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Tahiti

The Islands of Tahiti, South Pacific
by Cartography

TAHITI

The Air Tahiti Nui flight from Los Angeles arrived in Tahiti at night. On the bedside table next to the iPhone we found our first flower necklace and it was the scent of fresh tiare flowers, a good smell that suited both men and women, that we took to bed with us. The night sky in Tahiti was overcrowded with fairy tales and sea creatures, the long sky fish, te ikaroa o te rangi, which is what they called the Milky Way at times. The sky was a mirror of the sea with its many islands. A stingray slipped along the sandy seabed, its body velvety to the touch like the undulating cap of some enormous wild mushroom, a river eel wiggled through the roots of a forest of Tahitian chestnuts and ended up in the lagoon, a slow shark snaked between by my naked calves. “One thing is fundamental for me: I don’t want any of my journalists to have to write something they’re not interested in. Great writing comes from an obsession, not a mechanical obligation.

We’re a magazine of surprises, not constraints,” responded David Remnick, Pulitzer prize winner, director of The New Yorker for almost twenty years, in an interview for an Italian magazine that I’d brought with me on my flight. I was already in contact with various writers who were experts on the Pacific, some of whom had actually gone to live there, and after a few days in Tahiti I knew that Oceania could become an obsession for me too. Islands – that you expect –, valleys, steep peaks, austere caves, banks, distant skeins, flowers, rims, winds across the land, sweet men, strange cockerels, waves, punctual tides, sacred choruses, the hearts of a galaxy.

A starry compass can point you in the right direction. In Tahiti, at 17°S, the stars come up and go down at an angle of 17°, proceeding northwards. Every island in the South Seas has its zenith star: ‘A’a, the dog star, the brightest, is Tahiti’s. To get there, all you have to do is follow it. For the Polynesians, the sky is like an atlas of light that is perpetually open before their eyes. A map of stars. To read the ocean, you have to know as many stars as possible.

And you start to count the distance between two islands at night. That’s as if to say: Venice is one night and almost a day from Patras. And so, the scattering of their islands in the Pacific Ocean, the people’s inability to locate themselves in a land larger than an island, to see themselves as part of an archipelago, a nation, a continent, is cancelled out while contemplating their global map, in a sky of islands. It is no longer even an effort of the imagination, it is truly a vision.

In July, night falls at 6pm in Tahiti and the roulottes in Place Vaiete open their picnic tables and heat up woks and grills. Whoever starts first, fills up with customers first. That evening we were with Dimitri, a young freelance photographer born in Tahiti, waiting for our chow mein specials, when Dimitri suddenly spurted it out, with the excitement of a boy who has to convince his parents to allow him to leave on a madcap journey that would take him far from home for a long time.

And he did so with a premeditation that I saw had held his mind captive for several minutes, when he hadn’t been following our conversation, but was concentrating on how he would put what he was about to say. “Do you know what you have? You can get into the car and just drive and drive, cross Switzerland, then Germany, arrive as far as Denmark, change jumper, people, see what they put on your plate change. Here, to do something like that, I have to buy myself a boat and take sailing lessons. And then, for a long time I’ll be in the same place and they’ll give me raw fish with coconut milk and noodles to eat.”

“When you go, you don’t come back, when you’re born you can’t go away anymore. Sea prison and marine highway. Besides, is it not precisely the sea that makes an island a body unto itself?” [1]. He’d taken me back to the exact lines of the Sardinian Marcello Fois, which I’d underlined in pencil. He’d cried out to me that I’d never really understand what it means to be born on an island in a sea of many islands.

In Tahiti, the south wind is called that because it blows towards the south, and the north wind blows north. In Europe we say exactly the opposite, that is, where the wind comes from. The south wind comes from the south. It’s something which explains one of the many misunderstandings and one huge error in the maps made following the first Western explorers. The more I read, the more I learnt that the Polynesian people look where things go, in the intention of seizing a possible direction, which is a whole way of living, a way of matching one movement with another, of leaving.
[1] Extract from In Sardegna non c’è il mare by Marcello Fois. Edizioni Laterza, 2013.

Pantelleria

Pantelleria with Giorgio Armani
Text by Gianluigi Ricuperati
Photographs by Luca De Santis

PANTELLERIA

The natural range of colours and tones of the vegetation make this garden a miniature of everything that a Volcano can do to reach up to the sky without exploding. Melancholy and tender, the now extinct volcanoes have replaced pinnacles of smoke with the stalks of sculpted flowers, the grace of palm trees, the strangled green strength of succulents, certain pale little roses that don’t seem to fear the sun’s force. Everything resounds sweetly and neatly, but in reality it’s a suffocated and beautiful cry, which leads every atom of the earth towards the valley of stars.

Cala Gadir: At the beginning of July 2017, I was so lucky as to spend a few days at the splendid Cala Gadir, Giorgio Armani’s property on Pantelleria. Thinking back over those motionless hours, distracted by the wind and the extreme beauty of the place and the house, outside and in, I felt that my words were not enough. So, I’ve woven my words with those of one of my literary heroes, American writer Harold Brodkey, master of prose and the poetic and verbal representation of what it means “to be alive”, to be in the world. The two voices are put together to form a collage of tributes and sensations and therefore complete the text. Because while I was at Cala Gadir I was reading The Runaway Soul, his lifelong opus: I hadn’t picked it up for 20 years, since I was 19 and I had read it out loud in my room to improve my English, as my mother listened in, perhaps feeling a touch of pride, from behind the door. It’s 20 years now since my mother died. I’m always on the move, and every place I go, I take the genetic stamp of her gaze with me. She’s the one who made my way of looking at things. Children carry the shadow of their mothers’ design, to then perhaps pass it on to their children in turn. My parts are in Roman type, Brodkey’s in italics.

Cala Gadir: a place where the answer to any question is “paradise”.

And the freshness of the air, the near-silence, [...]
the great inner hounds are baying with moodedness. All sorts of inner selfhoods are clutching at stillness.

Cala Gadir: everyone stand, because here the Mediterranean is a sudden pause, a dancer who has just expressed herself with a complicated series of steps, as if to say: I’ve spent my life challenging the wind: I’ve spent a lifetime following the wind of details.

Then, all at once, the stuff is just light and shadow. [...] I haven’t a life-and-death say with myself, my selves, time-and-mind, time-and-flesh, whatever it is that I am.

Cala Gadir: the sun goes down, after reaching its nadir: but you can’t see it, not from here: it’s a collections of dawns, not sunsets. Dawn requires effort and discipline, or an extreme passion for the night. Like the photographer desperately seeking the light that he once saw but hasn’t come across again, this house asks a lot,
and gives back twice as much.

Near the river some of the land was really flat, and the plowed and planted fields were darkish in color, a real brown, and the stuff coming up was really green, or strongly yellowish-green, planted so geometrically that the planting looked like notation of some kind, an idea spelled out stalk by stalk, row after row; that tickled the eye and the mind.

