By Giada Zampano
MATERA, Italy (AA) - There is no sea in sight from Matera’s ancient cave dwellings. From the Sassi, the southern Italian city looks out over a landscape of pale rock, scrub and ravines, far from the Mediterranean coast.
Yet the sea is everywhere in Matera this year, evoked through art, music, ancient languages and centuries of migration as the city serves as Mediterranean Capital of Culture and Dialogue 2026.
Behind the exhibitions, concerts and artistic residencies lies an ambitious proposition: that culture can open channels of communication across a Mediterranean increasingly associated with war, migration and political division.
- A ‘vast liquid continent’
“The Mediterranean is, as I like to call it, a vast liquid continent that carries with it millennia of history and culture,” said Rita Orlando, general director of the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation.
For Orlando, the initiative is an exercise in cultural diplomacy, grounded in the belief that encounters among artists, musicians and communities can foster understanding where conventional diplomacy struggles.
“Cultural diplomacy that brings people together can truly be the system, the tool, to facilitate understanding between peoples and thus contribute to a world of peace,” she said.
The idea runs through the year’s cultural program.
In Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Love Difference,” installed in Matera’s rock-hewn Complesso Rupestre Madonna delle Virtu e San Nicola dei Greci, a mirrored table takes the shape of the Mediterranean.
Chairs representing the cultures surrounding the sea are arranged around it, transforming a familiar geopolitical map into a shared space for encounter.
- A language of encounter
The idea of finding a common space while preserving differences also emerges through language.
Musician and composer Stefano Saletti’s residency revisits Sabir, the lingua franca once spoken in Mediterranean ports, drawing on elements of Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic and regional dialects.
“It was the language of possible encounter within the Mediterranean,” Saletti said, describing a project that combines music with a dramaturgical text about Matera and its history.
The work has brought together local artists, actors and other residents, assembling what Saletti called “the various ingredients of the Mediterranean.”
Another project traces how migration carried those ingredients into southern Italy centuries ago.
Driant Zeneli, an Albanian visual artist and film director working in Matera, has been researching traditional songs preserved by the Arbereshe communities of Basilicata, whose ancestors arrived from across the Adriatic centuries ago.
One polyphonic song from San Costantino Albanese centers on women, wheat and the changing seasons.
It is being reinterpreted through a video installation that explores how migration carries memory and culture across generations, connecting communities on opposite shores long after the original journey.
- Imagining a shared Mediterranean
The interplay of place, memory and history also shapes “The Sea Is Closer Than You See,” a citywide exhibition that opened on Oct. 3 and runs through Dec. 8 across four venues in Matera.
Its premise suits a Mediterranean capital far from the coast: proximity to the sea is not a prerequisite for belonging to its cultural world.
Rather than presenting the region as a single, uniform culture, the exhibition explores connections forged through movement, memory and shared practices.
At MUSMA, Matera’s Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Studio Azzurro’s “Il Colore dei gesti. Sinfonia Mediterraneo” draws on the gestures of fishermen, potters, luthiers, weavers and other artisans to evoke a vocabulary of work and knowledge that crosses cultural boundaries.
Another work, TEMET, emerged from research in Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer.
Combining photography and technology with the knowledge of Tuareg communities, it explores prehistoric rock art and histories of migration, trade and cultural exchange. The Mediterranean imagined in Matera thus extends beyond the shoreline toward the Sahara.
The same vision informs Mimmo Jodice’s “Mediterraneo,” an exhibition bringing together photographs from Italy, Greece, Türkiye, Tunisia and Jordan.
Rather than presenting the sea as a geopolitical boundary between nations, Jodice depicts it as a shared cultural space.
Images from different shores form what the exhibition describes as a “cartography of memory,” in which distinct places become part of a common Mediterranean civilization.
- Music across the sea
Music offers another meeting point.
At the “Suoni Mediterranei” concert on Oct. 2, musicians from Italy and Morocco brought Italian strings together with Arab-Andalusian musical traditions. The performance formed part of a collaboration between Matera and Tetouan, Morocco, its partner Mediterranean capital this year.
Yet the Mediterranean portrayed in Matera is not an idealized sea stripped of contemporary crises.
Lebanese artist and illustrator Karen Keyrouz, who is in Matera for an artistic residency, said the Mediterranean repeatedly surfaces in her work through images of water and the marine environment, often in connection with cities facing catastrophe.
“The Mediterranean is always in my work,” Keyrouz said.
- Culture amid conflict
Orlando said cultural diplomacy does not mean being naive about the conflicts surrounding the Mediterranean, a region often viewed primarily through the lenses of war, desperation, illicit trafficking and migration.
“Rather than viewing differences as barriers, it means stripping away preconceptions, listening, being willing to understand those differences,” she said.
Centuries ago, Mediterranean communities found a practical way to navigate linguistic differences in Sabir, borrowing words from different languages to communicate across boundaries.
Matera’s experiment in 2026 explores whether culture can offer a language of encounter in a region where conflict and division so often dominate the conversation.
