Procidani seafarers: a book tells the seafaring history of the island

Maritime history is also an economic history. The book tells of its rise and, in a certain sense, its decline. What is this economic story like today?
An island of only 4 square kilometers – says Salvemini – has had the ability to establish itself since the eighteenth century in the panorama of national and international navy with positive repercussions on its own wealth. Privileged carriers in the coastal trade of the Bourbons and merchants, transporting grain and iron from the Crimea, wood and coals from the Lazio coast and much more, the island became a widespread shipyard with many shipowners and shipowners in the golden age of the navy procidana (Wealth from the sea). To face the risks of navigation, prayers were not enough and here the owners of Procidani woods decided to invest in insurance companies (Safe surfing). The presence on the island of shipowners, builders, insurers and other groups attests to the validity of an economic project that should lead to a new reflection on the extent of that gap that accompanied the history of our peninsula in the aftermath of the Unification. Their experience and professionalism are still today an added value in the training of the crews that from the twentieth century we will find on all sorts of ships from oil tankers, to the ships of the Lauro Fleet, to cargo and the most modern cruise ships. (The art of sailing). Today the sea and navigation continue to represent an opportunity for the people of the island but, unlike in the past, one gets the impression that young people also want to focus on land and are less attracted to that maritime income which is no longer so attractive as in the past. Young people feel the weight of an investment in absence, in waiting, in distance which is combined with the few guarantees on a contractual level. My father, born in 1920, had no choice and when my brother was born he saw him again after nine months.

The book, scientific as an essay and as pleasant as a baedeker, benefits from a formidable iconographic and photographic apparatus which is due to the tireless research of Donatella Pandolfi. What are the “rarities” or unpublished images that the curator Donatella Pandolfi would point out?
When Claudio and Raffaella involved me in the choral enterprise of this book, I set to work to enrich the book with images that would give back a visual support to the stories. To the first images of the book on the geological characteristics of the island, with the splendid cliffs of Ciraccio and Chiaia, and the reference to the ancient submerged and emerged archaeological traces, and to the nearest seabed (Horizon earth) I have added photos and images of real facts happened such as the ex-votos for shipwrecks or the life of women on the island. On the seafaring life you will find the beautiful drawings of Aldo Cherini, an Istrian historian of the Italian navy who reproduces boats and tartans used in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Particular attention to the Chiaiolella fishermen that I myself met as a child, one for all the legendary Turiello mentioned in the chapter The wealth of the sea, of which there are some photos from the photographic archive of my father Vittorio Pandolfi. Turiello, it was a sight to see him return from fishing with his faithful Bobby standing in the bow of the gozzo. In the Alinari archive I then found beautiful photos such as the one for mullet fishing with chiusurana from the early 1900s. A special thanks also goes to the contribution of private archives that kindly make precious testimonies available.

The sea would seem to be made up of men. You narrate “Women and the sea”. Who I am?
It has always been said that Procida – says Raffaella – is a matriarchal island, recognizing women a decisive role in building a model and a family economy based on the absence of husbands. To support this thought are the words of Marcello Eusebio Scotti, priest procidano martyr of the Republic of 1799 and author of a Nautical Catechism, which contrasts the women of the city seen as inept tools to bargain, sitting in a corner of the house and engaged in the mere cleanliness, the women of the sea who combined domestic care with business management. They were strong and rare women like precious stones capable of investing and making the capital of the sea bear fruit but until 1919 they needed the authorization of their husbands, except for widows. Having said that, in the absence of their husbands, the women of the island took care not only of “land” affairs, but also of “sea” affairs, captaining ships such as Luisa Ambrosino, who took over the command of the ship from her husband who died at sea or managing them as shipowners. . Among these we find Speranza Massa who ran a ship and granted loans with a life so intense that it would be worthwhile to be told.

How was the idea and structure of this book born with eight thematic chapters to which seven other authors (Paola Avallone, Rosario Lentini, Vincenzo Morra, Maria Sirago, Pasquale Trizio, and Francesca Borgogna and Nicola Scotto of Procida collaborated) Charles)?
This book has a choral structure – concludes Fogu – rather than a collective one. The basic idea was to create a kind of inverted pilot book, a guide that, starting from a terrestrial route, from the places and toponymy of the island, would turn the visitor’s or reader’s gaze towards the horizon of the sea and history. . And so we asked our authors to start each chapter from one or more places and return to the text whenever it was appropriate to do so. In doing so, our authors followed similar input that made their voices much less discordant than is usually taken for granted in a multi-handed book. We curators did not have much more to do than harmonize the interventions received from our colleagues and colleagues.