Air, Water, Fire, Earth and the Mediterranean is all that. In 1952 the "Einaudi pubblishers" brought out a book, written by the French historian Fernand Braudel "Mediterranean Civilizations and Empires in the age of Philip II". The book presented the "Mare Nostrum" as a rich and animated mosaic of an only civilization and destiny. In one sense, the book disproved those who just thought of Mediterranean as the place of its gods: Sea, Heaven, Sun and introduced its discourse by saying:" The Medite rranean sea is a sea among lands; soon after it added: "Isn't it perhaps a sea among the mountains?" So, in a new and splendid way it was announced a surprising "modus" of presenting this authentic part of the world, initiatrix of the western civilizatio n.

The Mediterranean appearance was no longer the sun hallucinations, the temples of light, the afternoon absence of litoral planes, but also "the permanent snows", "the glaciers", "the grassy hillocks", "the deserts all around" (sand and steppe); sheperds, nomads, transhumants, woodsmen, highlanders seeking fortune, monks farmers, hermits together with merchants, adventurers, refugees joined then to enlarge the swarming crowd of the Mediterranean people who, coast to coast, from mountains to shores, had made the history of this sea and of our nation.
For centuries, the Mediterranean people, from islands, peninsulas, highlands, shores and deserts, have migrated, traded, sailed on their boats: cargos, caravels, Kamakis, tercios; for centuries the arab camels have crossed the desert, sheperds have gone up the mountains and then gone down the valleys, searching for good pastures, for milleniums (and still today), merchants have carried goods and culture, traditions and religions, epidemics and diseases from East to West; hopes and dang ers, warriors and hermits, cultures and new civilizations have come from the sea: stratifications, accumulations, relationships which have made us like we are now.
And what about Italy? A land between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas, an open wound in the Mediterranean, Italy has been one of the most central nations among these traffics, a crossing land, balanced between the East and the Wes t, sometimes even far from the European peninsula, because completely mediterranean with its Alps and Appenines, its hills and coastal planes, covered with "olive woods". In the past, a reserve of wheat and oil. Contested for its beech-woods from the Alps to Gargano and its ports which dominate the mouths of the Adriatic and the Tirrhenian. So, since the beginning, our land has been part of the "Great Mediterranean history" a frontier of embarkings, crusades, languages, commerce; a land of conquests and occupation. For all this, we are aware that the South like the North, is searching for its presence in the cultural debate and that too often, it has finished by being a tow of obsolete discourses (already made), importing second-hand initiatives, arriving badly and late; most of times, transformed in a peripheric service station, where parking some cultural politics. That's why the Mediterranean Festival was born. The multi-ethnic human project which wants to institute a literary value in the whole Italian "interland" needs a possible place where everybody can communicate.
A dream - in Italy, a land where the architectural charm of the bare stone goes together with the intimate flavour of the Mediterranean Sea. The festival is a modest attempt, a little step towards this "possible place". We want to mark out a path that someone or too many (people) for years, have tried to bury or over-shadow to reach their aims.

The Mediterranean Art , has been promoting the Festival for 20 years. The aim is not gathering artists, styles and forms under the same mediterranean cultural flag, but calling them to a possible and common research project between the New Europe and the Middle East, each one with its own differences and pecularities. Therefore delays are scandalous as well as all the Italian people uniformed about various Mediterranean literatures as the African or the Arabian ones. We don't know anything about it and in the meanwhile we have ammassed remarkable delays or have worked on the past. In all these years, no one has wondered why people have neglected all the South Mediterranean literature. Simply, it has not been considered noteworthy. So, someone has closed the mediterranean art question, definitely, but there are those who can't share this idea, because they live dramatically, all the real intellectual tranformations in this piece of world that is Italy.

Beyond all that, what is important to notice is that richer and more powerful nations, impose their culture pushed by their own economic-industrial system, while today's poorer areas or neglected ones, once seats of magnificent and ref ined civilizations, have been reduced to silence, for a long time. And then, the success of the Mediterranean project will depend on all those who are participating, giving their assent and being true protagonists. It's up to them to accept or not the idea of a common and universal project whose aim is the refoundation o f cultural things and the restoration of relationship in the background of civilization, men and countries, severely tried by history and nature.
To be unacquainted with the problem, perhaps will mean for the new generation not to have a cultural model to propose. Within this picture of the situation, it is necessary to change the direction taken by scholars, the general public, mass media, insinuating the doubt that not only one culture exists, but a plurality of cultures which express themselves and are voices of an identity of peoples.
If all this is misunderstood, our world and our countries will get poorer and poorer.

Gino Locaputo
art director