“Here we oscillate between the desire to stay and the need to go; between resistance and emigration, between permanence and wandering. For the Mazarese there is always the sea in the middle, with whose nets he collects fishing booty or Greek bronzes. The Mazara that is told in this register of images and words, is the city of dreams and reality, shining on the sea, between Fata Morgana, Marrobbio, Mediterranean light and saltiness that corrodes the hands of the fishermen”. And precisely 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, which is being distributed these days. (Libridine editions, 85 pages, 12.50 euros). The cover was designed by Franco Donarelli. 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 cement. Here time oozes from the hands of those who built each building, visible only by those who know how to observe the swaying of the moments that cross between the glimpses of a sky that repeats itself, inexorably, among the seagulls, while they pierce the sirocco builder of the men of sea. Here everything is dream and reality and it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish the boundaries”, writes Cristaldi. “All of Mazara is inside Franco’s lens, with his evocative shots, almost all unpublished, taken over 15 years, with his special light and his true face: the narrow streets of the Casbah, the balustrades with new ceramics, the beaches cleaned up and redeveloped, the smell of the prawns on the market stalls, of the couscous evaporating from the houses in the historic center or from old trattorias, the splendid facades of the churches (the churches have written the layout of the city, giving meaning to every alley and in every square), the beloved rites and processions of the feast of San Vito, co-patron of the city together with the Most Holy Savior and all the saints who protect the fatigue and beauty of everyday life”, explains Romeo.
“The light in Mazara del Vallo has an intense flavour. And to try to describe it I rely on taste and smell, first of all – observes Giovanni Franco – Then naturally 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 Màzaro river offers, to those who know how to intercept them, which is less than 200 km from the Tunisian coasts of North Africa”. “Here where everything is difficult, windows open without horizons; those who know how to look far see islands and lands beyond the horizon denying the fata morgana. The lands you see from the coast are real and do not vanish after the physical phenomenon, they are not a deception which leads to death. This land lives between reality and imagination, between dream and reality, constantly threatened by the myth of the North of the 1960s or by the American charm of the early 20th century”, explains Cristaldi. The Mazara of history, with an excursus on the fishing economy, is also traced by Serra’s essay expert in European Law which suggests a new perspective of reading the city: “An oscillation between two opposing and competing vocations: sea and land. A pendulum movement which, between transformations and immanence, seems itself to become an identity trait of a city that has always been poised between the Mediterranean and Europe”.