Thinking is a shadow fruit, shadows and weirdness in an electric orchard, blossoming with mirage after mirage, crumbingly real, then shadow paintings, mock photographs in black-and-white, then a mere sickly sense, an exposed underpainting, the overlay lost.

Cala Gadir: a mother, a sister, a friend of black stone and cool homes. Its female substance allows itself to be accompanied by furniture that seems to move in slow motion, every effort becoming a slow maternal caress: the curtains that separate the patio from the outdoors, the elegant and welcoming sofas, the colonial atmosphere given by certain woods and matt whites: it embraces all, like a boy’s night-time conversation with the women in his family, a tale of fears hopes fantasies symmetries aspirations jokes games. And silences. Because Cala Gadir is a theatre of gifted silence, like the understanding of a love that lets you in.

Light and clouds and the shadows on the water, the birds overhead, their cries and skimming reflections, the boy, the reeds, the shore, the truth, the error—all of it exists here in the many-winged flutter and mutter in the moment.

Cala Gadir is above all Pantelleria, because Cala Gadir wouldn’t exist without Pantelleria: a name whose “panta” includes the whole classification of every living thing. It seems that at Pantelleria, as happens with islands fit for a king, Nature has called together all, or nearly all, of its disguises: the dry heat, the green shade, the black desert, the luxuriant life of flowers, the productive life of the vines that go right up to the shoreline and give man the sombre cheer of sweet passito wine. Pantelleria is a natural oven in the heart of Winter. Pantelleria is a simple harbour in the heart of Europe. Pantelleria is a landing project for military planes and other weird ideas. Pantelleria is a chorus of capers and trees. Pantelleria is the sentence: Cala Gadir is a word. Pantelleria is fixed: Cala Gadir flies.

It moves motionlessly into unexistencehood in actual moments where I am still, like a phonograph needle, noticing the deviations that become the course of argument of the thoughtlight in my mind. It becomes memory—usefulness—a flag, a cloudy thought.

That’s it. The only thing I can’t swallow, here, in the perfection of the Mediterranean, is the idea of a cloudy thought. It doesn’t rain in Pantelleria’s imagination. It doesn’t rain in Cala Gadir’s imagination. There are shadows, of course there are: but they’re hard, powerful, sharp, no longer raw diamonds of summer light. Nothing is grey. This Paradise is a wave of warm colours hosted by the most elegant king of black and white. Cala Gadir is a chess game between the brightness of the cosmos and its beautiful brutality.

Sardegna

Text by Davide Giannella
Sardinia with Pretziada
Photographs by Luca De Santis

Sardinia
Blues

For many years, Sardinia has been seen in the same, set manner, crystallized between two extremes: in the late-colonialist view of the tourists who crowd the coast during summer, and the closed isolationalist and independentist sights of many of its inhabitants. Beyond these stereotyped visions, the island is slowly changing how it is lived, and how it is recounted outside and inside its lands, thanks to more and more mixing and relations between locals and expats, and between centuries-old traditions and contemporary outlooks.

The first time I set foot on the Island was in 1987, thanks to my father. Since that time, I’ve been back to Sardinia every year, that is, for thirty years now, to experience it and try to really get to know it all year round. It’s a land, Gallura in particular, that I’m very fond of in human terms, and that I consider an integral part of my personal formation. In the same way, some of the people to whom I am most attached were born there, or decided to go to live there, each for their own reasons, creating a vast community of expats (from Rome, Bologna, but above all Milan, Turin and Argentina) and an unexpected social reality in this part of the world.
I worked on sailing boats for many years, and I was able to circumnavigate the island three times.

Nevertheless, from the sea, the perspective on things is almost always filtered by movement, by a sense of inevitable temporariness. You can set anchor or dock in a harbour of course, but for various reasons the times that you actually penetrate beyond the coast are rare.
This is why I recently decided to make a journey across the interior, from North to South by car, to take time to contemplate the places and people, to look into aspects that I had only absorbed indirectly or partially, and that still left room for doubt and curiosity.

My point of departure is the Val di Mela, a small hilly area to the north of Gallura where Caterina (who is bringing up little Nina here) decided to move 15 years ago now and where I periodically come back to find what I would call a primordial comfort. The stazzu (shepherd’s hut typical of this area) where I am staying is surrounded by a lunar landscape of enormous granite rocks and myrtle bushes, scrubland crossed by a single road that at times turns into a dirt track.
Located in the centre of a high hill – where it is not rare to come across wild boar in search of food at night or horses grazing in the day – it gives whoever lives or stays there a clear view of the whole Maddalena archipelago, of the shifting winds and the coming and going of boats that characterize these places. We’re not far from the Costa Smeralda – about 30 kilometres away – but there’s not the slightest trace of that world of explicit luxury and prohibitive prices.
In this sense, the Costa Smeralda is a dazzling example of how the continentali (Italian mainlanders) saw Sardinia for many years: a splendid and wild place where the customary concrete and artificial 1960s holiday resorts could be recreated, in a glamorous key.

It’s a point of view, an attitude that today many could define as colonial (in the same way as the NATO bases, whose numbers in the area are fortunately falling) and that without doubt created discontent among the locals, in time fostering not very accurate stereotypes of Sardinia and its people.
From the north-east I head towards the home of other friends in Santadi, a small village in Sulcis, in the far south of the island. In just under six hours’ travel – knowing more or less but not particularly worrying which way I was going – I passed through continually changing landscapes: in my somewhat random progress in the car, I came across a series of bright green chestnut woods or grey cork oaks, desolate and dry lands (making it clear why for many years Sardinia was used by the Spaghetti Western industry), granite mountains, salt lakes and fields for growing artichokes or grain, depending on the altitude and prospect. What was inevitably striking were the differences, within just a few kilometres, that this land offers. A multitude of landscapes – linguistic and cultural too – in an area of no more than 25,000 square kilometres.

I get to my destination and meet Kyre and Ivano. She’s American and he’s from Milan, brought up by Sardinian parents. Their story is in many ways a paradigm for describing the island and its present-day potential. After several years living in NY and as many in Milan with good jobs in the creative industry, they decided to move here with their two children, Leroy and Antioca.
They bought a piece of land with a small group of abandoned buildings, consisting of a house and a cow pen and a couple of sheepfolds. They’ve been working on rebuilding the house for a year now, which should be followed by the other buildings. It’s constant, hard labour – done with their own hands and sweat – but it’s also probably a first way to fit in with the locals, with whom they can share their common experiences of shifting rocks and digging soil. Beyond the romantic and bucolic impression that their choice may convey – the escape from the city in search of a more healthy and real environment to bring their children up in – it’s interesting to find out the approach they’ve taken towards this enterprise.

