The Fairies of Scilla

Stubborn and determined, Dominican friar Antonio Minasi rose very early for an extended period so as to reach a ‘steep’ vantage point in Reggio Calabria just as the sun’s rays formed a 45-degree angle over the Strait. From up there, on clear, windless days, he could witness marvellous spectacles ‘as if in a catoptric theatre’: he saw pillars, arches, castles, columns – and that was nothing. For then there would appear before him ‘grand towers, magnificent palaces with numerous balconies and windows, very tall trees, vast fields with their flocks, armies of men on foot and on horseback, all armed, and many other bizarre images in their natural colours, depicting their own actions, which, one after the other, flowed rapidly across that stretch of sea’. Fra Minasi was no fanatic but the most meticulous scholar of the Fata Morgana, the illusory optical phenomenon so common on the sea between Scylla and Charybdis. He classified it into three categories in a short treatise from 1773 for which he is still remembered today: ‘Dissertazione prima sopra un fenomeno volgarmente detto Fata Morgana: o sia apparizione di varie, successive, bizzarre immagini, che per lungo tempo ha sedotti i popoli, e dato a pensare ai dotti’.

That stretch of water separating Sicily from the mainland, where the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas meet and clash, where in recent days beach reports have highlighted the presence of the ‘flesh-eating bacterium’; that sea across which Antonello da Messina’s paintings—stolen on Ferragosto—may already have passed; that mythical place, where viewers of Nolan’s The Odyssey saw Ulysses once more on the black ship, is a well-known source of inspiration for legends and intricately woven destinies, for tragedies, trade and literary masterpieces that have amplified its geographical dimensions: “In reality, the Strait of Messina, in its brief expanse, has always enclosed a deep ocean of storm and torment: it was here that the fateful earthquakes and tsunamis occurred which have repeatedly laid waste to Reggio and Messina; the stormy winds of Aeolus sweep across its waters; bewitched calms occur; hallucinatory Sirens arise, along with other wonders that have fired the imagination since the dawn of history”. So wrote Vincenzo Consolo, one of the authors cited by Professor Giulio Ferroni in a book that has just been published and conceived in the ‘Augustal fervour’ of a year ago: Tra Scilla e Cariddi. Panegirico per lo Stretto, published by Laterza, illustrates the writer’s staunch opposition to the construction of the bridge. It is a ‘humanist plea’ to avert the ‘all-too-obvious offence’ that the infrastructure ‘would inflict upon nature: not only and not merely upon its balance and beauty, but also upon its relentless ‘stepmotherly’ nature, of which, after all, the history of the Strait is well aware, with its long series of earthquakes and tsunamis’.

Lamenting the laconic nature of his classicist colleagues’ views on the bridge project, Ferroni compensates for this by drawing on the words of those who, from the ancient Greeks to the Arabs, from foreign visitors to Italian writers, have celebrated the Strait as a ‘crucial place’ of ‘austere beauty that takes shape, fades and wraps itself around itself’. He makes it clear that his is not merely an environmentalist appeal, but a call to defend such places from ‘predatory’ greed. Turning the predictable accusation of nostalgia on its head, Ferroni judges the project to be “merely a belated remnant of the economic boom era, of a wholly twentieth-century vision of triumphant development”, in which “it is easy to discern an echo of the very same accumulative drive of ultra-capitalism that dominates the contemporary horizon: in short, a remnant that is in tune with that frenzy, fuelled by resentment, which is driving the world towards catastrophe and which, in the very act of bringing destruction to every form of human and natural habitat, suggests illusory simplifications and enhancements of existence, thanks to the decisive outcomes of ever-new technologies, to the projection of digitality towards the capabilities of artificial intelligence that is not only generative but also active (and who knows what further developments may lie ahead)”.

There is, however, a further level to which the literary historian devotes himself and which fuels his passion, and that is the millennia-old epic that makes the Strait of Messina ‘an anthropological trajectory, which, in a highly original manner, connects the mythical legacy, storytelling imagination, to physical space, to the confrontation of the lands, to the movement of the waters, to the forms and outcomes of human labour, and to its very constitution, amidst collaboration and conflict. Myth and folktale, in different ways, have imprinted upon the mirror of the Strait images of the human relationship with the otherness of nature, and of the daring that leads to overcoming its extreme and uncontrollable situations’. These lines allude as much to the poetry of Homer as to the Messina folk legend of Cola Pesce, the boy who dived on the orders of the king (or a governor or the queen, depending on the version) to explore the depths of the abyss, never to return. These lines also evoke the dense narratives contained in Stefano D’Arrigo’s masterpiece, Horcynus Orca, perhaps the finest Italian novel of the twentieth century, in the fluid, river-like prose woven over two labourious decades by the Sicilian author: a monumental book in which ordinary lives shift from real to mythical dimensions through the fantastical transfiguration of the existence of fishermen and ‘femminote’ of the Strait, which is a constant struggle against the ineffable forces of nature, a battle for swordfish against the tireless and malevolent dolphins (the ‘fere’) and the mournful ‘orcaferone’; but it is also a struggle against history, for the bombs and prohibitions of war prevent the ‘ferribò’ from connecting the two shores and the ‘pellisquadra’ from setting sail to earn their livelihood.

