Messina, Sicily.
And here I must confess. This model Fiat 500 resides in my Toronto closet, only emerging when the door's locked and curtains drawn. I love the Fiat 500, the Cinquecento. The model replaces the retro Fiat for which I yearn, but have no real need. My miniature Fiat is the focus of all my frustrated desires. And I don’t have to pay insurance.
This year as last, I do the rounds of Messina’s streets, revelling in the abundance of a hugely popular vehicle, which ended production in 1975.
In the case of the green example, note parking.
Having binged on Fiats, I find other distractions.
Having binged on Fiats, I find other distractions.
Prior to opening, a waiter makes use of not one, but three, café chairs …
… and a vegetable seller takes his ease in the street and has a mid-morning snack.
My discovery of a Messina restaurant named for the Duke of Windsor is conveniently coincidental. The waiter and vegetable seller have perhaps studied the late duke’s memoirs:
‘Perhaps one of the only positive pieces of advice that I was ever given was supplied by an old courtier who observed, “Only two rules really count. Never miss an opportunity to relieve yourself; never miss a chance to sit down.”’ (A King’s Story Edward Windsor 1951)
As for the restaurant, no idea why it’s so named. Perhaps the duke and his American divorcée holidayed in Sicily during their long years of nomadic semi-exile.
A final stop in Messina. Just across from the port, easily viewed from Maasdam, is this building, seen in a 1940 postcard.
Hundreds of passengers may have glanced at the words (or the graffiti) as they pass into the city - OSARE DURARE VINCERE. If they know Italian, they possibly attempt a translation - DARE ENDURE CONQUER.
What they likely don’t know is, seventy-two years after Italy surrendered, a Fascist slogan remains on open display in a modern Italian city.
Most Maasdam passengers are American. Following the opportunistic, last minute, Italian invasion of France in 1940, Franklin Roosevelt so well described Italy’s weaselly wartime role as, ‘…the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor’.
On the other side of the building, now a tax office, is a typical heroic sculpture of the Mussolini era, albeit with one face (the figure is carrying a Fascist standard) removed.
After 1908’s massive earthquake, Messina was rebuilt. And, by the 1920s, Mussolini was in power, so the city is full of buildings from that time. And many celebrate Fascist themes.
Some Fascist architecture, with links to art deco and art moderne, I quite like. But there is in Italy a useful forgetfulness about its role before and during World War Two, with claims to be more victim than the aggressor it actually was. Germany simply does not tolerate symbols of Nazism, yet all over Italy are reminders of Mussolini.
Nations, as humans, are paradoxes.
Nations, as humans, are paradoxes.
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Messina 2014 (also Palermo and Cagliari on Sardinia):