Also thanks to them, I heard Sardinia being talked about in a contemporary manner, outside the usual folkloristic rhetoric, slave to a mainlanders’ culture that would like to keep those places crystallized for their exclusive summer use, and beyond any separatist sentiments which now have little to do with reality. The most significant aspect is their capability to deal with and promote Sardinian culture for the layman, through the Pretziada project, using the tone and tools that they have refined thanks to their previous work experiences and their particular ability to dialogue on an equal footing with the local social fabric.

Ivano told me of the difficulties they had had in becoming part of the community, she being “the American” and he “the Alien” who spoke the Campidano dialect. Nevertheless, it’s thanks to the little clashes that they’ve been able to create a space that avoids both the late-colonial expectations of those arriving from the continente and the protectionist or independentist reactions of (by now few) islanders. They’ve likewise been able to strengthen (on the island and elsewhere) the vision of a region that not only is no longer a mere offshoot from the rest of the world, but, quite the opposite, is more and more capable of producing its own imaginery that straddles both the traditional and the innovative.

Of course, it isn’t an immediate process. Some deep-seated conceptions about Sardinia, fostered out of convenience and short-sightedness on the island too, still need to be chipped away at and rooted out. I’m quite sure though, that also thanks to people like Caterina, Kyre, Ivano and the many others who have come to live here, the people will mix and connect more, and that their experiences and visions will make this island shine all the more brightly.

peruvian-amazon

Peruvian Amazon by Cartography
Text by Paola Corini
Photographs by Luca De Santis

PERUVIAN
AMAZON

Walking Fish.
It flowed down from the Peruvian highlands, for one thousand miles, around one thousand six hundred kilometres, as far as the Amazonian plains. In correspondence to Nauta City was the point where it began to be called, quite simply, the River Amazon. There it met the Rio Marañon, another river coming from the mountains and ice, and, together, they continued to flow for another four thousand kilometres, at a rate of two hundred thousand cubic metres of fresh water emptied out into the Atlantic a second. The Rio Ucayali was a natural river, without any barriers, channels, dams or artificialities, without any human impact. A good-fortune fluid, I wanted to say, since I was interested in curanderos and medicine.

A week earlier my low-cost flight had left me at dawn at Iquitos, scarcely three hours from Lima. I hadn’t seen anything in Iquitos, like the Belen market, which he wanted to have me believe was a fetid and stinking place, an abandoned hulk of fish and rotten trunks, run-down huts, now that it was dry season in the city. He wanted to convince me that, once in the reserve, I wouldn’t miss Iquitos, just like you don’t miss the chaos of Rome in the yellow pastures of Campo Imperatore [1]. Yet I was sure that I would have found all the inebriating plants, all the flora of Upper Amazonia that I needed for my research in Belen. And in the city in the evening I would have drunk a cool beer in some touristy veranda on the river with some local used to asking strangers questions and suggesting going to ask a shaman to prepare us some ayahuasca the morning after.

Instead he had driven for one hundred kilometres, in the direction of Nauta, and hadn’t let me see the river yet. In Nauta, to silence all of my questions about Belen, he’d taken my hand and asked me to follow him to the morning market. We sneaked through the calm crowd in single file, like children between the tall stalks of maize in August. With a handful of dollars, the river people ate the best Amazonian breakfast before school or work, a patarashca cooked on a live coal flame and a fermented drink of jungle cassava.
The air smelt sweetly of wild coriander, onion, Peruvian lemon and ají charapita. There was nothing dangerous in that place, except that aphrodisiacal scent of fresh herbs. A gift from the plants’ spirits. It seemed to me that all the local young women were trying to seduce me. I felt the rhythm of the blades of oversized knives tapping my temples as they deftly sliced into the skin of freshwater fish and broke their little bones. The women responded to my guide’s greetings and flattery in that Spanish that smoothed their coarse beauty. They didn’t lift their idle eyes from the counter. They knew they were teasing, I would have liked them to look at me. The village music was an exotic carillon to my ears, Italian panettoni with the names of unknown saints were piled up out of season in the large drug stores, at the embarcadero trailers were hurriedly unloading heavy sacks of Andean potatoes and cereals, before diving back into the flow. It was then that I noticed the Coca-Cola-coloured river, grandiose, swift, shining, peaceful. It was eleven o’clock in the morning in north-west Peru and it was starting to get really hot.

I was by myself in the village’s large straw maloca, emptied even of children – where was everyone? – when a gentle breeze, such that seemed impossible in the Amazon, woke me and I realized that I had been asleep. That book was robbing me of my dreams. We had recommenced our slow sailing upstream, following the bank of a river that was as tall and crumbly as a pale Sachertorte. Marañon and Ucayali could not be more different, just as brothers all too often are. They explained to me that technically the Ucayali was the River Amazon, due to its density, temperature and the way its waters flowed. I loved it right from the start, with its sweetness and supreme character. Instead, the Marañon seemed a stagnant soul, with an excess of mystery, suited to beings of a gloomier nature.

We paid for our friendship with a bottle of Coke, fresh from the fridge. He leaned out of his sleek canoe and grabbed it with his good hand: the other had a large cut in the thumb that had just healed, a piranha bite. We met him at the point where the water really could be called black, deep inside the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve. He’s Alex’s grandfather, my guide told me, not so much because he wanted me to know, but instinctively, like when you recognize a friend from far off. We had left Alex this morning at the village school, at break time.

He was the leader of his little group of friends. They’ll have been eight years old or so. Somehow Alex had let us understand that to ask for a photo of one of the others we had to have the OK from him. Alex, a name that has been used for centuries, meaning “defender of his men”. In the end what he wanted was to pose for us too, on the school’s wooden balcony. We left Alex’s grandfather there, calm in his wooden motor boat, coming back from his fish, as he must have done every day of his life for the past eighty years.

We spent seven days and seven nights on the river. If we’d stayed a couple of years, we’d have seen Alex grow up, his grandfather letting him taste his first ayahuasca as soon as he turned ten, and the village shaman seeing that the boy had a strong temperament, that he was capable of administering the medicine’s dreams. Then Alex would have visited the city, left the village soon after, and turned his back on his chance to become the next shaman.
.... (continue on Cartography Magazine N.2)

fondazione Prada

This Place is All
About Good Vibes

Fondazione Prada and Latest-generation Milan

Text by Federico Pompignoli
Photographs by Delfino Sisto Legnani

“[…] like barbarians outside the walls, the shapeless, leftover, untidy peripheries, abandoned industrial areas, and unplanned zones insist on taking part in the cultural banquet. It is politics’ task to give it a meaning, while it is the task of next millennium architecture to design its appearance”. This is how, in one of his articles in the Il Sole 24 ORE cultural magazine, professor Fulvio Irace described the big transformations underway in contemporary city suburbs.

