This month marks the 100th anniversary of the great Calabro-Messinese Earthquake, which remains the most devastating earthquake to have ever hit Europe. At 5:21 AM on Monday, December 28, 1908, the population of Southern Italy, particularly those towns and cities located near the northern coasts of Strait of Messina, were awakened by a land that had suddenly turned violent. For many, it would be the last time they would ever awake. By the time it was over, between 120,000 and 200,000 people would have lost their lives. Two of the fortunate survivors were members of my family, including my grandmother Maria Amadeo and her sister Antonette, both of whom were children at the time of the tragedy.
The Strait of Messina is the narrow body of water separating Sicily from the mainland of Italy that owes its existence to the tectonic processes that would ultimately cause this great tragedy. The Strait represents the tectonic boundary between African and the European continental plates. This boundary generally trends east-west between the two continents, but in the vicinity of Sicily it turns northward where it passes between Sicily and mainland Italy on a path up toward the northern end of the Italian Peninsula, where it resumes its east-west traverse. Thus, the same forces that formed the Alps would, in a singular moment, devastate the 1908 population of southern Italy.
The quake would begin with a slip along the fault lying between Messina in Sicily and Villa San Giovanni in Reggio Calabria, with Sicily moving slightly south relative to the northward movement of the Italian peninsula. The ensuing 7.5 magnitude quake would topple buildings in the coastal cities and towns located on both sides of the Strait, crushing many inhabitants. The initial quake lasted about 35 seconds and was followed minutes later by a 30 to 40 foot tsunami that radiated outward from the quake’s epicenter, striking Messina on the west and the villages and towns of Reggio Calabria on the east. Villa San Giovanni was first commune in Reggio Calabria to be hit by the tsunami, seven minutes following the initial quake. Houses, ships, fishing boats and people were washed away. Then a prosperous manufacturing town, Villa San Giovanni lost all ten of its silk mills along with most of the mill’s operatives. The town was, for all intent and purposes, structurally destroyed with a loss of approximately 500 lives. To add more misery to the situation, the quake survivors, many of whom would wait out the many aftershocks in courtyards and other open areas, would be tormented by a torrential downpour of rain, soaking and chilling them.
Among the Villa San Giovanni survivors plunged into this nightmarish scenario were our Maria and Antonette. According to testimony provided by grandmother Maria, who was at the time of the quake only few months past her first birthday, she was being tended by a female family member while her aunt was giving birth. When the quake hit, Maria and her sister Antonette, then 7 seven years old, were quickly ushered out of the house. Her aunt, in the middle of birth, was not so lucky. The house collapsed, killing her and her new baby, her husband, her four other children and the midwife. At the time of the quake, both parents of Antonette and Maria were already residing in America, and the two children were living at the time with their aunt. They would remain in Villa San Giovanni for three more years before joining their parents in America.
Maria Amadeo would eventually meet Giosue Randazzo, and immigrant from Carini, Sicily. They would marry in New York in April 1925.
