journal – Page 3 – Mediterranei Invisibili

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CONTRADICTIONS AND OBJECTIVES: WHY IS THE SOUTHERN ITALIAN MEDITERRANEAN A POOR REGION, EVEN THOUGH WEALTH DEPARTS OR PASSES THROUGH HERE ON ITS WAY TO EUROPE? with Giuseppe Ida

Reflections by Giuseppe Ida, lawyer and mayor of Rosarno, speaking about transshipment, functional integration, and … the South, not just turism

Imagining that the Mediterranean and the South can contribute to the overall balance of the country and of Southern Europe is not an unrealistic dream.

The Mediterranean is a crossroads of cultures; restoring its centrality is a possible goal – indeed, it is the revival of a model already experiences in the past. Certainly, physical infrastructure is the first element that can help rebuild the centrality of Southern Italy. One example is the Port of Gioia Tauro, the third largest in Europe and the largest in Italy for transshipment – the transfer of cargo from one ship to another, usually through unloading in port and reloading. This takes place in hub ports where many shipping routes with different origins and destinations intersect. In the area surrounding the port, the movement of goods and the exchange of culture intersect and integrate.

One immediately perceives the contradiction between the habitual tendency to think of poverty as the harshest expression of Southern Italy, even though in reality it is precisely from our Mediterranean that wealth departs or passes through on its way to Europe.

The strengthening of physical infrastructure could generate lasting local wealth and place our Mediterranean at the center of the European development process, engaging with and balancing other transshipment hubs, for example. This strengthening should arise through a balanced participation of the public sector and private investors. But when strategy and planning are lacking, investments end up being wasted or undermined. This magnificent South, despite having such a highly efficient port, lacks an adequate railway system to transport goods and likewise lacks a road network capable of supporting the port’s expansion by land transport. Infrastructure and culture, in close connection with institutional strategies, are the fundamental pillars of a process aimed at making the South a leading force in Europe.

Today, the meaning of the South is almost entirely equated with tourism, but can tourism alone make it a leading force in Europe? And what kind of tourism are we talking about? What is the twenty-year vision for the Mediterranean?

For many parts of Southern Italy, tourism still remains an unrealized potential, and this consideration immediately brings us back to the previous issue: the development of what is still an underdeveloped tourism sector also depends on the growth of infrastructure and of the territory’s economy as a whole. It is difficult to imagine achieving results in the short term. Added to this is the fact that, in Calabria, youth unemployment has reached extremely high levels, despite the existence of real employment potential. Responsibility lies equally with regional and central political leadership that has been profoundly inattentive and has failed to allow these untapped opportunities to develop.

Certainly, Calabria can restart from its port system. During the lockdown period, Italian ports recorded a 30% decrease in traffic. Our port of Gioia Tauro, however, recorded a 40% increase, because goods destined for all of Southern Europe depart from here. Beyond this, stepping away from a strictly Calabrian and Italian perspective, it is essential to observe that the European vision of the entire Mediterranean is shaped through its ports.

A topic with limited media appeal and considerable complexity, seaports require cross-disciplinary expertise in logistics, technology, economics, and international relations. Insufficient attention is given to the value of ports, and the surrounding territories fail to connect with the broader economy. This also occurs in other Mediterranean countries – the so-called PIGS (Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal) – all countries considered key drivers of Europe’s growth.

In reality, precisely because of the unexpressed yet concrete and quickly activatable potential of these territories, if Europe wanted to become stronger and expand its capacity for inclusion, translating it into development, it should invest more in these regions.

Today, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe are not seen as places of development nor as crossroads of culture, because multiculturalism that is poorly managed and lacking integration turns into poverty. And, by ‘betraying’ its potential for opportunity, it becomes a burden to be carried. A vicious circle is triggered, whose dramatic outcome is the lack of investment in Europe’s periphery, precisely because it is seen as non-productive…a dead weight. In this vision, negativity spreads in concentric waves that affect the villages of which Calabria is so rich – places of history and culture that, in just a few decades, have been transformed into realities of sadness and depopulation.

