts of North America where most everything is new (or new-ish). When you have lived around history your entire life, you can easily take it for granted. I understand that. Having not spent most of my life surrounded by Roman or Medieval or Renaissance, etc. architecture, it allows me a much greater appreciation for it when I do see it. Having the ability to compare and contrast life in two different continents is a blessing.
“Bro, you gotta go to Sicily! You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is!”. These were the words that came out of the mouth of a scion of an ‘Ndrangheta family in Canada to me some 15 years ago. Calabrians are a very, very proud lot. For a Calabrian to positively compare Sicily to Calabria in terms of beauty meant that I could take it to the bank. At the time I had just read John Dickie’s excellent book “Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia”, and thanks to how it changed my perception of the island, I made a mental note to visit it some day.
Like most people in the Anglosphere, my mental image of Sicily up until that point was formed by two different influences: Mafia movies and Italy’s south being a cultural wasteland. I couldn’t be more wrong.
Unlike mass market mafia books published in the USA, Dickie, a British academic, writes in a more refined style, less sensationalist, with a wider and much deeper view of the cultural and political history of the island, and why it became what it is today. I had no idea that Palermo was one of Europe’s cultural capitals up until the Risorgimento, for example. I also had no idea that latifundia system ruled the island into the 20th century, making emigration an existential matter for the hundreds of thousands of Sicilians forced to leave the island for the New World, especially New York City.
I did not know how many great poets, writers, filmmakers, actors and actresses came from Sicily, visited Sicily for extended periods of time, or were inspired by the island to create great art. All of this was new to me and caused me to not only re-think my adopted mental image of not just Sicily, but the entire south of Italy. Sicily went from being somewhere that I had never thought of visiting, to a tempting terra incognita, constantly occupying space in mind.
The city of Messina is where one will first set foot on Sicily when crossing over from the mainland by ferry. Messina is slightly to the north geographically from Reggio di Calabria, but both share the Strait of Messina which is a stretch of land and sea that is very, very active seismically, and which has made the building of a bridge from mainland to the island rather cost-prohibitive and technologically challenging.
The Strait of Messina was the location of Europe’s most devastating earthquake ever in recorded history. Measured at 7.1 on the Richter Scale, it destroyed both Reggio di Calabria and Messina, killing over 75,000 people whether by collapsing homes and buildings, fires that followed it, or, most tragically, by the tsunami caused by the quake which swallowed up people on both sides of the Strait who rushed to the seashore to escape danger. Half of Messina’s population was killed. In the ensuing months, thousands more left. Messina, with 91% of its buildings destroyed, was largely emptied out. It had lost its old population. The city was slowly rebuilt, but with new colonists arriving from both Calabria and Messina’s hinterland. It was a new people for a city stretching back 3,000 years.
The almost total replacement of the local population leads many to suggest that Messina is a city where people are removed from its own long history. The dislocation caused by that massive earthquake ripped out the organic flow of one generation into another over the centuries, starting with the Ancient Greeks on through to the newly-created Italians of the turn of the last century. Once again, I turn to John Dickie, who put together this video where he explores the notion that Messina is a ‘city without memory’:
Messina’s main drag along the sea is rather pleasant, and beautiful architecture abounds. But when you’re so spoiled for choice, like Italy is, it becomes rather easy to become less appreciative of what you actually have.
Messina also has these amazing public graveyards that were created to celebrate important people and families in the city’s history.