Palermo from the Sea between Nature and Memory. Floating labs of images and words

Sail and Paint. Come with us and paint the historical and naturalistic beauties of Palermo from the sea. The floating laboratories allow participants to illustrate Sicilian cities from the sea, observing their coasts and creating travel diaries mainly executed with watercolor technique, texts and cameras.

The project, conceived and curated by Valeria Di Chiara and Maria Catena Sardella is promoted by ALAB Association of Free Artisans and Artists in Palermo historical center. It takes place every year between September and October within the Fabriano Drawing Festival together to other projects selected throughout the Italian territory. Fabriano Company presents us with excellent quality paper to be distributed to participants, among them artists and just sea lovers.

The cities of Palermo Trapani and Cefalù have been illustrated since 2018. The project comes from an artistic vision:  describing the Gulf of Palermo from the sea, as the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks saw it, as it appears today in the eyes of people arriving in the city from the North. If you want to understand Palermo you have to arrive from the sea, only this way you can get its deepest nature and its extraordinary geographical conformation.

The project was immediately loved and supported by an increasingly number of people, so that it went from a few shipowner friends to many volunteers who made their boats available within the city's nautical clubs; participants have multiplied over the years enthusiastically coming from the rest of Italy and Europe.The quality of the project stands on its simplicity, love for nature and creativity stressing on urgent matters such as creating a healthy and creative environment in homage to slowness and sustainability.

In a morning Autumn 2017 Maria Catena and I were wandering along the Palermo waterfront thinking about a new vision of our loved city to be represented graphically. Both sea lovers, one is a sailor and the other a painter, we walked to the extreme parts of the docks to catch new atmospheres. Some sailing boats were calmly pushed by a fresh sweet wind and we thought of something dealing with these: the bay and the sailing boat: memories came, remembering of several arrivals from the North by sailing boat or ferryboat from Ustica or Naples; the vision of Palermo gulf from a boat is always stunning!  But we needed something more! The opportunity came with a mail from Fabriano Paper, a drawing Festival, a competition to be done in the following September/ October. We caught the occasion and participated with enthusiasm and joy and won it! BCsicilia an association for the protection of cultural and environmental heritage supported our idea and a wide success came!

Every year since 2018 we have presented a project with a new sea town in Sicily like Trapani, Cefalu’ and given a glance from the sea to these marvellous sea villages, which was the view of the ancient seaway of the past. Sicily was one of the magic destinations of the ancient navigators coming from Europe who described and drew its coasts. Our objective was to borrow their eyes and to retrace the southern world route offering our friends the emotion of observing and drawing and share the same vision. The first two years the event took place in Cala, the ancient port of Palermo. From here it was a short step, a friend owned a catamaran in Trapani and proposed us to widen our horizons, thus the dream of circumnavigating Sicily was born.

Palermo presents itself as sumptuous and sublime as an opera on the stage of its Teatro Massimo, and we listen to it as an audience on floating stands and illustrate it. Trapani, wide and flat with its very long strips of land, gives us a mild African landscape and cradles us in front of the delightful seafront and its hills. Cefalù is our Arab-Norman precious stone of the fifth and sixth editions.

The cooperations were several, Tasca wines, Viviva pocket watercolors, Da Vinci brushes, the magical places of the exhibitions of the works such as the Libreria del Mare, Villa Tasca  gardens, the spaces Le Cattive in Butera Palace, the annual boat show Seasicily in Villa Igea, always in Palermo, final site for the artwork expositions every year.

The press has also given us wide visibility with interviews and lively and realistic descriptions of the activity over the years.

This is our small action to enhance the Sicilian seaside towns. The largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, also due to the presence of the small isles that surround it, splendid Sicily boasts seven UNESCO World Heritage sites located throughout its territory. Called Triquetra or Trinacria for its triangular shape, its coasts extend for over 1000 km in length.

The countless dominations that have come and gone over the centuries have given archaeological sites, palaces, churches and even craftsmanship and traditions, a world yet to be discovered which, as travelers eager to admire the beauties of this land, we creators of PdM aim to appreciate, contemplate and draw “from the Sea”.

This project wants to encourages administration, citizens and tourists to invest in the natural urban landscape of their towns; The project, simple in its structure is innovative in a social artistic and cultural geographic field because it is inspired by the past and it is connected to the present and future. It has strong association with the nautical and meteorological world. In few words it attracts sailors such as artists and simple sea lovers joining different competences in a single action. Going deeper in this way the result is joy, lightness and enthusiasm and desire of imagining a clean and beautiful world. Furthermore, there is a considerable presence of genre diversity given to the innovative feature of the project.

Our project has a strong European Dimension having the following characteristics:

Sustainability is assured by the means of transport, the use of sailboats, symbol of purity and connection with air, water and human intelligence, observation in silence of the natural phenomena all around to be put in a piece of paper.

Respect for environment is assured by the combination of elements which don't damage habitat at all; sailing boats, materials for drawing and so on: further more people who join the project are highly spiritually aware of climate change and planet pollution.

we as leaders of the project have been followed and also exposed our Palermo dal Mare's works for years in groups and associations in Italy and in Europe. We have participated to Urban sketchers  Porto and Amsterdam Symposiums in 2019 and 2020 . Artists from Ucraina, Germany and Northern Italy came to our labs in the last years.

The international dialogue is always present in our project since we have attracted people of all ages from Europe since the beginning of the project.

Disability integration

We cooperate with Lega Navale Italiana in Palermo, its great president Beppe Tisci is pride of the initiative "A sail without excluded" regatta, now in its 9th edition, and of the dream come true of "Our Dream", a sailboat confiscated from organized crime that used it for drug trafficking and given to the Italian Naval League which, with the support of the Order of Engineers and the University of Palermo, is working to make the boat accessible to all. We hope to host cultural diversity in this boat for Palermo dal Mare soon. We wish to transfer the project in other contexts it has a great potential since can be done in any places on the sea, river or lake.