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A few days ago, a few miles off Marettimo, when the long crossing had almost been accomplished, a tiny voice from Trapani was issuing a navigational warning: a dead body had been spptted drifting at the sueface between Levanzo and the islet Formica.

I heard today that in the end the body had been fished out and it belonged to a professional sailor who had been declared missing for weeks.

Useless, though, to say that my mind thought of other bodies that fill the Sicily Channel. Especially now that I find myself here too. Today they’re African, Middle Eastern. Seventy years ago they were Europeans when during World War II the channel was a strategic place for the fate of the world. Two thousand years ago they were Carthaginians, Romans.

From my humble point of view of seafarer and Mediterranean man used to sleep in camping tents or on the ground in boats of newly known people, at the mercy of weather and wind, what happens in this country seems to me more and more absurd: t-shirts, watches, Transatlantic metropolises.

What are you talking about, and what are you debating about, people?

And in the meantime, miniskirts and perfumes for men parade along the “corso” of the minor islands, arrogant, careless, impersonal, like every year, all the same…

Posted on: 8.Jul.2018   Leave a comment