In Milan, like in many other cities in the world, we are still seeing the phenomenon of the regeneration of decaying industrial areas. In the south of the city, at the Porta Romana railway station, a couple of kilometres as the crow flies from the cathedral, the presence of the now abandoned railway track has made such a deep split in the urban fabric that, as soon as you cross the bridge, you get the feeling you’re going into a different town, a timeless, silent place where long concrete walls flank semi-deserted streets, bright signs are replaced by lush creeping ivy, and large iron gates still close off the tracks. In this place, the chaotic atmosphere of the centre seems to have been substituted by a grim 1960s Pasolini film set.

But what would happen if all of a sudden you discovered that, outside the walls, something totally unexpected was awaiting you, something shaking up the values that regulate the lives within them?

Are we still prepared to accept different realities or is the contemporary city only held up by certainties consolidated by time and custom?

In fact, by rights this area on the outskirts of the town centre should deserve a place on a tourist map of Milan. Singled out as the place where you can admire the last remaining part of real Milan, it’s a picture postcard of part of the city where the principles that generated it have remained unaltered: the big production plants built here thanks to the railway station.

An ambiguous situation very similar to what happened in Berlin, where the Wall meant that the depressed GDR economy preserved the eastern part of city in the same condition as at the end of the war. A negative precondition whose removal was explosive: while one side of the city was handed back in its most authentic form, on the other side of the wall, in the West, they were making haste to rebuild quickly and in grandiose style.

Here in Milan, hordes of “cult” tourists should pass through here, to get a different point of view of a hidden and unusual city, while reflecting on what the future holds in store for this area (like in the former trade fair district or the Tortona neighbourhood). Will it be somehow possible to trade in a dizzying increase in prices per square metre or the appearance of multiscreen cinemas and multipurpose buildings with a deeper reflection that can give rise to the application of equally as loaded, but new concepts such as authenticity, nostalgia, ambiguity and “anti-ism”? On the notion of authenticity and nostalgia, in The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym stated, “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress”.

Attention to the concept of nostalgia can have devastating consequences on a city:

growing resistance to accepting changes and modernization in historical contexts as inevitable evolution; philological restoration focused on literally rebuilding the past; primitive regulations that force new projects to look like the old, generating a blurred mix of past and present “authenticity”.

The authenticity of this district lies in the acceptance that the industrial past of these desolated enclosures and depots has handed down to us an untouched, traffic-free, human-scale area, whose abandoned, large and “generic” buildings can be transformed to spawn new plans.

Within one of these areas, the industrial space has been transformed into a museum of contemporary art, Fondazione Prada: a manufacturing site elevated to the rank of public space for leisure and culture. Pretty daring as a plan, but on the other hand what could we expect from the collision of two “entities” such as Prada and OMA? What result could come from the meeting/clash between the company that started out selling handbags made from army parachute nylon and the firm whose first slide in its promotional meetings always reads

“challenge vs comfort”?

Both careers have been strongly inclined in the “anti-ist” direction, both in cultural terms and, as a consequence, aesthetically speaking too.

I remember one of the first meetings I had with signora Prada. I showed her, with a certain pride, the range of options we had put together to sort out every possible doubt on choices and combinations of materials. At a certain point I met her gaze, which was bordering somewhere between annoyance and boredom.

She bluntly said:

“I’m not an architect, but I am very interested in and attentive to processes. Let’s define the process as clearly as possible. It must be direct but never obvious, and then, as for what it’ll look like, we’ll see”.

In this case, the “anti-ism” consists of a meticulous, profound way of seeing the work and the project. A subjective civil war to mentally free ourselves from stereotypes and dogmas, so we would only do what the project required. While we would not forgo moral sense, at the same time we would discard the sentiments and passions linked to our own aspirations, references and opinions; because opinion is our downfall. And this is why all the rooms of an old, early twentieth-century distillery were renovated and transformed into exhibition galleries. Three new, almost entirely glass buildings completed the venue, with a cinema that can transform into an open-air stage and a 60-metre-high white concrete tower with exhibition galleries and a restaurant.

You can notice and sense all this while walking through the open areas of the museum, which are free for the public to visit. The open space belongs to the city and has been designed as a true extension of it. The project can be appreciated from here. The “inside” of the buildings belongs to another world, another scale, another social category – the architects, the experts and the critics. Outside one may think that this time Rem Koolhaas’ firm (OMA), usually with expectations heaped on it to unveil the next spectacular building, has decided to channel the interest towards a more sustainable interpretation of the context and a more delicate intervention. And the result is great: less obsessed with the need to change the city skyline, there is more attention to preservation and reusing what is already there. The challenge launched to the architects featured a series of different issues, less centred on form and more on the programme, the materials, the history, the systems and technologies. It is simple to infer that we’re dealing with a radical shift from egocentrism and the iconic, to the invisible and contextual. Therefore, preservation becomes a political act that forces urban planners, businessmen, architects and builders to consider alternative operating models, to create cities’ futures starting from their past, by reusing existing buildings instead of building new structures.

In its latest incarnation, and if the situation so requires, preservation can be so revolutionary as to introduce the possibility of using abstention in architectural language. Doing nothing or almost nothing, while avoiding planning and building new buildings is a tool that is just as powerful as its opposite.

Fondazione Prada therefore was born from this district and from a vision of a different city that ambiguously accepts diversity, differences and the co-existence of an array of pieces instead of standardization and sameness at all costs. It is a project that cannot be defined either as pure preservation, nor as new architecture, but an unusual hybrid in which old buildings blend seamlessly with the new, keeping their own identity without quashing or being quashed by the others.

It was a big decision to allow for this open comparison between the existing buildings and the new, to shun the dusty stereotypes of reverential respect and presumed originality.

Instead, the wager was laid that, when put together in an apparently casual manner, all these particular characteristics would not jar but create a pleasant sensation of genuine and rich harmony.

As Rem Koolhaas himself said to me while walking around the museum one evening: “This place is all about good vibes”.

On the Road Again

A project curated by Giovanna Silva and Francesco Zanot
On Cartography Magazine N.2

On the
Road Again

Shane Lavalette
Ashley at Ben Burton

Ashley at Ben Burton, from One Sun, One Shadow, 2011. The image considers the relationship between music and the landscape of the American South, by exploring the musicality of everyday life. Shane travelled around the South photographing places and people that to him elicited the feeling of a sound. Ashley was a stranger that he met in passing in a park in Athens, Georgia. She was sitting on a rock by a small stream, and when he spotted her the scene struck him as being so timelessly beautiful. Shane photographed her for just a short time, but she was very present. The portrait captures a moment where she seemed lost in thought, and in which the photographer felt a story in her eyes. Shane Lavalette (b. 1987, Burlington, Vermont).

Yann Gross
Turtle Shell Cap, from The Jungle Book, 2016.

Bolivar community, Peru. After a meal, the turtle shell becomes a toy for the children. Turtle meat is a favourite dish in the communities along the banks of Río Curaray.
Yann Gross (b. 1981, Vevey, Switzerland) currently resides
in Switzerland and the Amazon rainforest.

