Why Palermo?

The day of the coronation of Roger the II, the 25th of December 1130, the nobility, the clergy and the diplomacy that belonged to the entire known world attended; the tiaras were mixing with the turbans, many languages were spoken, Latin, Arab, Greek, French, German, Hebraic.

Palermo, a Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman town and the cross-road of the Mediterranean cultures, was the Capital of an enormous kingdom. At that time, the city counted two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, when Rome counted only thirty thousand.

The parties, the celebrations, the splendour, the personalities, couldn’t be shot by a video-camera, but the most important artists of the near and far world documented the past, anyway. They did it through the Martorana mosaics, the paintings of the Palatina Mukarnas, lately in the Monreale Cathedral. Many others can be found in all of Sicily.

The art developed in all the centuries and so all her expressive manners, but the artists never abandoned Sicily; painters, sculptors, photographers, film directors from all over the world continued to measure their art with the sublime past of this land.

This is the reason why this city is, and must remain, the activities centre of  “Sole Luna” a Festival that wants to be a bridge through the Mediterranean Sea, a deepening tool to read the “Other”.

The “Other”, that in reality is our past, our DNA, our history. Palermo has many examples of this past, such as the Cathedral that was first a church, then a mosque, finally a church again.

The profound aim is to succeed to make this festival, the nucleus of Mediterranean cultures, an area of free intellectual as well as artistic exchange.

Hence, let’s start the feast with a week of projections, shows, exhibitions, meetings, capacity building and cultural exchanges. Complesso monumentale di S. Anna will become a cosmopolitan theatre to gladden the Panormites and the several interesting guests.

Lucia Gotti Venturato

President