The regional administration of Calabria has committed itself to a policy of enhancing the villages that preserve our elderly, our customs, that intangible evanescence which is perpetuated through belonging to the territory. However, for now, except in a few exceptional cases, it remains a denied form of intangible heritage. In other contexts, for example, transhumance – the traditional practice of seasonal livestock migration – has been inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The enhancement of villages falls within a strategic tourism plan that centralizes infrastructure, not as alienation, but as a form of valorization of the territory.

IN THIS 2020, THE MEANING OF THINGS HAS CHANGED. THE SOUTH IS OUR BEST OPPORTUNITY

Alfonso Femia opens the third edition of Invisible Mediterranean(s) – Journey across the Strait.

“We can no longer just talk; for politics and architecture, it is time to act.”

It was not supposed to be a four-day event, nor was it meant to take place in September.
The idea was for it to last a full week, in June, during which field research on the territory would be combined with an organic re-examination of the themes and situations we had previously explored separately in the two earlier editions. I am referring to Invisible Mediterranean(s) – Journey Across the Strait III,, which despite the pandemic, we chose to undertake also – or rather especially – in 2020, albeit with reduced time and programming, in order to affirm the need and the will to state that the South can no longer be read, interpreted, and experienced as it has been up to now.

It is precisely 2020 that marks the first demonstration of how strong the South can be, and how this strength can sustain the country as a whole.
I believe that what Invisible Mediterranean(s) has revealed – and will continue to reveal – is important for the country. As we will read in the interviews with representatives of local public administrations, presidents of professional orders, and Sicilian and Calabrian architects, the meaning of words and actions can change when the perspective and gaze are different, and above all when dialogue and confrontation take place on site.
“Infrastructure”, “school”, “village”, “territory” carry different meanings and nuances in places such as Messina compared to places like Siena or elsewhere, and the evidence of this diversity must be strengthened and made more widely known.

There is no romanticism in the gaze of Invisible Mediterranean(s). Each investigation brings to light problems that can no longer be confined within an isolated identity, but must instead be expressed and resolved through connection with other identities. Citiens exist within territories, just as villages do, just as landscapes, coastlines, and mountains do. And Journey across the Strait reveals these connections and the overall system of relationship that binds them together.

Citing Cyprian Broodbank, author of “Il Mediterraneo” (Einaudi, 2015), perhaps the most interesting and brilliant narrative on the subject in the last decade, the characteristics of the Mediterranean are often taken as given facts. Yet the Mediterranean system is made up of closely interconnected centers, whose surprising economic and cultural development has become a model for the entire world. As Broodbank writes: “The Mediterranean of prehistory, a microcosm where everything has come to a standstill, is the perfect model for helping us investigate the globalized world in which we live”.

For example, in the past, highly original civilizations such as Cyprus and Malta, which reached peaks of development, were later reabsorbed into the dominant trend – and this represents, in Broodbank’s view, “the dark side of globalization. A warning message for all of us”.

And is the contemporary Mediterranean a sea of relations?
“Absolutely. If in the past it experienced both moments of confrontation and conflict, the prevailing message that emerges is that of a place of encounter – a place where stereotypes are constantly challenged and dismantled”, says Cyprian Broodbank. We strongly believe that, starting from the second half of 2020, national and European policies must invest in the Southern Mediterranean of Italy. Not as an act of compassion, but as a new center of energy for the entire Old Continent.

Journey across the Strait. Photo by Stefano Anzini.

The exploration Invisible Mediterranean(s), with the third Journey across the Strait, resumes together with Marco Predari (500×100) and Giorgio Tartaro, journalist who followed the previous editions, capturing the invisibility not only of the Mediterraneans, but also of journeys themselves.