Alejandro Cartagena
Girl in Gray Pickup Truck

Girl in Gray Pickup Truck, from the Between Borders series, 2010. In this small community a few minutes south of the US border, these people have found a life in between the rapid growing Reynosa and the turmoil of illegal border crossers and drug traffickers. The young girls, like many in this community, study until junior high school and then wait until they get married. This grants them an opportunity to leave the community or stay and be a housewife. The community survives on selling water and cattle to neighbouring ranchos. Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Dominican Republic), lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico.

Alberto Sinigaglia
Tirana

Tirana, 2016. The TID Tower is a new tower right in the centre of Tirana, designed by the Belgian firm 51n4e. The tower, which contains offices, shops and a large hotel, represents the rapid economic and social growth that the city, and Albania as a whole, is experiencing. However, it also shows the gap between the new/future Tirana and its surroundings, which are struggling to keep up. The tower gives a bird’s eye view of the city, to imagine what will become of it, for better or for worse.
Alberto Sinigaglia (b. 1984) lives and works in Vicenza.

Kent Andreasen
West Coast Vampire

West Coast Vampire, 31 May in Elandsbaai, South Africa. Kent found this young boy playing football with a group of his friends. He was randomly wearing a set of vampire teeth that people commonly wear around Halloween. Elandsbaai is a small rural surf town which makes this image somewhat out of place. It was also May and the kid and no real reason to be donning these teeth. Kent asked him if he could take a picture, he agreed and stood very patiently as the photographer found focus and off he went back to revelling
in his football game. Kent Andreasen (b. 1991) resides in
Cape Town, South Africa.

Vittorio Mortarotti
The First Day of Good Weather

From the series The First Day of Good Weather, 2013. Tohoku, Japan. Taken in the areas of Japan destroyed by the tsunami, this is a piece on the methods and strategies that we all implement so as to carry on after a trauma or tragedy. In the portraits, the photographer always looks for an action, a strong, albeit perhaps haphazard bodily presence that expresses one of the many ways we have to hang on in this world.
Vittorio Mortarotti (b. 1982, Turin) is an Italian photographer.

Maria Gruzdeva
VDNKh

The Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, also known as VDNKh, was first constructed in 1939 as a large park with grand pavilions, each dedicated to displaying the industrial achievements and latest inventions of Soviet scientists. Nowadays an extraordinary monument to the Soviet epoch, it is a popular place in Moscow, with various shows and festivals taking place there. In one of its central squares stands the Vostok rocket, once used to launch the legendary Vostok spacecraft and first manned space mission in history carried out by Yuri Gagarin on 12 April, 1961. Maria Gruzdeva
(b. 1989) is a Russian-born photographer based in London.

Martin Kollar
Field Trip

From the Field Trip series, Israel, 2009-2011. Martin Kollar
(b. 1971, Zilina, Czechoslovakia, now the Slovak Republic).

Ricardo Cases
Turistas en la Sagrada Familia

Turistas en la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, summer 2016. This photo belongs to a commission by M, le magazine du Monde. The photographer was asked to put together a series of images on the phenomenon of tourism in Barcelona. In the image he tries to make a parallel between the appearance of a tourist with the appearance of the façade of La Sagrada Familia, a building emblematic of the city. Ricardo Cases (b. 1971, Orihuela, Alicante).

Giorgio Di Salvo
Untitled

Untitled, Sudan. Heading northbound to Nubia, on the sides of the road through the desert on the western side of the country, Giorgio notices some black shapes like large tongues or moulted reptile skins. It doesn’t come to mind immediately that they are fragments of tyres from the lorries that cross the desert every day. The shapes and shadows projected onto the ground striking him profoundly, the black of tyres smoothed by the sand, the strands of the inner ply like ragged tendons, bundles of muscles lying on the boiling earth.
He finds something diabolic in these random compositions.
Giorgio Di Salvo (b. 1981, Milan).

Delfino Sisto Legnani
Common Ground #7

Common Ground #7, part of a series which sets out to show how, in its complexity and spontaneity, ordinary architecture presents very much the same characteristics as high-brow and internationally renowned architecture. This photo, taken in February 2016, portrays the common areas in an anonymous housing block in a town on the island of Fuerteventura. Delfino Sisto Legnani (b. 1986, Milan) lives and works in Milan, Italy.

Piotr Niepsuj
Łódź

Łódź, October 2016. Łódź, also written as Lodz, is the third-largest city in Poland. Located in the central part of the country, it has a population of 698,688 (2016) (...). Before 1990, Łódź’s economy heavily focused on the textile industry, which in the nineteenth century had developed in the city owing to the favourable chemical composition of its water. Because of the growth in this industry, the city has sometimes been called the “Polish Manchester”. (Source: Wikipedia)
Polish-born (b. 1984, Łódź) Piotr Niepsuj is based in Milan, Italy. He travels to Poland more or less twice a year.

Emilia von Senger
What Now?

What now? Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2015. Emilia had been going to Brazil for a few years, but this trip was different. She was travelling for the first time alone with my father, an architect – two weeks, four cities, Brazilian modernism. That morning, one of their last, they were walking around the city centre. A man was sitting under a tree in the middle of a huge roundabout. He looks slightly melancholic, as do the falling red flowers. In her pictures, she’s looking for moments like this one where time seems to freeze.
Emilia von Senger (b. 1987) lives and works in Berlin.

Northern-cyclades

Northern Cyclades by Cartography
Text by Paola Corini
Photographs by Luca De Santis

NORTHERN
CYCLADES

Holidaying in the northern islands of the Cyclades. Athens, Andros, Tinos, then Mykonos (but we’ll stay in Tinos), and back again. A delicate and faded summer. Rings on basketball courts, deserted by night and day, like souvenirs; old parked scooters; artichokes and caper flowers; small sweet grapes, golden like grain; the Orthodox monastery of Saint Nicholas. A lesser, rural Greece. Alternative, because it is profoundly classical.

Aegean Sea
For my birthday, in October 2013, I was given a book. I had just made a career change into travel publishing and had decided that my speciality would be exploring. The present was a translation of a German book, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will. An azure, non-plastic coated cover, with a black canvas binding and tangerine orange page edges, depicting three small mountainous, nameless islands. In October 2015 I looked out that book, opened it, and thought that two dots in the Mediterranean were missing, one for Andros and one for Tinos. Two dots that I would add, counter to all the sense contained in that book. And I’d be proud to be able to say that yes, you can get to these islands, I reached them quite easily even. Just a day-long crossing from Athens and the obsessive thought that, in the same time, by plane, I could have landed in Los Angeles or Cape Town, places I miss still.

