DIGISEA ::: images from the borders

… and beginning of a new one!
After nine years, Digisea.it will not be updated any longer.
Since the first web site, built with FrontPage and the 2002 bright colors, until this travel log, many things have changed, and many times, since the first works, in video only, and mostly underwater, when i was still based in Marina della Lobra, with my zodiac, to the return to photography, in Polinesia first, then in Scilla, and Sarajevo.
“Digisea” ’s ambition was to aggregate a team, and together to use the new media to exploit the digital video’s, photography’s and web’s capabilities.
The goals, as it often happens, have been only partly reached, and by unexpected ways. The team, better, the teams, have been formed, and together we have done great things and had lot of fun.
New chances, unthinkable only five or six years ago, have taken us into directions that we never could imagine to take. Surely never could we expect to exchange shots with a turkish galley from the top a Spanish tower, in XXIst century. And when I began to produce promotional underwater videos to advertise scuba diving, never I would expect to be able, in three years, to photograph the anchor of HMAV “Bounty” on Pitcairn island, and to interview the mutineers’ descendants.

It has been good, and like all good things, it must finish when you haven’t got enough yet.

Many ideas are still pending developement, waiting for better times and energy, many good works have not been completed, often due to customer’s fickleness or malpractice, but many projects will carry on, and satisfaction that they have given and will give will pay back for the inevitable dead ends that I, that we have explored.

My activity goes on, as a free lance and independent photographer and videomaker, going more often and further away from the Sorrentine Peninsula and Italy, and writing more. An image can be worth one hundred words, but a few words can add meaning and depth to the best photograph.

Thanks to everybody, especially to Fulvio, irreplaceable, changeable, unreliable, unfailing and inexhaustible, always available and always merry, and to Max, with his precious superpowers. And to everyone I met, all over the world, with a special thought to the Sarajlija, and the invitation to keep to follow on the new web site the photos, the videos and the stories that I’ll keep telling

Long time ago, in 1936, a young navy reserve officer was called at war.
The war was a shameful, unjustified act of aggression against a poor African country.
The officer disliked the government that had brought his country to war, but it was his country, and he had sworn to serve it. He like many others did not feel that war as especially unfair, as it was, because he was a son of his times, and was taught that European countries waged war in Africa to spread civilization. So, he served with honour on war ships, escorting cargoes loaded with weapons and troops to ravage the lands of Ethiopia, in a dishonourable colonial war in decolonisation time. The British Empire was being shaken by the moral strength of a half naked Indian little bald man with eyeglasses, but did not even bother to forbid the passage of Suez to the aggressor’s ships.
So the officer’s ship did not fire one shot, and he was soon back to his already growing family.
But for a short time: only four years later, the same officer, back in the navy again, had just sorted out of a shelter after a heavy bombing in Tobruk, when an aide reached him handing a cable.
He would not have been there. For the third time in five years, the country was at war: the government he despised was allied with the barbaric Nazis, and he felt from the very beginning that it would have meant the destruction of his country.
But when he read the cable, the World War lost any importance, for he had just become father for the fourth time. He looked at the devastated battlefield, saw the sunken ships in the harbour, and mentally promised to his newborn daughter and his beloved wife that he would have survived.
Later, after he survived the war, he got to know more of the horrors and lies about the wars he had been involved in. He cursed the regime that had stained his officer’s pride sending him to loot Ethiopia and to crush democracy in Spain, and felt secretly guilty for the rest of his long life, knowing that shells and mustard gas canisters that killed and maimed Ethiopian men, women and children had been escorted by his ship for a safe passage through the Red Sea.

