Myths and Legends
Few places in the world contain so many popular myths and legends like the Strait of Messina does. This includes stories of epic deeds, troubled events, and fantastic visions that have indelibly traced the history, culture, and traditions of the territories that have overlooked it over the centuries. As a crucial junction for the maritime routes beaten by the ancient civilizations, a source of inspiration for poets and writers, and an eternal challenge for navigators from all over the world, this sea, as Giovanni Pascoli recalls in “Thoughts and Speeches”, honouring the Reggio Latinist Diego Vitrioli: “is full of voices and this sky is full of visions. The Nereids that have been forgotten still howl in this sea, and the dead cities often hang over this sky. This is a sacred place, where the Greek waves look for the Latin ones.” Suggestions that are still alive today, the stories of anglers and the elderly, from the ancestral fear generated by Scylla and Charybdis, to the symbolic and imaginative power of Fata Morgana, up to and including the family drama of Oreste that finds peace in bathing in the Metauro.
Reggio Calabria offers visitors a great imaginary life that takes its first steps from the myth of its foundation, prophesied by the Delfi oracle, up to the Magna Graecia and Roman periods, and then passing from the medieval age to the Spanish domination. It is a cultural heritage rich in magical, mysterious, and timeless atmospheres.
Sources call him Anaxilaos or Anaxilas. The latter version would seem to be a more suitable name for a character who came from Messenia, the Peloponneso region. However, the oldest source that mentions his name, Herodotus, names him as Anaxileos.
He was a character of the highest level, a descend [...]
“…but to me Eros
does not rest in any season…”
(Ibico Reggino Davies fr.286)
Ibico, son of the historian Fitio, a noble family from Mexico who arrived in ancient Rhegion, is one of the most important lyric poets in the history of Greek literature.
Inserted by the Great Alexandrian schola [...]
It is a story full of passion, unrequited loves, fierce revenge, and a dramatic epilogue, one that tells of the mythological feats of gods and mortals in the body of water that separates Reggio from Messina. It is the story of Scylla, a nymph with an astonishing beauty, transformed by the sorceress [...]
There was a time, on the banks of the Strait, where Reggio and Messina were the faces of a single great territory, a space that is no longer separated from the sea, but held together by indefinite and unattainable borders. From a distant time, handed down by literature and folk tales that still live [...]
At the end of the Trojan War, the King of Mycenaeans, Agamemnon, returned to Argos after ten years of war, fell into an ambush orchestrated by his wife Clytemnestra together with her lover, Egisto, who would usurp the throne. The young Oreste, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was [...]