GIORGIO TARTARO’S NEUROIMAGING FOR INVISIBLE MEDITERRANEAN(S)

Let’s play a game.
A videogame.
Or rather, a game of images.
To make the invisible Mediterranean visible – even in its plural form – we can imagine the bounce of a ball. A basketball, perhaps. And imagine its sound in an empty gym.
As a bearer – hopefully a healthy one – of internal Invisible Mediterranean(s), as a lake dweller who loves the sea, I imagine this ball bouncing from Greek and Latin epics to the recent image of a Mediterranean rotated ninety degrees: unrecognizable, yet fascinating, like a future highway.
From Phoenician and Roman splendours to the Maritime Republics, from the fragmented history of a richly biodiverse “boot-shaped” country to the troubled process of Italian unification, from times of excessive government to times of no government at all… It is astonishing to think that, apart from devastations and agricultural, artisanal, and industrial revolutions, many – very many – things have fortunately endured.
For instance, the desire for discovery: just as in coastal landscapes, so too in inland, pre-Alpine and mountainous ones, it reveals exemplary moments of recognition. Tradition, the will to recover, effort, commitment, attachment, people, identity.
The encyclopaedists work on these dynamics and return splendours. The fact is that Invisible Mediterranean(s) bounces very high. It elects a “Virgil 4.0” and surgically identifies heterodox contemporary heroes – those who fight against the common opinion of the obvious, who research, design, study, involve, and connect… in short, as my children would say, they really go all in.
No, it is not just cool or picturesque: it is an ethical and luminous way of being in time, this telling of Invisible Mediterranean(s).
Those that some know and hide. Those that many long for and cannot find. Those that, sometimes, by sheer luck, we happen to encounter.
And then it becomes a kind of drama. Because they are like beautiful songs, refrains, synthetic dependencies you can’t quite escape.
Travel is about seeing with new eyes…new sounds, scents, energies, sensations, friends, anecdotes…in short: human beings. Women and men who, outside the uniform of formality, rejoice in telling, collecting, giving.
For me, Invisible Mediterranean(s) are everything that escapes the individual, egoism, the idea of status and social position.
Once Muhammad Al began a speech in public. He apparently didn’t quite know what to say. At some point, he said: “Me, we”.
He then reportedly reworked the “Me, We” pronounced at Harvard in 1965 into “Me, Whee” a joyful “me!”, or rather “I? Hooray!” Perhaps suggested by his team or by circumstance.
Personally, I prefer the first version. Which is also my point of view on the Invisible Mediterranean(s), seen from the kaleidoscopic position of the Inner Mediterraneans: it is, fully and legitimately, an “I,we”. A-Sea Our Sea.

YOU CAN START AGAIN FROM THE SOUTH, BY MARCO PREDARI

Invisible Mediterranean(s) is part of the broader project of Marco Predari, 500×100, which was launched five years ago with the aim of investigating, through dialogue, paths of built and conceptual architecture. It has progressively strengthened and expanded, moving from its first Milan-based experience at the Salone del Mobile to other national contexts, including Venice, Rome, Pisa, and the South.

It represents an important commitment for a company such as Universal Selecta, a leading organization that this year won the Compasso d’Oro in the “Office Furniture and Accessories” category. The company supports the process of growth in Southern regions through the encounter and alignment between politics and architecture, also through the 500×100 platform.

As a company, we share initiatives rich in content in Puglia, Sicily, and Campania, and we believe that the entire South can be transformed from an area of development into a territory for validating effective experiences.

CALABRIA IS IN CONSTANT MOTION, BUT SOMETIMES ITS COURSE IS THE WRONG ONE. LET US ABANDON OLD PROCESS MODELS AND FACE OUR “ARCHAIC FUTURE” with Salvatore Greco

Salvatore Greco, architect and council member of the Order of the Architects of Reggio Calabria, overturns the preconceived narrative of a poor Calabria. Its supposed poverty exists only in the eyes of the those who are unable to see.

“Calabria is wealth”
Salvatore Greco opens with this stement, immediately and decisivly removing one of the many stereotypes surrounding Calabria as a “poor region”. It is a beautiful narrative by Greco one that does not indulge in sentimentality but instead develops a rigorous analysis grounded in observation and the memory of places. An alternating vision – close-up and from a distance – that returns the most honest and passionate portrait of the South.

