I feel that Scylla got a rather bad press in Stephanie Mizzi’s otherwise excellent piece ‘Under a legendary spell’ (The Sunday Times, August 28).

Scylla was originally a sea nymph who was fancied by an old sea-god, possibly Poseidon, though the stories differ on this point. However, she refused to follow paternal orders to accommodate Poseidon, and was turned into a seven-headed monster for her cheek.

There was once a statue of Scylla the nymph on the Marina Grande, but this did not bring out her true character, having what I can only call an idiot expression on the face, quite similar to that on the effigy of St Julian on the corner of ‘his’ bay.

The Marina Grande statue was swept away in a great storm in the late 1980s, but the good citizens of Scilla put up a much better one in one of the higher streets of theChianalea (see photo). This has a very determined-looking Scylla, backed by a fan shell and holding a conch shell like a sub-machine gun. ‘No one messes around with this nymph’, she seems to say.

The worst act the monster Scylla perpetrated on humankind did not come from any attack on passing sailors. It came in the wake of the 1783 earthquake which destroyed the town. There is a description in a report that Sir William Hamilton, then British ambassador to the Bourbon court of Naples, sent to the Royal Society of London.

After the first major shock in February 1783, the survivors, including Prince Ruffo, abandoned the wrecked town to camp on the beach. During one night, without any warning from an after-shock, a massive headland north of Scilla fell into the sea. The wave raced across to Capo Faro in Sicily, carried off a few boats and fishermen there, and rebounded across the strait. More than a thousand earthquake survivors were plucked off the beach and drowned in the raging waters.

Incidentally, it seems that Charybdis is still around. On a clear January 2011 morning I was looking south from the belvedere of a public garden in the town of Palmi, some 16 km northwest of Scilla.

The snowy pyramid of Etna, fully 100 km away, was plainly visible. Much closer in, under a thin sea mist, the castle at Scilla could be seen; but between the castle and the Palmi shore, there was a clear trace of rotary movement on the sea surface, a stable pattern visible on photographs. The sea was devoid of boats of any sort.

Presumably Scylla was still asleep and Charybdis just beginning to come up to speed. Incidentally, direct flights to Reggio have come under the axe at Air Malta.