Costruzione di un Atlante del patrimonio culturale mediterraneo

The word “Mediterranean” has accompanied issues and considerations relevant to the scientific community of design. Time and use have perhaps amplified a term that, in its etymology, contains the sense of this place. Medi-terraneo is in fact the sea in the middle, surrounded by lands, with dense relations between a bank and the other. It is the white sea, calm and navigable, able to support the Carthaginians “woods”, the Roman trireme, the Venetian galleys but also the ships of shame. The latter, full of new travelers, driven by war and poverty, transport, physically, instances of people living on the south shore of what has been called the Mare Nostrum. The shores of the Mediterranean have been sung by poets of all time, told by writers and analyzed by scholars and essayists. They are rugged, complex, varied, as the multiplicity of natural, environmental and cultural factors that in these places were formed and developed. The banks laden with colors, smells and matter, they are composed to form landscapes, natural and artificial. They are the scene of the life of peoples and ancient and contemporary societies. The Mediterranean is therefore not only a real and tangible place, a physical and temporal space, but it is also the multifaceted reflection of a place, incorporeal, where occur brokerages and exchanges, diffusion of cultures and sharing of resources. It is the center of our identity as scholars and men. It is also a legendary, symbolic and cultural area. Where it takes place, as always, the culture of sharing and hybridization. Reasonableness that all filters, processes and transforms. The Mediterranean expresses the convergence of spirit and nature. Between materiality and religion.