Half a century and two decades later, I was on another battlefield.
The war was over, but it was still working, like a bullet gone astray. The battlefield was a city so rich with different cultures that people that had none wanted to destroy them to make it “clean”.
And ten years later, people in the city were working hard to forget. Bars and nightclubs were full, and everybody smiled a lot.
Only, on the bars doors strange looking stickers forbad to bring guns inside, and in the discos tough looking bouncers asked kindly to leave “all weapons” at the wardrobe. Nobody older than ten years walked over the grass, ever. Then, in nighttime, in the suburbs, one could still hear and see assault rifles fired in the air, new graffiti on bullet riddled walls promised renewed “cleansing” or revenge for it, and the names of warlords still at large were enough to make smiles disappear, and to attract nervous glances by strangers.
Sarajevo was not a quiet town, long after the war was over.
As it’s usual, after any war, some people had become rich, very rich. Other people, most of the people, spent time and energy to not look poor, but some were too poor even to pretend.
The Roma could be seen everywhere: in elegant streets begging or asking, in the suburbs living in shanties, and in the residential areas going from a garbage bin to the next, often pulling a cart, to collect whatever was still usable or saleable.
And then there were children.
Kids so young to be mere babies, crying or singing unlikely folk songs, or playing with wrecked accordions as big as themselves, kneeled on pavements, often in the pouring rain, begging for coins that were seldom given.
I was there to photograph the life of a city that had reborn after being under siege for four years. I shot at them mercilessly with zooms, defying curses from adults guarding them.
The legend says that photographers steal their subjects’ souls, and certainly I felt like a thief.
Every time I looked back at those photos, I wondered what had ever been of those kids. No harm, but either no good has come to them from being photographed.

Today, 75 years after the navy officer’s story, the photos I shot to the little young Roma kids in Sarajevo, and to the street kids in Istanbul, are being exhibited and sold in an art gallery in New York. The proceeds will finance the foundation “Artists for Charity”, that will use them to help unfortunate children to study and be treated in their orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Rest in peace, dear old captain: all debts are being paid.

“Born Brave”, from February 15th to February 20th, 2011, at Ouchi Gallery, 170 Tillary Street, Suite 507, Brooklyn, New York City, NY.

There are cities at the center of strangely attractive forces. The fascination of feelings seemingly inspired by them is exuded by the city themselves, while hidden under a veil of images, quickly turned into cliché.
Barcelona, Naples, Valparaìso, Istanbul: sea cities, historical cities, built by art, by pain, by blood: cities imprisoned inside of their very legend, where people become just shadows on a background that is the real protagonist, and the photographer can hardly focus the depth of the reality in front of his eyes.
It’s not always the history, or the beauty of monuments, or the inhabitants’ kindness to make a city alive.
It’s Istanbul, that was Byzantium, and Constantinople, and the Ottoman capital, and the vibrant Belle Époque city spiced with Orientalism, to give a soul to History, to the monuments, and to people living there.

And if the Christmas card has not been sent, for the first time in 12 years, it is not for lack of ideas.
Facing a holiday more and more tacky and watered down, emptier and emptier, the only possible inspiration is to live an intimate Christmas, reserved to the beloved ones and personal friends, trying to fill it up with new content of domestic peace and personal harmony.
But the new year is and remains a time of review and plans, a milestone on an increasingly interesting path.
After a breathless 2010, a hard and frantic year, a break for rest and deliberation should be needed, it should be hard to feel new incentives, new determination.
But once the “taste of blood” has been felt, it’s impossible to quit: as usual, the covered roads produce new itineraries, unravelling into an inextricable maze ahead of our path. We just need to choose one of these roads.
But there is only one possible choice: to travel them all…
Year 2011 is there, right ahead of us: let’s get it!
Happy New Year!

