A COMMEMORATIVE PLAQUE: THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARYMessina ’s Town Hall has three plaques recalling the earthquake of 1908. The one below was set in place on the fiftieth anniversary.
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The plaque was unveiled as part of a day of commemoration that began at 5.21 am , the exact time at which the earthquake had struck, with the pealing of all the church bells in the city. After a mass in the cathedral, Vatican Radio transmitted a special speech by the recently elected Pope John XXIII who urged the citizens of Messina to turn away from sin—‘the principal cause of great punishments’. There was also a debate in the Town Hall on the legacy of the earthquake in which leading civic, regional and national politicians intervened. The Minister of Public Works then laid the first stone in a new residential quarter of the city intended to house those still living in temporary shacks.
The commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary do now strike one as hollow or inadequate in some respects. The plaque on the Town Hall hardly does justice to the enormity of the catastrophe. There is a certain willed and unconvincing optimism to the reference to a ‘splendid resurgence’. Pope John’s speech contained little sense of Messina as a specific place in time and space, and treated it as an instance of a universal spiritual condition. The celebrations were given a political spin by Cold Warriors on both sides. And one only needs to look at the many shanty quarters in the city today to see that the loudly proclaimed resolve to tackle the city’s problems was not maintained.
For all that, the collective memory rites of 27-28 December 1958 show that, despite all the memory-related difficulties of the intervening half-century, Messina had demonstrably not forgotten the earthquake. Nevertheless, the persistent sense of Messina ’s being a city without memory may well be evidence of citizens’ alienation from the political and religious authorities who were the protagonists of the fiftieth anniversary.