That summer just behind us, I would learn that on Andros and Tinos the days pass by in a simple fashion. Living on those smaller islands was like diving into the best of the 1960s, a time I hadn’t experienced first-hand, with the faded rainbow sunshades, one-piece costumes and knee-length shorts, straw mats on the sand, sweet currant tarts or savoury goat’s cheese flans cooling down in the eleven o’clock sun, the village people. And what in my Italy mightn’t exist anymore, or maybe I just don’t look for it, does instead exist in at least two islands of the southern Aegean, oblivious to low-cost airlines and modern tourism. Not ashamed of showing their true nature, the islanders’ hands dyed the red of ripe strawberries and green of tomato fields, rustic, rural and seafaring all at the same time, small lands completely surrounded by water, with marvellous little people. That summer I fell in love with Greece and all that is still honest and kind.

One: Tinos
I only went into town – the Hora Tinos of the coachloads of miracle seekers – for the shop. On the right-hand side of the street going up the hill straight as a ruler, with the faithful on their knees making their vows at one end and the monastery at the other, that shop, a Greek bakers, realm of the sweet, homemade breakfast, seemed real. The type you couldn’t find in the small villages in the hinterland, but tiny and genuine just like them. I had decided that I’d go back every day, like a regular, abandoning my car for a couple of minutes, purse in hand, quick, cheeky, like a young local. I was by no means the baker’s best customer and although when I went – seven o’clock on a September evening, just as the sun was going down – we were the only ones in the shop, he demonstrated a good-natured annoyance over my presence, my smile, my compliments in a foreign language for each delicious mouthful I tried. From the street, through the square window, you could hardly see him, sitting on a chair that was too low, on the other side of the counter with the loose, sweet bread. He only got up when I had decided, which always seemed too late for him. Mounds of crumbly cardamom twists, pan brioche with the almost alcoholic scent of raisins, simple sponge cakes, brown wholewheat buns. My quantities were birdlike, my money never precise. And he huffed and puffed, but in a way that made me want to go back and make him understand that I only bought my supplies from him.

Manos had taken a few days to approach us. We were neighbours, our houses’ smooth stone walls were on the outside edge of the village of Loutra, a village with no foreigners, no taverna, only houses, scooters, the Ursuline nuns’ convent, the Museum of Folk Art, closed this year, perhaps for good. And then there was Manos. We would stand talking in the courtyard of our houses, us under our little olive tree and him on the other side of the stone wall, in front of his little gate. Every day he brought us something, like a shy suitor. Making friends at the village limits. And so we always had something at breakfast, to accompany the sweet buns from our moody baker: a handful of ripe strawberries, an empty white margarine tub filled with plump green baby tomatoes still on their stalks, a giant cucumber from the vegetable patch. The strawberries were pristine, the tomatoes shone like mirrors, cool from the running water, Manos’s hands dyed the purple of strawberry juice or the silky green of the tomato field.
Food was not in short supply. Every day in the villages above Hora Tinos we found hands repeating classic seasonal recipes.

And yet the fresh artichoke flan, crispy triangles of home-made filo pastry with fresh feta, courgette and wild fennel fritters, stuffed tomatoes, pickled artichokes and fresh capers never tasted the same twice. Everything grew on the island and every day we liked it in a new way. “Say that you live next door to Manos and Marieta. Maria is a friend of ours and her cooking really is something special: all those hot and cold nibbles pouring out one after another are fantastic.” Maria ran the bar on stilts on Kolimpithra beach. The surfers’ second favourite, it’s a small sheltered bay with couples of pensioners in oversized costumes floating in the salty water for hours as if they were in a spa, on a Sunday as they probably did every day at the end of September.

We stayed in every little village on the hill. Loutra, Ktikados, Stene and Agapi. As soon as we disembarked, we quickly left the port behind us and gained altitude. “Forget about the port and the town straight away, the island’s up there and it’s fantastic,” Nelly had told us. She and her architect husband lived in Athens and they’d been here a few times, by the short ferry crossing from Andros. Tinos is not the island where all the mainland Greeks have been, while Andros is a hop, skip and a jump from Rafina, and Mykonos, well, it’s Mykonos. Of them, Tinos is the small, unusual, silent, mystical one, the one you gently get to know. At night dark streets are illuminated by the electric blue of the crosses on the Orthodox chapels...
(Continue on Cartography Magazine N.2)

lima-surf

Surf in Lima by Cartography
Text by ERIKA
Photographs by Luca De Santis

SURF LIMA
PERU'

Lima is the South American capital of surfing, and as such it presents many surf options, from beaches for beginners to spots that really are for experts. Within Lima, the closest beaches for surfing are found in the Miraflores, Barranco and Chorrillos districts in an area known as the Costa Verde of Lima. There are different beaches such as Punta Roquitas, La Pampilla, Makaha, Redondo, Los Yuyos and Los Pavos, which are perfect for those taking their first steps in the world of surfing.

Along this strip of coastline there are different surf schools which teach you how to surf, regardless of your familiarity with the sea. Again on the Costa Verde, we also find iconic beaches like the La Herradura with its legendary waves that have gone down in the history of Peruvian surfing, reaching up to 3-4m in the season. Situated a little further to the south, 40km away, is the Punta Hermosa district. Along this stretch of coast, you can find a vast array of waves, with beach brakes at the Conchan, Pulpos, Arica and explosives beaches and solid point breaks at La Isla, El Paso, Playa Norte, Señoritas, Punta Rocas and Pico Alto.

This last stop is part of the WSL Big Wave Tour. Continuing south, we come to San Bartolo Beach, a location for the WSL junior category. The waves here are also perfect for getting started in the surf world. Seventy kilometres away we also find a point break called Puerto Viejo with good waves suitable for both beginners and experts to ride. And last but not least, on the road south of Lima, we find the Cerro Azul, where the waves break to the left in a spectacular way.
There are also various beaches to the north of the capital, such as Bermejo, 200 kilometres away. This beach is untouched by human hand, so the beauty of the nature still captures you when you’re riding the waves. So we can say that Lima is privileged enough to have many beaches for all kinds of surfers.

Faroe-Island

Faroe Islans by Cartography
Text by Paola Corini
Photographs by Luca De Santis

FAROE
ISLANDS

The Faroe Islands, green desert for a Nordic summer experience reminiscent of a carefree and dishevelled adolescence. Autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, tiny archipelago often likened to Scotland, Norway, the Shetlands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides and Greenland. “Island of sheep”. And puffins, grass, moss, basalt, Arctic light, running water, sagas, grass-covered roofs. Island of miniature villages – Gjógv, Tjørnuvík, Saksun, Mykines, Syðrugøta, Klaksvík, Svínoy, Fugloy, Kirkjubøur, Gásadalur, Bøur – all fringed by the northern Atlantic Ocean.