A photographer is a witness.
His own opinions, and his own impressions, must be kept in the background of the facts he tells, and they must be told through his own images only. And through my images I try to tell stories about ordinary people, their traditions, ancient memories and artistic suggestions.
But then, times come, as it happened, when emotions or or shame were too strong, times when one can not, and must not, stay silent.
“No man is an island: never send to know for whom the bell tolls”, John Donne said.
We have assisted from our tv sets to genocides and wars, with the uneasyness of who knows that there must be real persons behind the images, but also with the reassuring resignation of who knows cannot change the world. I have met people that had lived those tragedies as part of their lives, and tried to realize what those experiences could teach us. But I tried to tell only what I had seen and heard from the protagonists.
And then something happens, somthing so close, so unbelievable, that it’s not possible anymore to restrain one self to be a simple witness.
In a world where governments bargain “human rights”’s respect with the “national interest”, the common people’s support has always been a comfort. The only true Right, the right to be able to live with the dignity proper to a human being, is more easily recognized when people doesn’t hide behind flags or uniforms, but can look into each other’s eyes.
The tragedy of Sahrawi people, triggered by colonialism, perpetrated by the last fascist european dictatorship and an absolute monarch, fueled by the vetoes of the very nation that gave the world the idea itself of Human Rights, is downplayed or ignored by national governments, in the name of interests or alliances. But on a local level, at individuals, associations, small or big cities, that tragedy has ignited a solidarity and empathy race. A virtual community, a kind of little UN of individuals, has sprouted, that recognizes to the Sahrawi People the dignity and the richness of its culture, its language, that hosts and instruct its children in friendly towns, in spite of thousands difficulties opposed by the cynicism of national bureaucracies. The Sahrawis are still divided by a wall into two halves, one oppressed and colonized in its own land, the other one confined in the desert and humiliated in the condition of refugees.
But hundreds and hundreds of italian towns have twinned themselves with the Sahrawis’ refugee camps, and they use the twinned towns status to ease the movements of aids and of cultural exchanges, keeping alive the people, their language, their literature, their arts: their very existence, denied by some “national interest”. The Europe of people, the Europe of cities, has mirrored itself into a people living exile and colonization.
And the Sahrawis of the desert, naming each of their camps like one of their occupied towns, have mirrored themselves into the other half of their people and into their desire for freedom.
A small, happy italian town, instead, has been twinned with the invader.
The City of Sorrento has mirrored itself not into the refugee camp of El Aayùn, but with the administration of the moroccan colonies of the occupied city of El Aayùn, that they spell Laayoune.
The United Nations, The International Court of the Hague, the European Union and even Italy itself call for the right of self determination for the Sahrawis. The city of Sorrento, the sole and only political entity in the world, has recognized the sovereignity of a country on a territory that the UN define as “not self governed”, that is to say colonized.
If this move was made by a national government, motivated by a vague and nebulous interest, it would not have been so stunning. But the gesture of a small town, the grain of sand in the clockwork, the beat of a butterfly wing causing a storm on the other side of the world, it’s heavy as a boulder on the cosciences.
The people from “Sorrento”, even those who not vote for Sorrento’s city council, but lives in the Sorrentine Peninsula, cannot stay still and just look how does it goes. They must decide if they want to mirror themselves into the victims, and to offer solidarity, or into the invaders, and to be conniving. There’s no room for compromise when the topic is Human Rights and International Law: the solution is ready, as pointed by UN, taht even has a mission (that includes italian military observers) on location to implement it, and it’s not up to us to solve international disputes.
But, meanwhile, common people can help the common people living in the desert, and learn from them how to save their dignity, that has been humiliated by their administrators’ actions.
“Il Colibrì” will organize some meeting to inform about the situation in Western Sahara, to collect aids to be sent to Sahrawi refugees camps by the common people from Sorrento and the Sorrentine Peninsula. A great chance to show that the people is more sensitive then institutions.

photo: Fabrizia Ramondino, during a pro Sahrawi rally in Naples with Abdeslam Omar Lehsen, chairman of the association of relatives of sahrawi victims of human rights violations.

Behind the ancient town of Cuma, along the sea and northway up to the river Volturno, an impassable forest stood on the way.
The Silva Gallinaria was a holm oak trees wood, grown up for immemorable times by the seaside, that became the terror of travellers.
First Greek colons avoided to enter it when they founded Cuma, that was to have its back protected by the wood as an immovable army.
The roads building Romanshad to bypass the forest, and until the Imperial age the traders that were forced to cross it told stories about merciless bandits, primeval creatures, nymphs and fauns living there.
It was only the brutal realism of war, and war needs, to win the upper hand against the Silva.
The century old holm oaks were downed one by one to build the ships of Pompey’s fleet, first, and then the Imperial Fleet based in Miseno. The flocks of sheeps did not allow the trees to grow back, and the Via Domitiana crossed what was the forest to make of Baiae, Miseno, Puteoli, the Imperial Rome riviera.
But the forest had been reduced, not annihilated. The Roman Empire passed, and so the Goths, the Byzantines, the Bourbons and the Nazists. The holm oaks in the Silva Gallinaria still shade Cuma’s sun just by the sea, and the wood has become an oasis of green and mistery invinting to enjoy wildlife, vegetation and History.
From the forest that for centuries resisted civilization, a call is coming to look for earthly feelings, the scent of the wood, the Nature’s shapes, the suggestions of shadows.
From September 25th to October 30th, the Silva Gallinaria, the forest of Cuma, will take the shapes that artists of what is called Land Art will be able to notice in it.
And the creatures hiding there for millennia will assist from the shadow.

