Messina, named for its sickle-shaped harbour, keeps rebuilding after repeated catastrophes
The Sicels who founded the city in 757 BC called it Zancle, their word for sickle, after the curve of its natural harbour. Since then Messina, on the strait between Sicily and the Italian mainland, has survived sackings, plague, earthquakes and bombing, and it has risen again each time.
Greek colonists moved in, and early in the 5th century BC Anaxilas of Rhegium renamed the place Messene, after a Greek city whose refugees he settled there. In 264 BC, when the Mamertine mercenaries holding it appealed to Rome for help against Syracuse, Roman troops crossed into Sicily, the first time a Roman army had operated beyond the Italian peninsula, and the First Punic War followed.
Under Byzantine rule it broke up into a scatter of villages, and under the Arabs it served as a military outpost, but from 1060 the Normans turned it into a busy Mediterranean trading hub. Richard the Lionheart stopped there in 1189 on his way to the Third Crusade and briefly occupied it in a quarrel over his sister's dowry. In 1347 Genoese galleys arriving from Kaffa carried the Black Death ashore, making Messina one of its first footholds in Western Europe.
St Ignatius founded the world's first Jesuit college there in 1548, the seed of today's university, and the Christian fleet that triumphed at Lepanto in 1571 sailed from its harbour; Cervantes spent time recovering in its Grand Hospital. By the early 17th century it counted among Europe's ten greatest cities. A revolt against Spanish rule starting in 1674 ended in 1678 with the city sacked and privileges it had held since Roman times stripped away.
Then nature piled on. Earthquakes struck in 1783 and 1894, and on the morning of 28 December 1908 a quake and tsunami killed about 100,000 people and wiped out most of the old architecture. Reconstruction from 1912, largely in the Liberty style, laid out wide straight streets running north to south. In 1943 Allied bombers dropped some 6,500 tons of explosives on this vital crossing point, destroying a third of the city. About 216,458 people live there today, and its port handles more passengers in transit than any other in Italy.
Source: Messina
