glamour, a fathomless black set off by a necklace of white lights strung like pearls along the coast road.
It was a scene that had drawn artists and writers for generations. Those raised beside the Straits of Messina, however, have long understood that the truth of the place is in what lies beneath. The Straits are a narrow, plunging abyss formed when Africa and Europe collided fifty million years ago and Africa bent down towards the centre of the earth. In this underwater chasm, the rushing currents created when the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas meet make for some of the most disturbed waters in all the oceans. Boiling whirlpools and sucking vortexes trap yachts and fishing boats. Slewing tides send ferries and freighters skidding sideways towards the rocks. Those peering into the depths can see startled bug-eyed fish, and even sharks and whales, shot to the surface from the sea floor 250 metres below. The swirling winds of the Straits reflect this turmoil, inverting the normal pattern of hot air over cold to create an optical illusion called the Fata Morgana in which boats and land on the horizon appear to float upside down in the sky.
On land, human history has mirrored this natural upheaval. Reggio and Messina were founded by Greek colonists whose king, Italos, eventually gave the country its name. But for three millennia, the Straits have been continuously conquered and appropriated, first by Syracusans in 387 BC, then by Campanians, Romans, Vandals, Lombards, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Hohenstaufen German kings, Angevins, Aragonese, Spanish Habsburgs (twice), Ottomans, Barbary pirates, reactionary French Bourbons and Bonapartists, before finally, in 1860 and 1861, Reggio and Messina were captured by Giuseppe Garibaldi in the war that unified Italy. The wealth of its occupiers had given Messina and Reggio their ancient, yellow-stone harbours, their Arabic street names and an early artistry that found exquisite expression in the Riacce Bronzes, two sculptures of naked, bearded warriors dating from 450 BC discovered by a snorkeller off the Calabrian coast in 1972. But this early globalism also had its costs. It was through the Straits’ ports that the Black Death entered Europe from Asia in 1346, going on to wipe out two-thirds of the continent’s population. In 1743, by which time humanity’s numbers had barely recovered, plague returned a second time, killing 48,000 in Messina alone. Next to those disasters, the deadly earthquakes of 1783 and 1894 were largely forgotten, though not the quake and ensuing twelve-metre tsunami of 28 December 1908 which flattened both Reggio and Messina, killing 200,000 people. Rebuilt entirely, the twin cities were levelled again by Allied bombers in 1943.
Assailed by tempests, consumed by catastrophe, the people of the Straits could be forgiven for thinking they were cursed. Many used magic and folk wisdom to account for their suffering. In the Odyssey, Homer had written about two sea monsters which lived on opposing sides of the Straits. Surging out from Calabria, the six-headed Scylla would snatch sailors from the decks of their ships, while from Sicily Charybdis would suck entire boats under the waves with her insatiable thirst. People explained Etna’s deadly eruptions by describing the mountain as the home of Vulcan, or sometimes of Cyclops, both of them angry, thundering types with low opinions of mortals. The tremors people felt under their feet were said to be the shifting grip of Colapesce, the son of a fisherman who took a deep dive one day, saw that Sicily was held up by a single, crumbling column and stayed in the depths to prevent its collapse. The floating islands which appeared over Reggio, meanwhile, were thought to be glimpses of Avalon, to which the fairy-witch Morgan le Fay (after whom the Fata Morgana was named) spirited a dying King Arthur. Up there too, it was said, was The Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans for ever.