5000 years ago, an adventurers’ people settled on the islands of the Aegean Sea that one day would have been named Cyclades, because of their “circular” disposition. We know very little about them, and much of what we know it’s a source of mysteries. We know that they had an extraordinarily modern artistic taste, and that this has caused the pillaging of their archaeological sites, and the smuggling of their artefacts to secret collectionists has probably made their mysteries unsolvable.
We know that they used some bizarre objects, the so called “frying pans”, but we do not know to do what. They were ceramic circular containers, highly decorated, that surely were never touched by the flame. On the back, among other decorations, an unmistakable, roughly sketched shape: a watercraft, not yet a boat, but embarking even 50 rowers. The inhabitants of the Cyclades, tying together wooden planks, shaped by the first bronze or copper tools, could build themselves crafts not limited by the size, the weight and the rigidity of a whole tree trunk: no more canoes, then, but the first “boats” of a maritime civilization.
We know almost nothing about those boats: a few sketches, some later descriptions and a sort of reverse engineering from the iconography of later civilizations make us think of a planking sewn together, that once soaked in water became practically watertight, one end high on the sea with a totemic or apotropaic sculpture, and another one looking like a rostrum, more probably a skid to ease the hauling. But we have no idea how they were at sea, if they used oars or paddles, not even which end was the bow and which was the stern. But there is one way to find out…

Ilaria Patassini, known as Pilar, is beautiful.

And she uses all of her talent, her intelligence and her obviously large culture to make us forget of it. In the most realistic musical tradition, the one of smoky little clubs crowded with an often careless or insensitive audience, where soon-to be famous rock bands, cursed poets and French chanteuses performed, Pilar enchants her public, guiding them to the discovery of her musical persona, getting rid of her attractiveness as of a stage prop.

A singer willing to face her audience in such intimate confrontations cannot be only a singer. And the concert is a solo show, accompanied by Tony Canto’s guitar “and cheekbones”, her hands on her own thighs percussions, the sound of a pearl string wrapped around her body like an animal spirit, and mostly by her own lyrics, in Italian and French, passionate, wry, harmonious lyrics, that sometimes trascend into monologues, and others heighten with all the power of her voice.

A show that challenges the audience, a generous, lofty offer, at points even mocking, but always matched with an artist moving through spaces like the ones that hosted The Beatles in Hamburg, or Jim Morrison’s excesses, or vibrated with Juliette Gréco’s voice or Paolo Conte’s piano, with dubious acoustic and lighting worthy of the worst Tarantino.

Pilar is charming, and like all charmers, she leaves to her audience the choice to listen beyond music and words. To photograph her, hushing the “clicks” to preserve the purity of her music’s silences, has been a privilege…

Thinking of a mountain land, where indomitable people resisted the strongest armies in History, dotted with ruined castles and marked by thousands water lines, push imagination to countries still proud with their heritage, rich of tourism and traditions.

But Calabria, the heartland of Magna Graecia, that gave Humanity some of their more illustrious minds, that gave hospitality to Hannibal’s army when chased by Romans, that revolted against Napoleon, that here suffered his first defeat, that is blessed with unmatched typical food, is a defeated land.

Poverty, emigration, nepotism, and the ever present shadow of organized crime, seem to have blown even hope out. Scotland, Andalucia, Ireland, Savoy, Sardinia, have left to the past all the unpleasant memories of misery and banditry, and now they live out of the gorgeous landscapes and wildlife and their proud traditions.