That year Atlantic Airways started a direct flight connecting Italy to the Faroe islands. One spring ago I began to shyly repeat “Faroe islands” to myself, in that same elementary way I increasingly frequently realized was how I ended up choosing my next destination. Eighteen remote islands in a cold sea, a small archipelago to the north of Scotland and the south of Iceland. Then I understood I didn’t need to beat around the bush to tell people where I’d got it into my head to go, because the Faroes were absolutely present in the heads of whomever I met. What to me appeared an archipelago of my imagination, even though I could point to it quickly on a map of the great northern Atlantic, was known to the most ordinary people. In some way or other, I mean. “They’ve got a national football team,” my taxi driver told me, waving me off and closing the boot of his car with a routine gesture.

“They’d tried a direct flight from Milan and one from Barcelona, and Barcelona won in the end, so you’re coming in from Copenhagen, right?” asked Xavier, a young Dutch man with a lined jotter, tent on shoulder and ten-month-old baby at home with his girlfriend. “He’s called Oscar. He’s shown me what’s best about life. But I have to get off by myself for a few days, you know?” In this vintage, dark teak boat with cobalt blue leather sofas and portholes as thick as bottle bottoms, I only had three distractions, none of which actually belonged to me: turning the sprung knob of a glass chocolate drop vending machine whose contents had become marbled by the cold; sneaking up the steep stairs to the boat deck and seeing the next landing stage with my own eyes, the passengers lost and the new ones being welcomed; finding how to ask that slim boy who looked like a film star whose name I couldn’t remember if he did the same job as me. “Are you a travel writer?” We had the same guidebook.

“It’s the only one of the Faroe islands.” “Yup, you’re right.” I thought that it had been that guidebook that had brought us both to while away that afternoon in the westernmost isles of the archipelago. It seemed Xavier had had a better time of it in the village of Fugloy, while I had landed (literally, after a five-minute, one-way helicopter journey in the thick mist) in Svínoy and the few inhabitants I met couldn’t work out what there was for me to do in the hours-long wait for the next boat, which would arrive at the opposite side of the island, at an unknown time, between four and five in the afternoon, depending on the sea.

“It’s the aim of every Faroese to spend a few days on these distant isles,” wrote our guidebook. Harsh is the most diplomatic word that I can find for a totally austere place, which is anything but pretty or welcoming. Anyway, I would quickly forget Svínoy. Rather what I couldn’t explain, and still can’t, is how some second- and third-generation Faroe islanders could say to me: “Never been to Mykines”, seeing as for me, for two days now, Mykines had become the jewel in the Faroese crown. But those times that my plans had taken me off track I had learnt to say to myself now I know what’s there, across that water, behind that peninsula, now I know what goes on down here. Or what doesn’t go on at all, in the case of Svínoy.

Island
One after another, all of us tourists and travellers would arrive at every extreme of the archipelago, we would go to the end of a road, to the north, south, east and west to see what was there with our own eyes. Mykines, at the easternmost point, stole the show. Sea permitting, we would also reach this small island and then leave it behind. I had read that extract from the guide millions of time, as if I had to learn it by heart: the sea decides when to take you to the island and when to put you back on dry land. They repeated that for a trip to Mykines we had to calculate a few days more to make way for any unforeseen circumstances and they repeated that we may have had to spend the night there, if that’s what was in store for us. “It’s a very hospitable village, they’re used to welcoming visitors.” For me that threat was turning into a hope. I didn’t want to leave Mykines.

Had it been a stormy day, with fog thick as cotton wool, mad northern wind, I would have been the first to go down to the quay to board the only return boat, the 5 o’clock. But I want to think that that day will be remembered by the inhabitants of Mykines as the most beautiful day of their summer 2015. The granddads were cutting the grass on the roofs, the youngest children were drawing squares and flowers with coloured chalk on the rare stretches of tarmac, the slightly older ones were playing hide-and-seek in the potato patches, girls in Olympic swimming costumes and rubber clogs were chatting in the fresh-water pool at the top of the village, the young Swedish girl employed for the summer in the only bar in the village was peeling apples and baking tray after tray of apple pies before the island’s guests returned from their much-plugged trip to the lighthouse...
(Continue on Cartography Magazine N.2)

Itinerario Faroe Islands

Destination Faroe Islands
Itineraries by Cartography

Faroe Islands

DAY 1-2 VÁGAR TO GJÓGV
Fly to Vágar Airport with Atlantic Airways. Pick up your car (4x4) at 62°N. Drive to Gjógv (1 hr). Sleep at GJAARGARÐUR GUESTHOUSE (1 night).

DAY 2-6 GJÓGV TO TÓRSHAVN
Morning walk in Gjógv, visit the villages of Tjørnuvík and Saksun, find one of the largest waterfalls Fossá. Drive to Tórshavn (1 hr). Eat your dinner at Koks Restaurant. Drive to Kirkjubøur at sundown. Sleep at HOTEL FØROYAR (4 nights).

DAY TRIP TO MYKINES
Drive to Sørvágur (40 min). Boat ride (May-August) to the island of Mykines (45 min). Hike out to Mykineshólmur. Refreshments at Kristianshús. Boat back to Sørvágur, drive back to Tórshavn.
Dinner at Restaurant Áarstova.

DAY TRIP TO BORDOY AND EYSTUROY
Drive to Klaksvik (1 hr). Visit the church (with wood carvings by local artist Edward Fuglø). Enjoy G! Festival, the Faroes’ summer music festival (mid July), in Syðrugøta. Drive back to Tórshavn. Dinner at Barbara Fish House.

DAY TRIP TO TÓRSHAVN
Spend the whole day in Tórshavn, the capital. Visit modern knitwear design shop Guðrun & Guðrun. Lunch at Restaurant Etika. Walk along the harbour area, visit cafe/design shop Østrøm.
Walk around the old part of town and Tinganes. Dinner at Restaurant Barbara.

DAY TRIP TO VÁGAR
Visit the villages of Bøur and Gásadalur.

More information at visitfaroeislands.com

Itinerario Northern Cyclades

Destination Northern Cyclades
Itineraries by Cartography

Northern Cyclades

DAY 1-4 ATHENS TO ANDROS
Fly to Athens International Airport (ATH). Rent your 4x4 car and drive to Rafina port (30 min). Take your ferry from Rafina to Gavrio, Andros (2 hrs). Drive to Ahla Beach (1 hr). Eat and sleep at ONAR ANDROS (2 nights).
Morning visit to the Monastery of Agios Nikolaos (St. Nicholas). Enjoy Vori Beach and Plaka Beach. Sunset walk in Andros Chora Village (Andros Town). Dine at Endochora restaurant. Sleep at KTIMA LEMONIES (1 night).

DAY 4-7 ANDROS TO TINOS
Take your ferry from Andros to Tinos (1.30 hr). Drive to Loutra Village. Visit Agios Fokas, Ap’gania, Kolybethra, Pachia Ammos (beaches). Visit Loutra, Agapi, Ktikados, Volax, Kardiani, Isternia (villages). Eat at Drosia, Ktikados village
and To Thalassaki, Ormos Isternion. Sleep at TINOS HOUSE, Loutra (3 nights).

