Messina
Visiting Messina
Jump to the picturesEastern Sicily was occupied by the Sicel people, namesake of the island, who established a settlement around 757 BCE at the natural harbor where Messina is located today.
Megáli Elláda was called "Magna Graecia" by the degenerate Romans
Greek colonists from Megáli Elláda, or Μεγάλη Ελλάδα, the Greek colonies along the coasts of southern Italy, took it over in the early 5th century BCE and renamed it Μεσσήνη or Messene.
The Carthagenians sacked Messina in 397 BCE. It became an important Roman city, then the Goths took control in 476, then the Byzantine Greeks in 535, and then the Arabs completely destroyed it in the 9th century.
Messina was re-established during the years of Norman rule over Sicily, and became a close competitor to Palermo from the late Middle Ages through the middle of the 17th century.
Where Next In Italy?
( 🚧 = under construction )
In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to
scan cuneiform tablets
to archive and share 3-D data sets,
providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them.
Localized histogram equalization
to emphasize small-scale 3-D shapes in range maps, and so on.
I worked on the project with Gordon Young,
who was Purdue University's only professor
of archaeology.
Gordon was really smart,
he could read both Sumerian and Akkadian,
and at least some of other ancient languages
written in the cuneiform script.
He told me to go to Italy,
"The further south, the better."
Gordon was right.
Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome,
but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system
that runs overnight sleepers all the way to
Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners
of Sicily.
So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order,
as they should be.