MESSINA

Dolphins, those symbols of luck and fair weather, accompanied us as we approached Messina, and we saw our first sword-fishing boats, small vessels equipped with enormously long bowsprits with platforms on the tips for the harpoonist and extraordinarily tall masts for the lookout, who, when he sees a swordfish lying in the water, takes over the steering of the ship himself by means of lines that go down from the top of the mast to the rudder, very much as bombardiers take over the piloting of their planes as they go into their bombing run. For some reason, since antiquity, the Straits of Messina have swarmed with swordfish, and their succulent steaks, prepared in a dozen different ways, are the specialty of most Sicilian restaurants.

We passed through the whirlpool of Charybdis, now, on this calm day, merely going through a polite circling motion so as not to disappoint visitors, and tied up in the harbor of Messina in front of a railroad yard next to an American freighter discharging American wheat as a blocked lire gift to the Sicilians.

Messina, a bustling, raw city, is a kind of pre-atomic Hiroshima. As in the case of some human beings who are unkindly and wantonly marked for disaster from birth, everything that has happened to Messina through its history has been for the worst. Set in a land and seascape of luxuriant green and blue, the city has gone, through the years, like a pretty woman with deplorable taste in men, from one catastrophe to another. Aside from more than the usual share of plunderings, razings, massacres, and plagues to which the cities of the Mediterranean Basin were all periodically subjected, Messina was the victim in 1908 of an earthquake and tidal wave that killed 80,000 of its inhabitants and practically leveled the city. And in 1943, in the massive bombardments that accompanied the Allied campaign in Sicily, it was once more terribly reduced. The truth that the human race will continue to live anywhere has never been more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that at this moment Messina has 242,900 inhabitants. If I were forced to live there, I have the feeling that I would be testing the nearest walls for quivers twenty times a day and keeping a nervous eye peeled for sudden flashes in the sky.