Not Calabria, damned to survive in a limbo between a glorious past and an invisible future, in the absolute indifference of its own rulers, accomplishes in a self-ethnocide seldom paralleled in History.

Still Calabria only waits for discovery.

The gastronomical abundance, the vineyards, the bergamot, citrus and the innumerable traditional recipes, the harsh landscapes and the wildlife still untouched in spite of so many attacks, the sea, and the ancient or abandoned villages, the Magna Graecia poleis ruins, the archaeological museums, are still there.

Francesco Turano, journalist, underwater photographer, trekking guide, naturalist illustrator, studies as an old times eclectic scholar his land, and after quitting a “prestigious” job, works full time to uncover Calabria’s hidden riches. During an all too short trip, he has presented us the Aspromonte’s paths and his friendship.

And he let us discover a new border to explore, before it’s too late.

To meet an old friend many years later arouses mixed feelings.
It is embarassing to be face to face with a person that probably remembers all too well many moments we would like to have forgotten, and at the same time it is unavoidable to mirror one self into the friend that was so close, to measure any change, and maybe, to realize pleasantly that we still have more hair than him, or to discover that he got married with the girl he dreamed to go out with the last time we met him.
It occurred to me, while googling for a shady secret agent, to find instead a dear old friend, as much shady, named Ferdinando.
After almost twenty years (omg, it’s shocking enough to realize that we reached the time when we can say “twenty years later…”), he still has less hair than me, he got married with the girl he dreamed to go out with the last time I met him, he has discovered at last, thanks to Frank Miller, what ever happened at the Thermopylae. And more than managing an interesting cinematography blog, he has published a novel, and he is an author and director of short films and web series.

The really incredible thing, though, is that, like super heroes, all of this is just part of his hidden identity.

In the so called “everyday life”, my friend Ferdinando, that to my astonishment has even graduated as an engineer, is a faithful employee of a multinational corporation, he works at a desk, with a pc, pics of his family, drawing by his kids, and definitely a cactus. And, even more remarkably, he has unbelievable colleagues, that not only lend themselves as the cast for his films, but even give their sharp minds to refine their “director”’s ideas.

And in a Kafkian game, like a mediocre insurance clerk in Prague becoming at night one of the greatest writer of the XXth century, it comes out that the mediocrity of the unlikely cast’s creations is actually only a collateral flaw, due to the lack of time and attention, sacrificed to the office groove, essential to pay generous loans offered by the employing corporation and the car needed to come and go to the office.

And next comes the question of how much creativity is flattened and crushed by the grooves of the innumerable patent offices, or sacrificed to the altar of family harmony in free time, or annihilated by the commuters’ migraines, and how many masterpieces can ever be produced in this time of drastic flattening.

Meanwhile, as in the classic films he so much loved, Ferdinando has immediately succeeded in exploiting the recovered friend. And before I realized how did it happen, his short films were being filmed with DIGISEA’s videocameras….

It is possible to learn how to be a fashion photographer, to study still life or architectural photography, and to follow lectures for naturalistic photographers, learning a lot about macro or panoramic pics.

For many great photographers of the Film Era, the base of their profession was the mastering of technics, and most of them could still teach lessons to today’s best digital colleagues.

But to be a “streepher”, a Street Photographer, is something that cannot be learned but following the most visceral instinct, and the experience on the road, with all the risks, hardships and the pleasure of condensing whole life stories into the moment of the click, is the only way to improve.

To be admitted with a selection of photos into such a selected group of photographers is a honor, a spur and a challenge to improve and keep trying to show the whole humanity in a mirror shard.

