“Mediterranean. The sea of history” is the theme of the sixth edition of Festival of the Middle Ages that will take place in the City of the Ceri from 23 to 27 September.

An exciting journey into the profound memory of the "Mare nostrum" of ancient Rome that began to be called "Sea in the middle of the lands" in the Middle Ages. It is a vast "closed lake" between one side of Europe, one side of Africa and the other of Asia Minor: the "Upper Sea" so feared by the Egyptians and the Sumerians, the "White Sea" of the Arabs, the "Great sea” Quoted in the prayers of the Jewish tradition.

A crossroads of peoples, languages, cultures, religions, encounters and clashes, goods and knowledge. This is the mirror of fanaticism and tolerance. For more than two thousand years, the real beating heart of the world.

The Mediterranean is much more than a sea. It has been the theatre of the millennial common history of Europe, Asia and Africa and of the three great monotheistic religions.

A “liquid continent” according to the famous definition of the historian Fernand Braudel: “A thousand things together. It is not one landscape, but numerous landscapes. It is not one sea, but a complex of seas. It is not one civilisation, but a number of civilisations, piled one above the other”.
Ports and sanctuaries. Trade and battles. Dreams and adventures. Continuous migrations, both of people and ideas. An incessant coming and going, from the Bronze Age to modernity. Mediterranean with mobile borders, with borders continuously redefined by the different areas of influence of the three great powers that marked its history in the centuries of the Middle Ages: Western Christianity, the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim states.

A great story that the Festival of the Middle Ages will tell from Wednesday 23 to Sunday 27 September thanks to this well-established formula: cultured and at the same time popular, free lessons open to all. A ten-century journey through history, art, literature, politics and philosophy.

The event is held annually in Gubbio in the last week of September and the protagonists of this initiative are more than one hundred historians, essayists, writers, scientists, philosophers, architects and journalists engaged in a challenge of “correct disclosure” of the intertwined events occured over ten centuries and more.

The Festival of Middle Ages evokes the profound memory of the “Sea of History” through the image chosen for the poster presenting the sixth edition: a timeless, fascinating and enigmatic face that belongs to the "Dancing Satyr", a Greek statue of the fourth century BC – from the school of Praxiteles. It re-emerged at the end of the 90s of the twentieth century in the waters of western Sicily, in the fishermen’s nets of Mazara del Vallo together with the fish. With its hair sculpted in bronze blown in the known but changing winds of the Mediterranean, the Satyr has a look that defies the centuries.

For information:
www.festivaldelmedioevo.it