Alessandra would carry the feel of the Straits with her all her life. It was there in the way a winter’s chill would remind her of the morning breeze off the city docks or how the first days of summer would almost instantly change her forearms from alabaster to honey. It was there, too, in her distaste for the way people often seemed to prefer fiction over truth. While most children were delighted to find themselves growing up in a world of gods and castles in the sky, Alessandra was unmoved. Stories of monsters and fairies were entertaining, but they also obscured the deadly reality of the Straits. Every summer, she watched as Messina’s coastguards heaved a steady procession of dripping, blanketed stretchers onto the docks. How could these regrettable, preventable deaths be part of some mystical grand plan? There was little logic, either, in the other spurious legends that Sicilians would spin to glorify their island. In 1975, when Alessandra was five, a twenty-six-year-old from Messina called Giovanni Fiannacca swam to Calabria in 30 minutes and 50 seconds, a record that was to stand for forty years. Alessandra’s neighbours proclaimed Fiannacca the greatest distance swimmer in Sicily, perhaps even of all time. The reality, as most Siciliens knew, was that he had timed his crossing to coincide with a particularly strong east–west tide which would have carried a rubber duck to Calabria.
In another life, in another land, Alessandra might have forgiven these illusions and the credulous adults who repeated them. But her home was the birthplace of Cosa Nostra. By the 1970s, the Sicilian mafia was operating all but unopposed on the island. It was a state-within-a-state, extracting taxes via extortion, dividing up public contracts among mafia companies, settling disputes, delivering punishments – and lying, cheating and murdering to preserve its position. Yet no one said a thing. To inquisitive outsiders, Sicilians would claim the mafia was a fable, a cliché or even a groundless slur. Among themselves, proponents would characterise it in more mythic terms, as an ancient Sicilian brotherhood built on courage, honour and sacrifice. Never mind that it was the mafia itself which cooked up these romantic legends and embellished them with more recent folklore, such as their story about how mafiosi rode Allied tanks to liberate Sicily in the Second World War. Never mind that in their hearts most Sicilians knew they were being lied to. Just as the islanders found it hard to accept the indifference shown to their city by Nature and Man, so most preferred not to confront the truth that their fellow Sicilians had grown rich by robbing and killing them.
Alessandra lamented her neighbours’ complicity in these deceptions, even as she understood it. Decades later, reading sensational newspaper accounts of mafia adventures, she would react the same way she had as a child. The facts about the tyranny and the killing were plain. Why dress them up as something else? What Alessandra truly detested, however, was the way outsiders assisted the mafia’s myth-making. A year after she was born, Mario Puzo, an American pulp magazine writer, sold the screenplay adapted from his book, The Godfather, to Paramount for $100,000. Two years later, Francis Ford Coppola was directing Al Pacino in the movie on location in Savoca, twenty-five miles south of Messina.
The film, one of the most successful of all time, contained elements of truth. The Corleone family was a crime syndicate from south of Palermo. There also had been a disagreement inside the mafia in the 1950s over whether to enter narcotics trafficking, a dispute which did lead to an internal war. What Alessandra found unforgivable was the way Hollywood used southern Italians’ daily tragedy as a device to make its dramas more compelling. She shared none of Coppola’s empathy for the men who murdered their wives and girlfriends. She could make no sense of the women either, passive, giddy creatures who allowed their men to lead them from love to betrayal to an early death. Nor did she recognise any of the film’s sombre majesty or mournful grandiloquence in the blood that stained the gutters as she walked to school. When Alessandra was ten, two ambitious bosses, Salvatore Riina (‘the butcher of Corleone’) and Bernardo Provenzano (‘the tractor’, so-called because, in the words of one informer, ‘he mows people down’), began what became an all-out mafia war by assassinating several Sicilian rivals.2 The decade and a half that followed, spanning most of Alessandra’s adolescence, became known as la mattanza, ‘the slaughter’. More than 1,700 Sicilians died. Mafiosi were shot in their cars, in restaurants, as they walked down the street. In a single day in Palermo in November 1982, twelve mafiosi were killed in twelve separate assassinations. Yet through it all, foreign tourists would arrive in Messina asking for directions to The Godfather’s village. No, thought Alessandra. This was a hideous, wilful delusion. It was a lie. It had to be corrected.
When Alessandra was eight, her teacher asked her class to write an essay about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Let your minds wander, said the teacher. You can
