Look at this town built in the mountains of Sicily. Yes it looks suspiciously like a very large human. The odds of this, I imagine are pretty low. Sicily is an island in the Mediterranean just off the coast of Italy. You know, the peninsula that looks strikingly like a boot.
What are the odds that these two geographical anomalies would be so close together? I would say the odds are very low, so much so that my mind has crunched on the problem so hard that I think I have a valid theory for their proximity to each other.
Let’s say some early Italian peoples were more advanced than the others. The Etruscans come to mind. In fact maybe they were more advanced in ways than the rest of antiquity. Perhaps some inventive person developed a shrink/grow ray gun.
But something went wrong in the testing phase.
S/he was enamoured with stories of seven league boots and the fact you could travel seven leagues with a single pace. With such size, you could travel to all corners of the Mediterranean in minutes. So in boots that weren’t initially seven leagues, s/he aimed the grow ray at themselves. S/he grew so tall that they were soon gasping for air in the higher atmosphere.
Realizing their mistake, s/he changed the grow ray to a shrink ray and in their panic to do so, kicked off one of their boots. This of course led to flailing and accidentally crashing into what would become Centuripe and the end of the inventor S/he.
But the shrink/grow ray gun hadn’t broken yet and accidentally focused on the one boot across the Strait of Messina. It grew and grew until the peninsula of Italy was formed. Then it’s power either ran out or the ray gun was overheated and disintegrated.
And that my friends is the origin story of Centuripe and Italy.
