Between 2011 and 2015, a series of emergency interventions enabled archaeologists to light the funerary furniture of the vast necropolis of Via degli Orti in Messina. The tombs often contained rich material, and seven miniature ships were found and exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Messina. This type of votive toy ship is quite common in museums and tombs in southern Italy, where it was first defined that it was impossible to match these ships with real models. It is always difficult to determine, in the graves of children, whether they are toys that belonged to them or votive objects manufactured in series, and intended to accompany the deceased on his last journey on the Styx. Often with animal heads, the boats would thus be born from the imagination of the ceramists, an obvious link with piety or even the myths of Eleusis and Cybele. However, what distinguishes some ships from the necropolis of Messina is the precision of their lines and certain details, revealing the care of ceramists to reproduce real models, or surprising details. We must therefore face the facts and note that these ceramists most probably faithfully reproduced real models, those which were in the harbor of Messina in the third century BC.