Scylla: in the light of the sunset, the viewpoint of Punta Pacì

The color of the sea and its seabed

The sea embracing Punta Pacì has colors that portend interesting seabeds. Following the divers of Scylla, in fact, having passed a seabed of scattered rocks, one would find oneself following two parallel ridges, sculpted in steps, that descend rapidly to a depth of 20 meters gradually richer in life. Descending further, one enters the band of yellow-red gorgonians among which a few brown grouper peek out while small rockfish move in swarms. Even more exciting spectacle, however, is that of amberjack and barracuda crossing in the open waters on the trail of schools of bluefish.

What to do at punta Pacì: snorkeling and caves

Fins, mask and snorkel is all you need to snorkel, letting your imagination give sharper contours to what you glimpse in the deep blue. By swimming at the water's edge, however, you can reach the caves that open up along this stretch of coastline. The names that mark them follow the Homeric thread: cave of Polyphemus, cave of Circe... characters from the Odyssey among the most popular. Then there is also the cave of Glaucus, a sea deity who was rejected by the nymph Scylla because of his too scaly nature, hence the revenge that transformed the beloved into the bloodthirsty six-headed canine fair, terror of sailors.

From the belvedere to the myth of Glaucus

This leads finally to the bronze bust on the belvedere: it represents the Pesaro-born Ercole Morselli (1882-1921), a character with a fictional story, who as a writer found his greatest success in the drama Glauco, performed in the theater in Rome in 1919 and revived as an opera in 1922. Morselli reinterprets the classical myth in its characteristic anti-heroic key, writing about a fisherman who in his quest for adventure comes to achieve immortality but, finding his beloved dead on his return, understands the vanity of everything. A success, it certainly helped bring Scylla back into the limelight in the years when it was trying to redeem itself from the great earthquake of 1908.