Mediterranean, I may be an incurable romantic, but for me, summer is all about this: the sun slowly drawing closer to the sea, as if to brush its lips in what feels like an endless first kiss. And a horizon that becomes ever more visible, almost tangible, transcending the rational limits of distance.

I am neither the first nor the best, and I certainly won’t be the last to fall in love with the Mediterranean: the silent protagonist of our lives, literally the ‘sea be-tween the lands’, which has always been the cradle of peoples and a treasure trove of biodiversity. ‘The Mediterranean waiting to be discovered’, sang a young Pino Mango in one of his most famous songs, which encapsulates the very essence of what the Mediterranean is: ‘to be seen and to be savoured’, certainly. But it is also a place of prayer and death, because in recent decades we have betrayed its voca-tion for dialogue, transforming it into a frontier between life and death, democracy and tyranny, opulence and poverty, forgetting that wealth and origin are not crite-ria for judging whether one is human.

We should, therefore, return to studying the Mediterranean with greater convic-tion in schools and, perhaps, even through direct experience, to realise that the ports of Tunis and Mazara del Vallo speak the same language; that couscous and fregola are related; that without Anatolia we would never have learnt to cultivate the olive tree. Yes, simply knowing this – even without understanding why – would be enough to grasp where the sovereignist and absolutist tendencies of nations are leading us. And also our inability to admit that we have only one planet at our dis-posal and that we are using its resources to excess.
After all, in our homes, all we need to do is switch on an air-conditioner to beat the heat – at least until we have enough energy to power it. So, the words of Sitting Bull, a Sioux chief who, in the mid-19th century, whilst one of the many attempts at the genocide of Native Americans was underway, come to mind today more than ever: “When they have polluted the last river, cut down the last tree, hunted the last bison, caught the last fish, only then will they realise they cannot eat the mon-ey they have accumulated in their banks.”

 

Nio