The Christian Easter is a moment of thought and penitence, culminating in the Resurrection catharsis, the focal point of the whole Christian theology. The god embodied into a man suffers and dies, merging himself with the painful mankind, but through Faith and divine intercession, he presents his own resurrection from the dead as Hope and a metaphor of eternal salvation.
Such a dramatic moment of religious piety, lived on for two millennia by different people, united in religion only, has produced the most spectacular folk rituals. The great part of them is centred on penitence and pain for the conviction and execution of an innocent man, but then burst in happiness and joy for resurrection and salvation, for victory of divine justice over the iniquity of the eartly one. Triumphant angels, Spring festivals, decorated eggs and symbols of fertility or rebirth, flower ornaments and ritual sweets enrich the symbology of the “Passing” from a dark, winterlike and hopeless world to a new one where salvation is reality, Springtime is fecund and both material and spiritual abundance are coming.
But on the contrary, here, in the same Campania which was Spain during the Counter-Reformation, the climax of Easter, the most peculiar ritual of the Holy Week is not the moment of salvation and joy, but the death of the persecuted god.
The famous processions of the hooded men organized by solidarity brotherhoods, are somptuous, painful funerals involving whole communities. The shocked cry of zealous aunts and pious housewives, if a relative only tried to taste a “pastiera”, the unfailing Easter pie that “must rest for three days”, it is made on Holy Thursday and cannot be eaten before the Easter Sunday, was always “‘O lluttto!!”, “The mourning!!”, “Keep in mind that we are mourning, until Easter!”
And then the immortal syncretism of Mediterranean people surfaces again, about the cult of the dead, the cult of the god descending to netherworld to save mortals. Here the main vision of Easter is not the one of Resurrection, the defeat of Death, but on the contrary, the acceptance of the latter by the god making himself equal to mortal men, and so deserves a suitable funeral, and the resulting mourning. The intercession through the deceased beloved ones, or through the Saints, mortal people favoured by God, is now possible through the Savior too, become part of the cult of the dead. And Easter, three days later, celebrating Resurrection, has to be observed as all sacred or secular holidays are observed here, for Homeric times: with a solemn banquet, to be concluded with the famous “pastiera”. Finally.

My photo of Mediterranean Red Coral (Corallium rubrum) has been picked by the WWF International for a page on its website about the impending CITES meeting next on March 13 -25 in Qatar.
The CITES is the Convention on International Trade restraining trade of endangered or protected natural species.
It’s shocking to see two of the animal species so much involved in the economic and social history of the Mediterranean to be included in the list, and quite depressing is the ensuing discussion.
The tuna fish and the red coral and their thousand-year long, hard and demanding exploitation have been the icons of the sea culture, coming out of deadly hazards, indescribable sacrifices rewarded with the prosperity (never growing into richness) of whole communities. The Sardinian and Sicilian “tonnare” (with the long disappeared and less evoluted Campanian, Calabrian ones) and the settlements devoted to the collection of red coral spreading from Torre del Greco (sometimes real “colonies”, in the Greek or Phoenician sense of the word) have helped to shape the Mediterranean not less than wars or tectonic movements.
And now, in the span of only one generation, when modern means of exploitation could have secured the future of a traditional way of life, we have shamelessly pillaged resources that were inexhaustible, and confined into the list of rare and endangered treasures our very symbols of industriousness.
This photo of the Red Coral has a story, one of those stories that will never be written because too incredible. It was shot 62 meters below, in the sea of Ischia, while with Francesco Germi, thanks to Roberto Sforza’s boat, with Bruno Iacono’s advises, an oarlock borrowed by a fisherman, and specially thanks to Luca, that after a while lost a battle for life, to win a more important one. This photo, with all the hope for tuna and coral, and our sea’s future, is dedicated to him.

A day like many others, a year like many others, but a watershed for half of the world: on February 14th, 2010 one half of the year celebrates romantic love in the name of Valentine (except Sorrento, that celebrates its patron saint, Sant’Antonino), and the other half of the world enter a new year: 2010 is the year of the Tiger, according the zodiac called “chinese”, that is common to most of eastern Asia, influenced by Han culture, from Viet Nam to Korea, from China (that is to say wherever chinese people are, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia and the countless “little Chinas” scattered worldwide), to Mongolia, to himalayan kingdoms.
The Tiger is on of the 12 years cycles composing the chinese Zodiac, along the agricultural calendar based on observation of Lunar cycles. Every year is associated to one of the five elements, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire and Earth: 2010,Year of the Tiger, is associated to Metal. Tiger is a symbol of strength, positiveness and confidence in one’s self, risking at every step to turn into the pride leading to danger and fall. But in difficult times, the strenght of the Tiger will help to take hard and audacious decisions, to change any crisis into an opportunity of resurgence and eventual success.
Happy year of the Tiger! :o)

