Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity

The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination

Marco Benoît Carbone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350118201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoría y crítica del arte

Turning to a region of South Italy associated with Greater Greece and the geographies of Homer's Odyssey, Marco Benoît Carbone delivers a historical and ethnographic treatment of how places defined in public imagination and media by their associated histories become sites of memory and identity, as their landscape and mythologies turn into insignia of a romanticised antiquity. For the ancient Greeks, Homer had set the marine monsters of the Odyssey in the Strait between Calabria and Sicily. Since then, this passage has been glowing with the aura of its mythological landmarks. Travellers and tourists have played Odysseus by re-enacting his journey. Scholars and explorers have explained the myths as metaphors of whirlpools and marine fauna. The iconic Strait and village of Scilla have turned into place-myths and playgrounds, defined by the region's heritage. Carbone observes the enduring impact of Hellas on the real Strait today. The continuous rekindling of cultural and visual traditions of place in the arts, media, travel, and tourism have intersected with philhellenic historiographies, shaping local policies, public histories, views of development, and forms of Hellenicist identitarianism. Elements of society have celebrated the landscape of the Odyssey, appropriated Homer as their imagined heirs, and purported themselves as the original Europeans–pandering to outdated ideological appropriations of 'classical' antiquity and exclusionary, West-centric views of the Mediterranean.

1

Introduction

Towards the end of August 2014, I got up from my beach mat overlooking Sicily as the sun set on a hot summer day and people enjoyed their last dive. Walking up to the street side and then through a small alley with a café called Calypso, I stepped into a tavern. I was in Scilla, a small town by the sea in Calabria, Italy that has been traditionally associated with the myth of Scylla and Charybdis from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.¹ Fortunato and Antonio, a fisherman and fishmonger, welcomed me to have a few drinks and talk about life in a town steeped in the memory (and place branding) of Magna Greacia: the former Greater Greece, a geographic area that encompassed parts of Southern Italy once inhabited by ancient Greek settlers. The two Scillesi also elaborated on the town’s economy, which owes a lot to seasonal intake from local seaside tourism. While drinking Peroni, Fortunato described to me the currents of the Strait (Figures 1.2, 5.2) that had generated the ‘fable of the monster’ from the Odyssey. Here, whirlpools would have once dragged down sailors, inspiring the myths.

Indeed, mention of the Strait of Reggio and Messina – a narrow passage of water between the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas separating mainland Calabria from the Italian island of Sicily (Figures 1.1, 1.2) – frequently conjures up images of Scylla and Charybdis, the ancient Greeks and picturesque Mediterranean Italy. As Fortunato and Antonio reminded me, the Strait has enjoyed an enviably attractive literary aura with international renown owing to Homer and the poleis of antiquity. In textual, iconographic and historical traditions, scholars and explorers have explained the myths as metaphors of whirlpools, caves, sea rocks and marine animals. Images of the Strait as the inspirational source and abode of the mythological monsters have been reworked in the modern imagination from popular histories to scholarship, from the arts to travel cultures, from cartography to tourism. Travellers and tourists have often ‘played Odysseus’ by re-enacting his journey.²

This legacy is fairly apparent in Scilla town. In the central square, Francesco Triglia’s statue of the mythological Scylla captures the moment of the creature’s metamorphosis, dominating the onlooker from a height of some three metres and a view of the Strait with Sicily in sight (Figure 1.3). While discussing the mythology of the town, the burly Scillesi jokingly likened themselves to Odysseus, reminding me of the artists and explorers who had reworked the Odyssey and even tried to sail in the hero’s tracks over these seas. Then, their humour soured. As Fortunato put it, his boat was an ancient spatara used to hunt swordfish – a practice thought to hail back to Homer. Politicians, he said, claimed to support traditional activities and praised Scilla’s roots in ancient Greece in election times, but did not in reality promote any financially supportive policies. In the guise of hi-tech Charybdes, the boats of the multinational fishing industry devoured fish at a far quicker pace. The town, they continued, also suffered from chronic unemployment; sustainable, literary tourism had been perennially hailed as a key to development, but it had never taken off. In his raspy voice, Antonio concluded that ‘Homer had done a lot, while ourselves – we have done very little’.

Figure 1.1 Aerial view of the Strait from the Sicilian side with Calabria at the opposite end. Photo by author.

Figure 1.2 A view of Scilla’s rock from the sea. Photo by author.

