Crossroads of cultures, cradle of civilization

These millenary dynamics have left evident traces. The diet is probably one of the most modern, solid and permanent.”

A historically dense and complex place, the Mediterranean is a permanent voyage. A voyage of ideas, of knowledge, of people who during millennia have catalysed a good part of the cultural progress that has shaped western civilization as we understand it today from our contemporary point of view. An almost geographically closed sea, it has been a crucible of cultures, of products and techniques. Open to receive and integrate to export and disseminate.

This reality, most likely unique, is a result of a continuous miscegenation6 of people and products, of techniques and elaborations. We must not search for the original Mediterranean, with which many are obsessed with and get lost, there is but a resulting Mediterranean, dynamic, a product of multicultural energies both external and proper, predisposed to learn and to teach, to receive and to offer, recreated daily, non-stop. Nor should we look for a geographical Mediterranean millimetrically defined, since the exchange is constant and millennial, which characterizes this basin and produces some limits more or less diffuse, more or less saturated. These millennial dynamics have left obvious marks. The diet is probably one of the most present, solid and permanent. As Braudel7 would say “Travelling in the Mediterranean means finding the Roman world in Lebanon, prehistory in Sardinia, the Greek cities in Sicily, the Arab presence in Spain. One might add: finding an authentic desert passage, a palm grove, in Elche.

Centre and simultaneously almost the whole known world, for our civilization, for a long time the Mediterranean can acknowledge the roots of our common cultural background as well as preserving and maintaining the coexistence of plurality and particularities. The Mediterranean is both a mosaic of a thousand colours as well as polyphony of many voices. Its harmony has not been easy historically, to find a common denominator is more achievable.

The Mediterranean relates to perfection landscape, agriculture and culture.

6 Lucien Fevbre, Annales, XII, 29, describes an imaginary voyage that Herodoto (480-420? A.C) could repeat throughout the Mediterranean of today and that would illustrate this extraordinary miscegenation: “How amazing! Those fruits of gold in those dark green bushes, orange trees, lemon trees, mandarin trees…but he did not remember having seeing them when he was alive. They are from the Far East and were brought by the Arabs. And those strange plants with unusual silhouettes, that prick, those flowered BOHORDO and strange names, cacti, aloe, Barbary figs,-but he never saw them while alive-. They are American. And those trees of pale foliage that possess a Greek name: eucalyptus: he had never seen them, not even anything similar. They are Australian. And the cypress neither, they are Persian. AS for the lesser of the meals, how many surprises yet, whether talking about tomatoes; Peruvian; of eggplant, Indian; of peppers, GUAYANES; corn, Mexican; rice, a favour of the Arabs; not to mention beans, potatoes, peach trees, products of a Chinese mountain turned Iranian…”
7Op. Cit.