If Ulysses had to escape the voracious monster Scylla and the deadly whirlpool of Charybdis, the men of today now move, as D’Arrigo wrote in Il Codice Siciliano, “across the meadows, now reduced to ashes, of Homer”. The return may be dictated by the Sirens’ lure, which summons the children back “from that balustrade of scents – jasmine or basil – in Sicily”; or it may be, as Ferroni recalls, the final journey cut short by the Strait, which in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo sees the prince returning by train to die in 1883: “Thirty-six hours holed up in a sweltering box, suffocated by the smoke of the tunnels that repeated themselves like feverish dreams, blinded by the sun on the open stretches, stark as sad realities, humiliated by the hundred menial favours he had had to ask of his frightened nephew; they passed through malevolent landscapes, accursed mountain ranges, malarial and torpid plains…”.

How much sweeter was Guy de Maupassant’s crossing of that sea two years later: he enjoyed the voyage as a tourist with a sensibility quite different from that of the gruff sailors who suffered “that stench to die for, unique in the world”, emanating from the gigantic “orcazza”; on the contrary, the Frenchman noted in his diary that ‘the shores of Sicily and the shores of Calabria exude such a powerful scent of orange blossom that the entire Strait is perfumed like a woman’s boudoir’, whilst the summit of Mount Etna, bathed in the light of the full moon, appeared to him as if clad in silver. No wonder: to each his own alluring or punishing mirage, for ‘Scylla and Charybdis continue to live on in the truth of fiction, marking the very reality of the Strait’s expanse, its sunny and stormy backdrops, its dangers and the myriad lives that flow through it’, observes Ferroni. “They bring to life not only the violence of nature, but the beauty of immersing oneself in it, as well as the memory of the history that has unfolded there: the long, stubborn defence of humanity, its defeats and its achievements, the labour of the generations that have passed through it, for better or for worse, in brotherhood and in hatred”. Similar reflections are echoed in the book La Sicilia è un sentimento. Viaggio sul limite dello Stretto (Sicily is a Feeling: A Journey to the Edge of the Strait) by Father Antonio Spadaro, a native of Messina, published last spring by the Touring Club: “The sliver of space between Scylla and Charybdis” opens up a “powerful philosophical metaphor for expressing the human condition of constant movement between opposites, tensions and encounters. This philosophy draws direct inspiration from the geographical landscape of the Strait, marked by opposing currents and a dynamism between two lands that are close yet irrevocably separated, and transforms it into a paradigm of the very experience of the spirit”.

In the extra time of the contemporary era, the quixotic yet self-aware Ferroni launches, through his "Panegirico", an appeal in defence of the environment – not merely the physical environment, but the mythical, archetypal and fairy-tale one. While this is threatened by what he terms ‘ultra-capitalism’, it is also true that throughout the twentieth century, opposing ideologies too have worked to desecrate human and natural spaces, and in the name of a messianic progress of history have branded as irrational anyone who evoked any transcendent dimension.

It will be difficult now, though one can never say for certain, that the defence of the ‘Bosphorus of Sicily’ (as Quasimodo put it) might become a symbol ‘of the defence of the world against the fate mapped out by the destructive forces that are currently derailing it’. It is unlikely that the imaginary world upon which Father Minasi fixed his gaze from the heights of Reggio will be able to counter the myriad opposing arguments put forward in favour of the bridge – arguments based on long-standing assessments that have now reached the implementation stage (meanwhile, one screenwriter has even had fun imagining the structure’s collapse in the TV series The Bad Guy, released on Prime Video in late 2022). However, if the connection between places and human consciousness, as endorsed by Ferroni, is true, then the alteration of a topography so rich in myth and stories would have its collective cultural repercussions. Who knows, then, whether ‘that stretch of sea, that brackish river’ which Consolo saw as a ‘metaphor for existence’ will still be perceived as ‘the inescapable strait, the tormented passage where man may lose himself, may lose his reason, becoming frenzied, or lose his life against the rocks or within the vortex of a malevolent, monstrous and ferocious nature; or save himself, emerge from the horrid chaos after the crucial passage, and reach shore, in the Ithaca of reality and history, of reason and affection’. It remains to be seen whether the bridge will dim the memory of the marvellous crossing of the Strait on his cloak, for which Saint Francis of Paola was chosen as the patron saint of fishermen threatened by storms, as Giovanni Verga recounted in I Malavoglia. Who can say whether the half-sorceress Ciccina Circé will also vanish as if by magic—she who ferried the protagonist of D’Arrigo’s novel, ‘Ndrja Cambrìa, across at night to bring him home, bewitching the wild beasts with the ceaseless tinkling of a bell. Who can say whether that colossal bridge will dissuade the ghost of the poetess Maria Costa from lingering once more on the shoreline of the little village near Messina to urge the spirit of Cola Pesce to re-emerge from the water, as if she were his heart-rending mother.

These are subjects as evocative as they are fragile: Ferroni knew this before he began the book, just as anyone writing in 2026 knows it, yet he insisted, despite everything, that this landscape “must be defended just as it is, in its living reality, in the breath of the wind and the sea, in everything that moves there—humanity and objects, ships and artefacts, life teeming along the coasts and upon the surface of the sea—in the changing rhythm of days and seasons, of calms and storms”. For many readers, his 153 and a half pages will seem ‘merely the necessary outburst of an old professor who has devoted his whole life to literature’, but ‘he has always believed that literature concerns life (and everyone’s life)’. It is not a question of Reggio and Messina, or not only that, because ‘looking out over the Strait and its fate is like looking out over the fate of the world’. “Perhaps” he concludes, “to save ourselves from the artificial, digital, plasticised myths that besiege us today, we would need to rediscover the link between places and the founding myths, tales, words and names with which they have been identified, and which have shaped our perception of time, our hopes and fears, our successes and defeats, and the intertwining of the lives that have passed through them”. This is how humanists reason.