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Where past and present look at the future
The Mediterranean: uterus of the human civilization
“Oh! Mediterranean and the miracle of your history, you hold the whole of it in the explosion of your smile” , this wrote the nobel prize for literature , Albert Camus in a poem inspired by the scummy lapping of the waves which, like cantors from an ancient past, tell stories of immeasurable beauty. A few words, but superbly meaningful. Mediterranean, a noun which tells everything by itself, comes from the latin Mediterraneus, which means “in the middle of the lands”. This sea is really the omphalos of the western civilization, the Amnios, in which it was born, has grown and from which it has taken nourishment and vital force to become what we know nowadays. This great expanse of water with its thousands of colours, scents and flavors gathers around it a history of different cultures and worlds , all of them highly-fused with an harmonic balance. Its waters in fact lap the coast of twenty-two countries: Gibraltar, Spain, France, Montecarlo, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and the island-States of Malta and of Cyprus.
Although the first traces of human presence date back to a quite late age, about 100,000 years ago, the Mediterranean has proved to be the fruitful soil, in which the seed of civility and human knowledge took root. In fact on its shores the first great human civilized societies evolved, such as the Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian one, which were at the forefront of the development of writing, science, law and knowledge in the broadest sense. Stage of myriads of wars among the most disparate people, this sea, crossed by hundreds of ships with crews who spoke the most different languages, was the altar at which the faithful followers of the three great monotheistic religions knelt: Christianity, Judaism and Islam have coexisted in these places for centuries through alternating periods of peace and war. The influence of the peoples of this sea on the modern world is not only factual knowledge but also kind of moral and philosophical. Examples include Greece, the birthplace of scientists, artists and thinkers, which reached on a physical level a large area surrounding the Mediterranean basin, but on a cultural level the whole world. Right on a Greek colony, Miletus in Asia Minor, arose the first philosophy school, which has paved the way for ars cogitandi, giving birth to philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who are the cornerstones of the Western Weltanschauung.
The endless immensity of the rainbow and impenetrable waters did not just stimulated the man to accomplish the mad flight over the columns of the contingent empirical knowledge, but inspired the mythical bard par excellence, Homer, one of the greatest works ever written, sacred text for the ancient world, the Odyssey, which with high-sounding names and transcendent characters, has provided the world the most attractive description, that can be done, of mare nostrum. This last appellative dates back to the Roman Empire, the maximum imperum imperorum, which has expanded its control over the entire basin and beyond, and was the forerunner of an utopian anachronistically multiethnic society. The beauty of the Mediterranean is in this medietas , in the dialogue among different worlds that leads to new and unexpectedly higher results. The same equilibrium that we find not only in culture, but in every aspect, even in climate, just defined Mediterranean, which arises precisely halfway between the glacial Nordic winter and the burning African heat, and with a sweet mildness it is perfect to spend days of otium, understood in latin meaning of otium studiorum, in which even the mind seems to be able to draw from the sea a refreshment and an essential input to reach its highest peaks.
Everything in this modern world which smacks of old, is full of memories, even the culinary arts is an example. It is considered by the whole world the best for the flavors, the smells and the nutritional values, and bears the mark of the past and it is the one that best represents the polymorphism of these environments, blending in itself oriental spices, bitter savors that mixed with the sweetness of the fruits of our land produce an excellent and balanced result. The Mediterranean therefore with its thousands of souls, landscapes, flavors and fragrances is the ideal place to get back in touch with the origins of our own humanity. In these places, such as in an orchestra, the voice of the sea, the wind in the wonderful nature, the songs of the fauna, and even the euphoric shouts of the people who live there, give rise to a concert that is a salve for soul , spirit and mind. As a skillful charmer it waits for brave adventurers ready to be captivated by its infinitive mysteries, basically as the writer and poet Jean Claude Izzo said: "Just open the window and you have all the sea for yourself. Free. When you have nothing, having the sea - the Mediterranean - is a lot. As a loaf of bread for the hungry. "