Calabria is rich in perceptions. Its highly distinctive morphology is itself a form of wealth.
It is a mountainous region, made of mountains that face each other across the seas (the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian), and the physical space between the coasts and the Aspromonte is filled with countless stories.
Eight hundred kilometers of coastline, pastoral culture and cuisine…other narratives and forms of wealth.
Another form of wealth is the Calabrian “unfinished”: the rebar of pillars emerging from slabs, awkward volumes rising up, unfulfilled promises of houses – behind every house there is a social story, and this is wealth. Further wealth is the suspended sense of time, as if it stops and then resumes.
A sad form of wealth, but still wealth, is that of lands abandoned due to economic necessity, hydrogeological instability, earthquakes, and floods.
There is also the wealth of ghost towns, where only the past exists, while present and future are merely illusory intentions: the village of Amendolea and its river, the Cretto di Burri in Gibellina, which tells not what once existed, but its disappearance, the aftermath of the earthquake. The linguistic richness of the Grecanic area (certainly not a “minority” – a word that feels wrong and contradicts its enchantment and fascination).

Again, suspended time. All of this is wealth.

Then we move into the question of how to use and invest this extraordinary value.
A first reflection is that some of these situations have been preserved precisely because they have remained inaccessible.
And while invisibility and inaccessibility can certainly have negative connotations, I believe it is preferable to maintain an extreme form of protection rather than resorting to misguided interventions or restoration approaches that turn villages into something resembling and “Indian reservation”.
That would mean losing wealth rather than gaining it – making room for a form of consumption that empties places out, a throwaway use of territories.
Change, “progress”, even in its most aggressive forms, has reached Calabria filtered through its environmental character and geography – sometimes hostile – and this has caused less damage than in other regions.
We must encourage a delicate form of tourism, one that is not offensive or arrogant.
Landscapes transformed into postcard panoramas end up aligning with an undifferentiated mass of postcard-like landscapes.
The danger is that the richness of values is reduced to a merely transitory purchasing power – and the lost forever.

Can the authenticity of the Calabrian territory be reconciled within a European framework? The provocation we are putting forward with Invisible Mediterranean(s) is that of restarting the country (and Europe as well) from the southern Mediterranean.
These are not separate positions, but shared objectives grounded in respect for identity.
In Calabria there is no strong opposition between countryside and city; our wealth comes from the rural world and can be interpreted and strengthened within a European perspective. We are cities, villages, and communities: we must relaunch the vision of the world within and through communities.
For this reason, I believe a surgical level of attention is needed in how tourism is directed. And we must do this ourselves, as Calabrians.
Many things have been “dropped from above” onto us – for example investments in the steel industry, despite its crisis (with Taranto already struggling as a competitor). The Port of Gioia Tauro later managed to transform itself into a transshipment hub, but generating little local spin-off. The port is in fact a ZES–Special Economic Zone–which means that production and processing take place and exchange happens within the port itself. However, the lack of adequate rail infrastructure and railway terminals hinders the development of a potential local economic ecosystem.

We simply need to return to being what we once where, without anachronistic positions, within a framework of real change.
Calabria is in constant motion, but too often the course it takes is the wrong one.
We can speak a great deal about conservation– about architecture, landscape, and places. But places and landscapes exist through their transformation. To trivialize concepts and apply labels – first “sustainability”, now “resilience” – while pretending not to understand what real mutation means, overlaying inadequate models onto communities, is precisely to take the wrong direction.

In Calabria there are two dawns and two sunsets: the sun rises over the Ionian Sea and over the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the water is made of two seas and of the fiumare. Geography is what shapes history. And it is from here that we must begin.
Politics – which is a fundamental component in triggering architectural processes – must detach itself from models that do not work and embrace the regenerative capacity inherent in territories.
Nik Spatari, an internationally renowned artist and recently deceased, founder of Musaba, the art park in Mammola, spoke of the “archaic future” of Calabria – an idea that is less visionary and more deeply rooted in reality.
“I wish greater fortune to this my, and our, ultramediterranean Calabria”.
With Nik Spatari.

A GIANT LOOKING OUT TOWARD THE SEA AND THE PLAIN BEHIND IT: GIOIA TAURO, A UNIQUE PLACE DIVIDED IN TWO, EEMBODYING AND REFLECTING THE DESTINY OF A SOUTH SHAPED BY ILLOGICAL SEPARATIONS. A CONDITION THAT ARCHITECTURE CAN TRANSFORM with Giovanni Multari

Giovanni Multari, architect and professor at University of Naples Federico II, believes that regeneration should be a program implemented through small steps, relying on alternative solutions: if the Bridge is not built, let’s immediately redevelop Villa San Giovanni. If industry is not working, let’s invest everything in agri-“culture”.

