It is quicker to say what it isn’t. It isn’t really a Festival. It isn’t a literary prize. It isn’t a conference. It’s a place where writers meet to discuss.
The idea is to bring a certain number of intellectuals to the bedside of a sea that as things stand seems to be chronically ill, with a rate of conflict with few precedents. A sea of problems that professional politicians and diplomats, with the instruments of their trade, have not managed so far to solve. The hope is that at least writers are able to find common ground in discussion of the great conflictual themes of the Mediterranean.
Having to start somewhere, one might as well start from the centre. And the centre, map to hand, is precisely in Sicily. And even more precisely in the south-east of Sicily. Maybe it’s casual, but maybe not: south-east. As if the reasoning of the South and the East of the world could find a home here that offers shelter to each of them. A place where this reasoning can be aired and where someone, it is hoped, will be inclined to hear them. The Province of Ragusa, after having been declared Heritage of Mankind by Unesco, puts itself forwards as a clearing house of rights, ideas, and disparate languages that crisscross from the different shores of the Mediterranean. It is at Ragusa, Modica and Scicli that the masters of the word are called to cross swords, to discuss and even quarrel, if they have to do so. The important thing is that they talk. Out of this comes the need for an annual appointment that should be founded on trust in the power of the word declined in the three different monotheistic religions that have found their foundations in the Mediterranean.