https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIKELNkdYEw
My husbands great grandparents, 4 of his grandmothers siblings,
many cousins, aunts, uncles, a huge part of the sizeable ex-pat community
died in the Dec. 28, 1908 earthquake.
The earthquake collapsed poorly built stone/concrete stucco homes,
and produced a tsunami with a wall of water that was as high as 30 feet on the mainland and Sicilian side in the Straight of Messina.
It is assumed that his great grandparents and the 4 children were washed out to sea by the tsunami, which followed minutes after the quake. Many people rushed out of their homes when the quake occurred, only to be washed out to sea.
Were it not for the fact my husband’s grandmother(age 14 in 1908) and her sister(age 16) attending boarding school outside of Messina, they would have perished as well.
A Russian Navy ship was the closest to Messina, after the disaster and were the first foreign nation to arrive and begin recovering survivors from the city streets and
those who were trapped in the rubble.
There were 2 major earthquakes in 1693 and 1783 which affected Messina and Calabria.
The Mormon genealogy website, familysearch.org has most all of the ATTI DI MORTE, available for this disaster.
I too have Sicilians in my family tree. The 1908 disaster convinced them to come to America.