Milazzo

Milazzo was called Mylai, and in Greek that means millstones, mills. It was founded in 716 BC by Chalcidian Greeks from Zancle — Messina — chiefly as a military outpost to watch the approaches to the mother city, from which it later made itself independent. But the greatest thing here is of 260 BC: in the waters off the town Caius Duilius beat the Carthaginian fleet, and it was that victory that gave Rome command of the sea. Two centuries later, off this same shore, Octavian settled his account with Sextus Pompey — the man who had beaten him at Vibo Valentia and put him to flight — and in gratitude granted the town the eagle and a motto recalling the eagle set upon the sea and Pompey overcome.

Anyone leaving for the Aeolian islands without climbing to the citadel misses one of the largest fortified works in Sicily: the castle was begun by the Normans on the ruins of all that went before, the Swabians added to it, the Aragonese adapted it, the Spanish ringed it with walls. In 1571 Don Juan of Austria chose Milazzo as the gathering and embarkation point of the Sicilian-Spanish contingent that would sail for Lepanto; in 1860 it was the last Bourbon bastion before Garibaldi took Messina; and twenty years later the castle was downgraded from royal stronghold to prison. At the foot of the rock is the cave they call Polyphemus's, where the epic places the captivity of Ulysses: it has been a plague hospital, a gunpowder works, an artillery emplacement in the war and a music venue in the sixties, and today it is closed and abandoned. The cape stretches the town out into the Tyrrhenian as far as the pool of Venus, and swordfish alla ghiotta is a reminder that here the sea is a trade before it is a holiday.