Hesiod’s cosmogony to explain the origin of the Giants of Messina

Since the sixteenth century, scholars have used the framework of classic cosmogonies and, in particular, Hesiod’s Theogony, to explain the origin of the Giants of Messina. Strangely, however, little attention has been paid, in spite of what happened in the rest of Europe, to those passages of Scriptures that speak of the first inhabitants of the Earth, the Giants before the flood, the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, which tells the story of the giant Saint Christopher and, finally, to the famous figures of Samson and Goliath. The mythological version considers the Giants of Messina children of the primordial deity Gaea, the goddess of the Earth, and Uranus, her son-husband. The story of their troubled union is called upon to demonstrate the concrete link with the city of the Strait: the scythe with which Cronus castrated his father Uranus would have fallen, according to legend, in the sea of Messina, which not coincidentally was known to the Greeks by the name of Zancle, or Sickle, because of the peculiar shape of its bay. Based on this story, Cronos-Saturn and his wife Rhea-Cybele are considered the founders of Messina, on account of which the city created the two giant equestrian statues in the sixteenth century.