Antonio’s formulation condenses the gist of my research in the area of the Strait, particularly in the province of Reggio, as a site where the construction of a canonized Greek past has become a fundamental element in the modern region’s renown in the arts and literary cultures – and of its hopes and aspirations. At the same time, it plays a role in the region’s efforts to cope with a ‘crisis of presence’ as a marginal economy facing political disenfranchisement in Italy and Europe.³ This book follows the cultural trajectories of the Homeric Strait from modernity to the present, presenting a historical and in-field treatment of the mythological landmark today. It focuses on how Greater Greece binds together ideas about geography and history to create a memory that then sustains local formulations of heritage, aspirations for tourism and development, constructions of cultural identity, and even myths of an ethnic ‘descent’ from the Greeks.

Figure 1.3 Mythological statue of Scylla in Scilla town’s main square by Francesco Triglia, 2014. Photo by author.

An interrogation of how historical and imaginative geographies impact on the sense of place and identity, this study discusses the ‘projections’ of the past⁴ and interplay between literature, heritage, landscape and popular histories and archaeologies. It participates in a current approach to historical experience that investigates the specific question of how ‘history is subjectively experienced by people in the process of orienting their present toward the past’.⁵ I consider two intertwined perspectives. First, there is the Strait’s enduring fascination to tourists, travellers, artists and in media such as literature, film and documentaries. Second, the role of Greek antiquity has shaped ways of understanding the landscape, memory and heritage – even inviting the appropriation of Homer as an asset for literary tourism and as a foundational figure.

This is thus an investigation into a sense of history for a sense of place. From this standpoint, the Strait is both liminal and marginal. It is liminal because its geographical position has made it work like an in-between, a ‘borderland’ between Europe and its Others, stuck in a backward present. Its liminality entails a state of in-between and threshold that has provided a setting suitable for imaginative travel. Yet the region has also been intended as peripheral and far from the centre, working as a geopolitical Other and as a ‘place on the margin’, ‘left behind by the onrush of modernity’, evoking ‘nostalgia and fascination’.⁶

Within this process, the Homeric landscape is a crucial element in the construction of ideas of belonging – as the Strait has been constructed over time by both visitors and locals as exceptional and myth-inspiring. In fact, the area’s reception has been at least as much shaped and produced by the history, Homeric myths and the expectations that they generated. Homeric geography in the Strait has become a defining element of heritage, intended as ‘the contemporary use of the past’.⁷ Historical traditions and iconographies have had an important effect not only on the geographical construction of an imaginatively mythological landscape, but also in building a local sense of place and belonging.

As a native of the area, my own interest in the topic emerged as a way to self-reflexively explore how exposure to various forms of historical mediation shapes our sense of belonging and identity. As I investigated the visual genealogies of the Strait for my doctoral research, I realized that my earliest recollections of the themes of Greek mythology had also been acquired through the media accompanying my experience in the lived environment, and then via my later exposure to the Odyssey as I attended the Liceo Classico Italian high school. As a continuation of the doctorate I undertook on the subject, this study reflects a personal trajectory that has transformed my perception of what counts as local identity and how we attach ourselves to the symbols behind our affiliations – experientially and theoretically.

Punctuated by statues, landmarks and countless examples of place branding inspired by Homeric geographies, Scilla is real-life proof of the impact of the cultural traditions of the Strait as a playground of Homeric geographies attracting generations of artists, filmmakers, travellers, writers and scholars.⁸ Centuries of imaginative projections, travels and re-mediations of mythical tales have also contributed to shaping a sense of identitarian belonging. Homeric geography has stood less imaginatively and more politically as a foundational myth to claim continuity with a prestigious past. Yet, the area of the Strait – comprising Calabria and Sicily – has been characterized by stilted modernization, weak industrialization and mass migration to Northern Italy and abroad since the country’s unification. Both have been fraught with structural social issues turned inescapable commonplaces, such as backwardness, corruption and criminality. The prestige of the past has thus often fuelled comparisons between a glorious heritage and a disappointing present.

Homeric references have even supported a social mythology of the local inhabitants of the area as the ‘heirs of the Greeks’. Heard time and again from my informants in more or less ironic or serious forms, the myth of Homeric descent is a localist version of the ethnocentric belief that ‘Greece has made Europe’ (in fact, as historians tell us, Europe has claimed Greece).⁹ In the Strait, the claim of continuity with Hellas (often seen by Euro-Atlantic agents as one of their own precursors in civilization) has amounted for some to reversing a regional stigma with both a declaration of Mediterranean exceptionality and a romantic over-performance of the idea of having represented the earliest Europe. ‘Being the Greeks’ has meant for some in the South a way to secure one’s place both within Italy and the ‘West’ and in contrast with those supra-local foci of subordinating power.¹⁰

This study considers many of the facets of these political and cultural relationships, showing the ambivalent role of historical traditions and mediated representations in shaping an image of place that has often b...