CASSIOPEA

“The road ahead is neither easy nor safe. But it must be travelled, and it will be.”

Blue. There is nothing else around me. A deep, intense blue that, as I lower my gaze, swallows every trace of sunlight and grows darker. It isn’t black. There are blades of light, long, bright rays that, through some strange trick of refraction, seem to be shining up at me from below. I know they aren’t. I know the sun is behind me, somewhere up at the surface.

Out of habit, perhaps, I try to see the bottom. To understand how far down it goes and, above all, where all that water ends. I can’t see it, but I know the land likes to hide behind that transparent, salty wall. I stay there, watching, and I feel as though I’m waiting for something.

Above me, noise still exists. People, boats, everything else on the surface reaches me muffled. All I can hear clearly is my own breathing and a distant sound that I decide must be the echo of the sea.

I lift my head out of the water. For a few seconds, the light hurts my eyes. I take another breath, and when I put my head back underwater, I can’t help looking down again.

The deep sea has always stirred a strange curiosity in me, only a breath away from fear.

I know what’s down there: rocks, seabeds, fish. And yet I can’t see any of it, and all my certainties begin to waver, inevitably making room for the wildest fantasies. Things perfectly content to exist without my knowing they are there, shipwrecks, monstrous prehistoric creatures from the abyss. Things that have been lost, and secrets entrusted to the sea so that no one will ever ask us to account for them.

As I come back up, I notice it: there is an island in front of me.

Its name is Ventotene.

It’s small, little more than a fragment of land in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea. So small that after a few days you start recognising the streets, the paths leading down to the sea, the people sitting at café tables. And, above all, you learn one thing: here, whichever direction you choose, sooner or later the land ends.

I look at it, unmistakably a volcanic island, its boundaries so clearly visible. Because on an island, a boundary isn’t a line drawn on a map.

You can see it. It’s right there in front of you. The exact point where the land stops and the blue begins.

And Ventotene has a long history with boundaries.

The Roman emperor Augustus chose it as a place of exile for his daughter Julia. Over the centuries, the island changed names, inhabitants and rulers. But that idea remained: if you want to remove someone from the world, an island is the perfect place.

You don’t need walls when you have the sea.

But the walls came anyway.

Just beyond Ventotene lies the island of Santo Stefano.

Seen from the sea, it almost looks close. Another island, smaller still. At its centre stands an enormous prison, built at the end of the eighteenth century according to one precise principle: from a single point, everything had to be visible and under control. A place designed to imprison. To separate. To prevent people from going anywhere else.

During Fascism, Ventotene itself became a place of internal exile. Men and women whom the regime wanted to remove, neutralise, isolate were sent here — that really was the language they used.

Among the many confined there were two gentlemen whose names may sound familiar: Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi. And there is something about them that I still find incredible. They were confined to an island: in front of them was the sea, and behind them a regime that had turned the world into a cold succession of enemy nations, borders, armies and wars.

What were those two supposed to do in there? They could have thought about getting themselves out, for example.

Instead, they thought about how all of us might get out. And in 1941, together with the ideas and contributions of other anti-Fascists confined there with them, what we now know — and what perhaps some of us no longer remember — as the Ventotene Manifesto was born: For a Free and United Europe.

Something written with the future in mind while the present was falling apart all around them. An idea of unity in a world that seemed destined to be torn apart. Born in a place they were not allowed to leave.

That still moves me when I think about it. More than anything else.

The fact that they imagined Europe from an island, from exile, from a tiny patch of land surrounded by an enormous, deep blue sea. It takes a particular kind of freedom to imagine something you cannot yet see. Perhaps that is exactly what hope is.

At some point, interrupting my clumsy and entirely pointless attempt to grow gills, I see a small foreign object approaching me from the distance. A yellow circle, something that looks remarkably like a fried egg. My eyesight, which somehow becomes exceptionally good at recognising things when I’m in the sea, immediately works out what’s coming towards me, and without hesitation I exclaim happily: glugluglugluuuuglglu! (translation: “It’s a Cassiopea!”)

Cassiopea is a strange jellyfish. It doesn’t sting humans. It often lives upside down, resting on the seabed with its tentacles facing the light. Beneath it, tiny fish swim incredibly close, apparently sheltered within its space.

I stay there watching them.

I don’t know for how long. Perhaps this was what I had been waiting for, something to help me see the thread running through my thoughts a little more clearly?

I like that improbable little community. Different species occupying the same tiny patch of sea without wondering who it belongs to. One above, the others below. Each with its own space and, at the same time, within the other’s.

Nature, of course, doesn’t do politics. We human beings are the ones with this wonderful and slightly ridiculous habit of looking for metaphors everywhere. But down there, in front of that jellyfish named after a constellation and its tiny travelling companions, I can’t help thinking about what is on the island, about what exists on dry land, about the endless possibilities we have as human beings.

Cassiopea drifts away, its little fish following behind, completely indifferent to my thoughts about Europe, borders and the rest of the world. I watch it go until the yellow disappears into the blue.

I lift my head out of the water again and look up.

The sea ends at the horizon.

Or perhaps, from where I am, I simply can’t see how it continues.

Ilaria Serpi