THE GREAT DRAWING OF A “SEA PORT”

“The magic of the Parish Map of the Port Museum of Tricase is repeating itselfs, years later. A unique and creative idea to entrust to a drawing, masterfully interpreted by the talented Chiara Rescio, the description of a small but very important “sea port” of a small and very important “port city”, of a living and experienced physical and mental space where sea and land people, fishermen and not, merchants, soldiers, inhabitants, professionals, workers, turists and visitors, culture, environment, objects, landscapes, rituals, stories, memories and dreams, create a port and enrich it with colors, sounds and smells. The Port Museum of Tricase is all that can be seen in the drawing and also something else that cannot be represented in a drawing, but that the drawing certainly lets you guess, imagine, … draw“. With these words, Antonio Errico, President of Magna Grecia Mare Association, introduces and presents the Parish Map of the Port Museum of Tricase 2020.

The first map project, now in its fourth update, was created in 2013 on the initiative of the Magna Grecia Mare Association and the City of Tricase, thanks to the contribution of all the actors and visitors, even occasional ones, of what was once the just born Port Museum of Tricase. A large white sheet of paper was placed on a wall of the bar in the small square of the port, inviting everyone to suggest scenes, places, characters, memories, history, … useful to describe the past, the present and to imagine the future of the Port Museum. Chiara was asked to translate the stories into simple and linear drawings, certainly colourful. And she was so good that her drawings were included in the Annual 2017 catalogue (the most authoritative publication of the illustrated image in Italy and Europe) and she was awarded during the Annual Awards 2017, in the “didactics, school and science” category, during Bologna Children’s Book Fair 2017. And here is what Chiara tells us: “My usual search for synthesis, in this great illustration, has left room for the richness of elements to admit all the dimensions of the community to the drawn story, from the practical and daily ones to the more emotional and exceptional ones. By letting myself get involved in the life of the Port Museum and trying to free myself from certain aesthetic conventions, I have tried to give back to the ‘reader”s gaze a flow of images, like real explorations. In a certain sense this illustration produces memory, also initiating a process of growth in knowledge of the place“.

Today, among the new places included in the Parish Map 2020, it is certainly worth mentioning that beautiful and fascinating international projection of the City and its Port that is the proactive MARE Outpost, Tricase headquarters of the international organization CIHEAM Bari. And it is the Director Maurizio Raeli who describes it: “Our new headquarters in Salento is synergistically integrated in the Port Museum of Tricase, animating the dialogue between Mediterranean coastal communities with institutions, local and academic, cultural, and groups of citizens engaged in the sustainable development of coastal territories“.

In the upper part of the drawing appears the Palazzo dei Principi Gallone, the seat of the Municipality of Tricase, the entire city that almost maternally embraces its territory and its community, increasingly aware of the privilege of being a coastal city, of land and sea, a port city, a harbor city, a hardworking and welcoming community, proud heir to its past history and protagonist of the present one, stretching out into the Mediterranean and the world, thinking about the future.

Thanks to all! And may the wind always be favourable!