January 27th is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Which remembrance?
Who remembers? What?
The generation which witnessed the horror was indelibly scarred, but the prevailing feeling was not of loathing or revulsion, nor hatred.
It was shame.
It was the awareness to have allowed, even in the slightest part, even in the absolute impotence of common people, even in the many tiny heroic moves that saved a handful of neighbours or strangers, to have allowed that such a shame could happen to leave the whole human race stained forever.
The Germans who saw a minority going berserk and stealing their own name, and their country, and the whole Europe then, holding on the fading hope that they would restrain sooner or later, and then abdicating to the new masters’ matters, “it’s for a superior goal”, “they must have done something wrong, if everybody hates them”, were content enough that it wasn’t them, to get cheap benefits, enjoying shining parades, buying official versions.
And nowadays, when lager’s signs are stolen or exhibited as souvenirs, that many pogroms and “crystal nights” (such an epic name for a night long organized theft and robberies carried out by street gangs!) smear that that was an emigrants’ country, which even in its darkest hours did not lose humanity, schools visit the shameful camps, sugar sachet are printed with “jokes”, and the home-made Streichers poison hearts and minds, struggling to find moralist justifications for the ones sowing hatred and sloth. There is not much left to go back, over the long time passed and the massive historiography barriers.
But who wishes to, can drive the road from Bosanski Brod to Banja Luka.
One day, after years of “harmless” and “ludicrous” televised propaganda, a minority went berserk, stole a people’s name and its culture, made them feel their identity threatened, used never healed wounds to justify those who were jealous neighbours, displeased employees, unpleasant landlords, gave them weapons and dispatched them to exterminate, rape, kill or expel the ones they did not like because, being from a differente “race” or religion, they were enemies.
The house of casualties are still there, pillaged, disassembled, marked and then burnt, and the fields are still uncultivated, sown only with unnumerable mines.
The Remembrance Day makes me think not of the lagers, the industrial plants of degradation and extermination, that were its last phase. It makes me think of the beginning, when none of those who locked themselves inside and plug their ears could have realized how far it would go. And that it happened again, and now, when we can see the early signs, we know that it can happen again.

This past year 2009 has been an intense and interlocutory year, as much as hard as exciting. From a passage to a holiday, we have kept covering stories of boats and of nativity scenes, we have recalled old tales and exposed new misteries , we have listened to cries for help and traditional chants, we uncovered the story of a recent wreck and the one of an ancient ship. Looking for the meaning of ancient ruins and modern passions, we received unexpected satisfaction from other story seekers and from History custodians. We now appear at different windows and have learned new ways of presentation, and once again we look at the past to find the path toward a better future.

Christmas is a holiday so deeply rooted in everybody’s imagination, to inspire a true mythology about it. It is perhaps the very first feast that kids learn to celebrate, well before and more than a birthday, surrounded with bright and unchangeable rituals, and with misteries that the youngsters, as uninitiated, cannot understand. The Nativity Scene man, the able dad or uncle inventing solutions to build the miniature village, has a long lasting charm, even after the Christmas “misteries” are revealed to be false. The Neapolitan “Presepe” tradition, then, with its heritage of unforgotten sovereigns and nativity scenes worthy of royal palaces, charms old and young people alike for centuries, attracting more and more attention as cultural roots are rediscovered. The work of a modern Master of Nativity Art is the topic focused in Stories through video, photos and an article.

… and if the celebration of compulsive happiness will be useful to stay in touch with old friends, to consolidate friendships, to greet relatives and make children happy, then this Christmas will also have had its meaning. Greetings to everyone!!

A resume about what we have done or we do like to do: topics and goals of our pics, videos or stories.

… and about friends e degli amici che constitute DIGISEA. Those who took part in real adventures, those who followed loyally every work and every hardship, those who worked and those who only had fun: next time will be even better!