Page 260 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

trees and Liberty-style palazzi, have a certain bourgeois charm, but much of the city

centre is given over to charmless buildings, more or less anti-seismic, depending on
the honesty of whoever was responsible for their construction. The treasure-trove of
art contained in the Museo Regionale makes up for what the rest of the city lacks.

THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF MESSINA

Messina straddles a fault-line which has been responsible for several centuries of
catastrophic earthquakes. The most devastating occurred in 1783 and 1908; on the

latter occasion the shore sank by half a metre overnight and around 80,000 Sicilians
lost their lives (plus around 15,000 across the Straits in Calabria). Few Messinese
families were untouched by the quake, and almost everyone you meet will have some
earthquake story – of miraculous escapes, or of people driven insane by the loss of
loved ones and their city – passed down from grand- or great-grandparents.

As if that wasn’t enough, the few surviving buildings, along with everything that
had been painstakingly reconstructed in the wake of the earthquake, were

subsequently the target of Allied bombardments, when Messina achieved the
dubious distinction of being the most intensely bombed Italian city during World
War II.

The Duomo

Piazza del Duomo • Mon–Fri 9am–7pm, Sat & Sun 9am–noon & 3.30–7.30pm

Messina’s most important monument, the Duomo, epitomizes the city’s phoenix-like
ability to re-create itself from the ashes of its last disaster. It’s the reconstruction of a
twelfth-century cathedral erected by Roger II, one of a series of great Norman
churches that included the sumptuous cathedrals of Palermo and Cefalù. Formerly, the

building dominated medieval Messina, and was the venue for Archbishop Palmer’s
marriage of Richard the Lionheart’s sister Joan to the Norman-Sicilian king, William