Invisible Mediterranean(s) is dialogue, comparison, and investigation. It is a journey and a revelation of the invisible dimensions of Sicily and Calabria. It is all of this, but above all it is a way to recognize and reaffirm the strong identity of shy places seeking a sustainable synchronicity with contemporary time.
The Mediterranean is a vast theme belonging to many cultures, marked by different geographies and united by ‘invisible’ aspects, contradictions, and harmonies. The Mediterranean of the Strait is a hidden and reserved place, despite still being a major crossroads and a transnational hub.
At the heart of this Mediterranean, of the South, Rosarno, the plain, and the port of Gioia Tauro form an extraordinary aggregation of masterful visual and olfactory euphonies, together with striking dissonances and urban distress.
Gioia Tauro is a geometric center, but also a generator of economic and political meanings. A place of failed strategies and missed opportunities.
The Port of Gioia Tauro is a giant facing only toward the sea, turning its back on the land because it generates little local impact, is self-sufficient in its function and organization, and is more inclined to look toward the Suez Canal or Strait of Gibraltar than toward its own plain.
Expanding the gaze outward, the richness of extraordinary places immediately emerges – places that have always nourished Calabria. A predominantly agricultural world, whose Calabrian environmental context makes it fertile ground for an evolution that can positively intertwine with architecture.

In Calabria and throughout the South, architecture takes on the meaning of care for the land and for communities; it becomes agri-culture.
We must invest in the traditions we have, enhance them, and make them known: recent pandemic events have confirmed Calabria’s capacity to be an extraordinary reservoir of energy and have highlighted that the region can be self-sufficient.
Infrastructure difficulties still exist, but we are working on them step by step: for example, our mountains are no longer inaccessible. The Club Alpino Italiano has mapped most of the trails and opened the way to a form of tourism that is passionate and respectful of places.
In these mountains lie areas only partially shaped by human activity, revealing an authentic heritage of culture and traditions. It is a unique monumental reality, that of the Sila mountain range, which contrasts with the coastline – a threshold element of the Mediterranean – where design is directed toward the essential themes of ecology and the environment.
In this unusual summer, the first phase of coexistence with coronavirus, Calabria experienced a moment of great redemption, lived across its entire territory, visited by tourists from all over Italy and even by some European visitors. A sign of attention, appreciation, a first step toward taking – by right – a place within a European geography, also through tourism.

Where do we go after tourism?
Urban regeneration processes are not only made of large-scale transformations. Alongside major works – complex and difficult to implement – there is a small, continuous effort that also reaches the less visible territorial fringes and opens up unknown cultural and physical channels of communication.
We already have an infrastructure system in place that works, and it must be integrated with what is still missing.
The Ionian backbone suffers more, while the Tyrrhenian one is very dynamic, and from these different speeds of places emerges an unusual beauty, the awareness of a diachronic condition that generates positive evolutions out of contradiction: Paola, Crotone, Lamezia Terme, Catanzaro, Reggio Calabria.
There are territorial conditions that can be improved without major transformations, regenerating from the ground up and involving communities and citizens.

Let’s take a step back: how do the different “souls” of the same territory coexist?
Sometimes they are separate, sometimes they intersect. The Port of Gioia Tauro should be better connected with the plain. And if the best industry in Calabria is agriculture, then the agricultural system must be highlighted and enhanced, from cultivation to forestry, considering that it generates a significant economic impact, with exports across Europe.
But above all, precisely in order to reconcile these different identities, we must never stop and proceed in small steps: if the Strait Bridge is not built, let’s redevelop Villa San Giovanni, equipping it as a place of transit, imagining a large marina, and replicating the same program in Messina, to improve the efficiency of the two gateways.
Before thinking about new projects, we should survey what already exists: abandoned places and unfinished construction sites.
Let’s create a table of people who live in the communities; we do not need prefabricated solutions imposed from above.
Let’s involve a network of local businesses, breaking away from a system governed by patronage politics that has damaged Italy as a whole and especially the South.

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