Europa Malta Mediterraneo

Abstract

The Mediterranean is an archetypal and crucial illustration of the encounter and clash of different civilizations, a "very ancient crossroads", as the French historian Fernand Braudel called it: the most common example of our Western tradition. Malta is in the middle of the Mediterranean. For thousands of years, Europe has been considered the center of the known world and then of the planetary civilization and has considered, from time to time in the historical event, the Mediterranean as its vital center or as a simple border of southern water. Malta is the fulcrum of this dynamic centering and decentralization. But Europe now seems destined to become any periphery of a labyrinthine world and variously interconnected, without a center or provided with more centers. So the three names of the title seem to constantly rotate around a center that does not exist or perhaps not at all a center - even if we like it or we are accustomed to consider it - but a vortex of rotations and displacements, slips, overlaps and mutual connections. Everything is moving around us and only a certainty we have right now, that we are in Malta, on a land that emerges at the center of a sea that is at the center of the land, and we find ourselves talking and questioning about Europe and on the Mediterranean. A situation that throws us into despair, the discomfort of those who are not accustomed to a world without center and in continuous movement and change, to a world of differences and exchanges and not of unquestionable and immovable certainties and truths, to a physical and not metaphysical world.