Grove Koger
It was one of the most devastating natural disasters in modern European history. The Sicilian city of Messina, which lies on the strait separating the island from the toe of the Italian boot, was struck by a massive earthquake at about 5:20 on the morning of December 28, 1908. Within minutes, a 40-foot tsunami then swept through the strait and pushed inland for miles. The twin calamities left Messina in ruins, and Reggio di Calabria and other nearby settlements on the peninsula suffered much the same fate. The total death toll may have run to as many as 100,000 people or more.
The Italian army and navy began rescue efforts immediately, and other countries dispatched their ships to aid in the operation. Within a short period of time, a number of countries also began raising humanitarian funds in what may seem like an unusual manner. They printed stamps in a series of shared designs, with proceeds going to help the many victims. But these weren’t really postage stamps; you couldn’t mail anything with them. But you could add them to letters carrying official stamps, and in Italy itself, thanks to a royal decree, they were postmarked. (Those cancellations increase the value of the stamps and the envelopes they’re attached to—a point of considerable interest to collectors.)
The stamps, which collectors categorize as labels or “cinderellas,” were triangular in shape. One series involved ten simple images of landmarks and the like, and were printed se-tenant (that is, together on single sheets) in ten colors. In all, ten countries issued the stamps, with denominations in currencies appropriate to the particular country. Another shared series pictured the King and Queen of Italy, and were priced in higher denominations. The countries involved in this humanitarian effort were Austria, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States.
A few other labels were also printed, with the Massachusetts branch of the American Red Cross, for instance, producing its own triangular versions.
A century later, in 2008, Italy issued an official rectangular stamp commemorating the terrible event.
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The Messina earthquake played a minor role in the lives of two intriguing writers—Norman Douglas (1868-1952) and Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913).
Having heard in mid-May 1909 of the misery that the survivors of the quake were still suffering, Douglas took it upon himself to “cajole or blackmail” the foreigners living on Capri (then Douglas’s home) into contributing to a fund that he then carried to Messina and Reggio. “During this operation,” he wrote, “I had occasion to observe, not for the first time, that when it is a question of relieving distress the poorer folk are more generous, relatively speaking, than the wealthy ones.” Douglas published an account of what he saw in the September 1910 issue of Cornhill magazine and incorporated the material into his classic 1915 travel account Old Calabria.
The earthquake also figures in Rolfe’s strange fantasy The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1934). Protagonist Nicholas Crabbe (who is something of an idealized self-portrait) rescues a survivor of the catastrophe before sailing to Venice, where the rest of the novel is set.
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The image at the top of today’s post is an American stamp from the first series showing Sicily’s Mount Etna, and the third illustrates the manner in which the stamps were printed on the sheet. The photograph of damage in Messina is from the collection of Lieutenant Commander Richard Wainwright and is reproduced courtesy of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. The final image shows the 2008 Italian stamp commemorating the event.
World Enough 
