Messina

Messina is the door of Sicily. It stands on the narrow strait where the island almost touches the mainland, the crossing the ancients feared as Scylla and Charybdis. And everything passes through it: the ferries, the trains, the ships, the current that runs like a river between two seas. Above the harbour, the Duomo keeps the greatest astronomical clock in the world, and every day at noon its bronze figures wake, a golden lion roars, and the whole city stops to watch time strike.