Grove Koger

The strait I have in mind lies between the northeastern tip of Sicily (the Punta del Faro) and the region of Calabria on the “toe” of the Italian boot (the Punta Pezzo)—the Strait of Messina.

At its narrowest, it’s a bit under two miles wide, and, like quite a few straits and other geographical features, it seems to have accumulated a number of significant “associations”—mythological, historical, geological, and even literary. In other words, it’s both a locus (or particular location) and a focus (or center of activity).

The Strait is routinely identified with the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of the Odyssey, the passage in which Odysseus and his men sail, or at least row, between a rocky shoal (the six-headed monster Scylla) and a dangerous whirlpool (Charybdis). Odysseus seems to have had a way with goddesses, in this case Circe, who advised him to sacrifice a handful of his men to Scylla rather than lose all of them, along with his ship, to Charybdis. It was, in other words, a difficult choice, and has led to the phrase that’s still in use today—usually by those who have no idea of its origin.

There’s actually a small town in seaside Calabria known, a little ominously, as Scilla, as I’ve learned from a 2022 book by Marco Benoît Carbone, Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic). Carbone’s survey has led me through a thicket of myth and mythic associations (not to mention a few tangles of academese), but it’s alerted me to a number of intriguing issues relating to the area. One involves a local scholar, Franco Mosino, who has determined to his satisfaction, if no one else’s, that the author of The Odyssey had actually lived in the area and had revealed his true identity by way of an acrostic in the ancient text! Carbone calls the theory a “local-centric worldview.” It’s a new term to me, but clearly one that shapes a lot of our thinking.

The strait was the scene of a catastrophic earthquake in 1908, the “largest seismic event ever recorded in southern Europe” since measuring instruments were introduced, according to G. Barreca et al in “The Strait of Messina: Seismotectonics and the Source of the 1908 Earthquake.” Writing in the July 2021 issue of Earth-Science Reviews, they point out that the causes of the catastrophe “have remained elusive” and make their own suggestions about the underlying issues. Famed travel writer Norman Douglas visited the scene from his home on Capri to make a donation to the survivors, and, in his eccentric novel The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Frederick Rolfe included an episode involving the rescue of a young woman in the quake’s aftermath.

The strait is also frequently the site of the Fata Morgana, an odd mirage in which an object such as a boat is seen in distorted form floating above the horizon. The phenomenon’s suggestive name is a reference, if you follow it back far enough, to the enchantress Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend.

For years now, Italians have debated the possibility of constructing a bridge across the Strait. It’s a project that would be enormously costly and that, given the seismotectonic situation that led to the 1908 earthquake, seems to me to be wildly unwise. But it’s a complicated issue worth examining another day.

Finally, I’ll mention a purely personal association with the Strait: Millennia after Odysseus’ fraught passage, my first wife and I passed through the strait one peaceful night on a ship of the Turkish Maritime Lines. Both shores were ablaze with lights, and although our ship made its way slowly, the experience didn’t last long enough to savor adequately. But we were on our way to more adventures, and I suspect that our thoughts were probably racing far ahead.

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