Today, we introduce a new semi-regular feature on Il Regno: In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato. From time to time, the Count’s restless spirit will join us to delve into some of history’s stranger tales and forgotten oddities. ~ Ed.Colapesce: The Boy Beneath the Island
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In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.
In the waters off Sicily and Naples, fishermen have long told of a boy who swam too well… and too deep.
They called him Colapesce—Nicholas the Fish.
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| Bas-relief of Colapesce (Niccolò Pesce), Via Mezzocannone, Naples Courtesy of storienapoli.it |
Objects were cast into the depths. A goblet. A ring. Perhaps even a crown.
Each time, the boy returned.
But on the final descent, Colapesce discovered something far more unsettling. According to legend, Sicily did not rest securely upon the earth. It stood upon three immense pillars rising from the sea floor. One of them—cracked and crumbling—threatened the island’s stability.
He dove again.
And this time… he did not resurface.
Was it merely medieval imagination attempting to explain earthquakes and the fiery rumblings of Mount Etna? A symbolic tale born in a land shaped by tremors and tides?
Or could there have been a gifted diver—an extraordinary youth whose disappearance grew into myth?
No grave marks his passing. No record confirms his fate.
Yet in the Strait of Messina, where currents churn and the seabed drops away into darkness, sailors still speak of strange shapes moving far below.
Is Colapesce only legend?
Or does he remain there still—holding up an island, suspended between history and myth, beneath the restless sea?
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