Mazara del Vallo, the story in images of a city “beyond the network”
[ad_1]
books
NoonNovember 3, 2022 – 2:50 pm
The book by Giovanni Franco and Nicola Cristaldi
from Roberto Chifari
If you are a Sicilian you see the sea every day and the sea, for someone who lives the island, becomes border and freedom over time. It depends on what perspective you look at things. All the more reason for those who live by the sea, like a Mazara who sees in the sea the desire to remain anchored to their roots and the need to go and look for new challenges. A bit like all Sicilians who experience that feeling that oscillates between resistance and emigration. the city of dreams and reality, shining on the sea, between Fata Morgana, Marrobbio, Mediterranean light and salt that corrodes the hands of the fishermen. And this, as Milena Romeo writes in her preface, is the leitmotif of the book “Mazara del Vallo, Beyond the Network” by Giovanni Franco and Nicola Cristaldi, currently being distributed. (Libridine Editions, 85 pages). The cover was designed by Franco Donarelli. The light in Mazara del Vallo has an intense flavor. And to try to describe it, I rely on taste and smell, first of all – observes Giovanni Franco – Then of course on sight and hearing. But the five senses are not enough to give an idea of the mixture of emotions and sensations that the city, at the mouth of the Mzaro River, which is less than 200 kilometers from the Tunisian coast of North Africa, offers to those who know how to intercept them.
The volume also contains an analysis by Gianluca Serra. The dreams of this city, Mazara del Vallo, from the sea and protected by the millennia of history are made of stone, plaster and concrete. Here time exudes from the hands of those who built each building, visible only by those who can observe the rocking of the moments that cross between the gashes of a sky that is repeated, inexorably, among the seagulls, as they pierce the sirocco builder of the men of sea. Here everything dreams and reality and it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish the boundaries, writes Cristaldi. There is all Mazara inside Franco’s lens, with his evocative shots, almost all unpublished, made in 15 years, with his special light and his true face: the alleys of the Casbah, the balustrades with new ceramics, the beaches cleaned and redeveloped, the smells of shrimp on market counters, of couscous evaporating from the houses of the historic center or from ancient trattorias, the splendid facades of the churches (the churches have written the layout of the city, giving a meaning to every every square), the beloved rites and processions of the feast of San Vito, co-patron of the city together with the Holy Savior and all the saints who protect the fatigue and beauty of everyday life, says Romeo.
Here where everything is difficult, windows without horizons open; whoever knows how to look far sees islands and lands beyond the horizon, denying the Morgana fairy. The lands you see from the coast are real and do not vanish after the physical phenomenon, they are not a deception that leads to death. This land lives between truth and imagination, between dream and reality, constantly threatened by the myth of the north of the 60s or by the American charm of the early twentieth century, continues Cristaldi. The Mazara of history, with an excursus on the economy of fishing, also traced by the essay by Serra, PhD in European Law that suggests a new perspective of reading the city: An oscillation between two opposing and competing vocations: sea and land. A commuter movement that, between transformations and immanences, seems to itself become an identity trait of a city that has always been poised between the Mediterranean and Europe, he concludes.
November 3, 2022 | 14:50
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
[ad_2]
Source link
