Zoom into a map of Italy and you will notice a gap where the tip of the toe of the boot-shaped peninsula seems to touch Sicily—the stretch of sea that makes Sicily an island. The Strait of Messina is just a couple of miles wide at its narrowest point, and between two coasts that never quite meet, the Mediterranean produces a distinct hallucination. Every so often, sailors see it: the fata morgana, a trick of light that makes the shoreline seem closer. The sorceress Morgan le Fay, in a Sicilian telling of the Arthurian legend, lured a barbarian king to his death in these waters, smiling as he drowned. In the south of Italy, distances deceive. The train between Palermo and Bari travels roughly the same space as between Turin and Rome in triple the time. A Ministry of Infrastructure study concluded that Sicily might as well be a hundred times farther from the mainland than it actually is, for all the time required to cross the strait by car on a rusty ferry. Of …