Stretto di Messina

I submitted photos of the Strait of Messina (Stretto di Messina) for both a profile photo and a «business specific» photo. And I found a review from an American, and a fellow Californian at that!
The Strait of Messina has always had three dimensions, in that it has scenic, cultural, and economic ramifications.
While I have been on the Calabria side, it’s always been inside a train that I’ve taken up toward Rome or Florence. Hence, I’ve never been able to look back at Sicily from Calabria. However, I have looked at the Italian mainland, from either sea level, at the port of Messina, or from the hills above Messina, several times. The Sicilian side of the strait is home to Sicily’s third largest city. The Calabrian side is more rugged, with promontories and hills that tumble down to the sea. The feeling of looking across the strait, or having it as a backdrop while at the beach, is exciting. Sicilians tend to be dismissive of Messina, as if it was vapid. They instead hold Palermo, the capital, boisterous Catania, and Siracusa (Syracuse), with its Greek ruins, in high regard. The views Messina offers are superior to those of the other three cities. Sorry. Therefore, Messina couldn’t possibly be vapid.
The Strait of Messina has shaped Sicily’s unique culture, being that, in ancient times, people couldn’t just cross those 1.5 miles of water to commute to work, as some do today. This led to Sicily’s being designated as an autonomous region, under Rome’s purview, but with enough leeway to keep its cultural fabric intact. And what a unique culture it is. Its food staples are different, its desserts are different, its dialect is different, its customs are different, its attitude is different, and its history is all its own.
The Strait of Messina has also determined Sicily’s economic circumstances. By not being integrated into mainstream Italy for a long time, it sort of went off the Italian grid, and onto its own grid. When you transit by automobile or train from the mainland onto Sicily, a ferry is necessary. The train combines are pulled apart to get the various cars onto the ferries, as individual carriages. Additionally, the island does not even have a fully developed ring road, turnpike, or toll highway. They are slowly adding onto it, but completing it will take time. The Italians wanted the feather in their cap of having the world’s longest suspension bridge, connecting Sicily to the mainland. It has to be the world’s longest for a reason. They have determined that the currents are so strong and hard to contend with, that setting up cofferdams to build the towers for a suspension bridge partway into the Strait of Messina is not feasible. If it were, the bridge, the likes of the Golden Gate or the Lisbon harbor bridge, would have been there long ago and the high speed trains from Rome or Naples would have just continued southward and crossed on the bridge onto Sicily. Instead, with its towers having to be on land on both sides, it would make for a span about 1.5x that of the Golden Gate Bridge or New York City’s Verrazano Bridge. While it could give Sicily an economic boost, they’ve decided that it’s too costly, too unwieldy, and locals fail to see its value when the island’s roads are in a state of disrepair.
A mock-​up of one bridge tower on land on the Sicilian side:
A formidable span to be bridged, with Sicily on the left and Calabria on the right:
When one stands looking at the Strait of Messina, they can sense the history and the culture this narrow passage has created. As for the bridge, I vacillate from «leave this natural wonder untouched» to «that would be one ‘bitchen’ bridge.»

Sailing through the Strait of Messina, the narrow gap between mainland Italy and Sicily, is exhilarating.
With a natural whirlpool in one part of the strait and strong currents throughout, it’s believed this area was the inspiration for Scylla and Charybdis, two monsters Odysseus carefully had to sail between in Homer’s «Odyssey» on his way home. On top of all this the optical illusion of Fata Morgana regularly occurs here, makes ships appear upside down and old sailors claimed to see fairy castles in the water.
One of the crewmen on our ship mentioned the pilot boatmen in the strait were crazy. Normally the pilot boats slow down before approaching a ship so they may board to help navigate it through treacherous waters, but in the Stretto di Messina they race along like it’s nothing.
Sure enough as we watched the pilot boat approach in the wild and choppy waters, they were getting thrown into the air as they sped toward us, practically making a flying leap onto the ship. They could build a reality show around these guys.
It’s probably an everyday sight for them, but it’s really cool watching the Tyrrhenian Sea come into view and with the northern tip of Sicily on the left, part of the southern tip of Calabria (mainland Italy) on the right.