DAY 7-8 TINOS TO ATHENS
Take your ferry from Tinos to Athens (4 hrs). Morning visit to Athens Central Market (Varvakios Agora, 7am-3pm Mondays-Saturdays). Eat at Avocado Food for Life, Syntagma (vegetarian) and Melilotos, Monastiraki (Greek). Visit The Acropolis and The Acropolis Museum. Sleep at ALICE INN (1 night).

Itinerario Peruvian Amazon

Destination Peruvian Amazon
Itineraries by Cartography

Peruvian Amazon

DAY 1-4 LIMA
Fly to Jorge Chávez International Airport Lima (LIM). Private transfer to HOTEL ATEMPORAL in Miraflores
(3 nights).

LIMA

SAN ISIDRO
Lunch/Dinner at
Osaka (Japanese);
Astrid Y Gaston (Novoandina, Chef Gaston Acurio).
Walk in Bosque El Olivar
Visit/shop at Bioferia de Miraflores, Calle Miguel Dasso (Sunday Market).

MIRAFLORES
Breakfast/Lunch at
La Verdé Bio-factoria (Organic, Vegan);
El Pan de La Chola (Bakery/Café).
Lunch/Dinner at
Central Restaurante (Novoandina, Chef Virgilio Martinez);
Maido (Japanese, Chef Mitsuharu Tsumura);
Rafael (Modern Peruvian, Chef Rafael Osterling);
Restaurante El Mercado (Fish, Chef Rafael Osterling).
Visit Playa Makaha (Surf Beach).

BARRANCO
Visit
Feria Ecologica de Barranco (Sunday Market);
Peña Don Porfirio (Ballroom, Live music);
Bodega Piselli (Historical Bar).
Lunch/Dinner at
Isolina Taberna Peruviana (Criolla);
Canta Rana (Ceviche, Traditional Peruvian).

CENTRO HISTORICO
Coffee at Bar Restaurant Cordano (Historical Venue).
Visit
Plaza Mayor;
Basilica y Convento de San Francesco de Lima.

DAY 4-11 LIMA TO IQUITOS
AMAZON RIVER EXPEDITION CRUISE
Fly to Iquitos International Airport (IQT). Private transfer to embarkation point with Aqua Expeditions. Eat and sleep aboard the ARIA AMAZON (7-Night Expedition Cruise).
Sail along the two largest tributaries of the Peruvian Amazon, the Ucayali and the Marañon, as well as on the Amazon itself.
Activities: Off-ship Excursions with Naturalist Guides, Forest Walks, Piranha Fishing, Swimming, Kayaking, Canoeing, Cycling, Village Visits, School Visits, Night Excursions, Jacuzzi, Massage, 5-Star Peruvian Cuisine (Chef Pedro Miguel Schiaffino), Cooking Lessons.

DAY 11-12 IQUITOS TO LIMA
Disembark from the Aria Amazon. Private transfer to Iquitos International Airport (IQT) with picnic by Aqua Expeditions. Fly to Jorge Chávez International Airport Lima (LIM). Private transfer to HOTEL ATEMPORAL (1 night).

Book with Aqua Expeditions.
Aqua Expeditions launched the first Amazon River cruises on the Peruvian section of this iconic river in 2007. The Aria Amazon skirts the edges of the vast Pacaya Samiria National Reserve, a flooded forest covering five million acres at the headwaters of the Amazon basin.

itinerario Pantelleria

Destination Pantelleria
Itineraries by Cartography

Pantelleria

DAY 1
Fly to Pantelleria Airport (PNL).
Rent a car and drive to Tenuta Borgia, Contrada Salto La Vecchia (30 min).
Visit Helena Thurner’s plant Il Giardino di Rekhale, Contrada Rekhale.
Dinner at Ristorante Bar La Vela, Contrada Scauri Scalo.

DAY 2
Drive to Cantine Donnafugata, Contrada Khamma, (30 min).
Visit cellar/winery and Giardino Pantesco Donnafugata.
Visit Lago Specchio di Venere and Punta Spadillo.
Visit caper farm Cooperativa Agricola Produttori Capperi, Scauri Basso.
Drink at Curnutazzi Bar, Scauri Porto.

Day 3: SEA EXCURSION
Drive to Pantelleria port (30 min).
Shop at fruit & vegetable Shop Da Zazà.
Rent a boat and sail to Arco dell’Elefante, Grande Faraglione di Punta Tracino, Balata dei Turchi.
Snack and granita at Bar Aurora, Pantelleria.

Day 4
Drive to Cala Gadir (30 min).
Morning walk/trek along the Sentiero Romano Trail (4.5 km).
Swim in Laghetto delle Ondine, Cala Cottone and Cala Cinque Denti.
Dinner at Trattoria A Favarotta, Kamma Fuori Favarotta.

Day 5
Drive to Sibà (20 min).
Hike to Bagno Asciutto - Grotta di Benikulà.
Drive up to Montagna Grande (836 m) and walk to Grotta dei Briganti.
Drive back thorugh Pian della Ghirlanda, Monastero Valley.

Sleep (4 nights) at TENUTA BORGIA, Contrada Salto La Vecchia.

itinerario Tahiti

Destination Tahiti
Itineraries by Cartography

Tahiti

DAYS 1-4: Tahiti Nui
Fly to Faa’a International Airport (PPT) with Air Tahiti Nui. Private transfer to InterContinental Resort, Faa’a (10 min).
Eat at: Café Maeva, Papeete Market; Place Vaiete Roulottes (mobile food vans, Chinese/Polynesian/French cuisine); Place To’ata Snacks (open-air, Chinese/Polynesian/French cuisine); Le Lotus Restaurant, InterContinental Resort (overwater, French/gourmet).
Visit: Papeete Market (Mapuru a Paraita); Temple de Paofai, Papeete (Protestant church, Sunday service 10am);
Musée de Tahiti et des Îles - Te Fare Manaha, Puna’auia.
Sleep at INTERCONTINENTAL RESORT (3 nights).

FULL-DAY TRIP TO THE PAPENOO VALLEY
Private tour/4WD safari with Hervé Maraetaata
(Mato-Nui Excursions, phone +689 8778 9547).
Pick up at 8am at the hotel and drive to Papeeno (40 min).
Stop at the kiosk for a coconut bun.
Visit Fare Hape village (Association Haururu).
Fresh pineapple and grapefruit tasting.
Swim in the natural spring water pool.
Drive back to the hotel for dinner.

DayS 4-6: TAHITI NUI TO Tahiti Iti
Drive to Teahupoo (1 hour, 30 min).
Half-day sea excursion with Michael (Teahupoo Taxi Boat):
the wild coast of Fenua Aihere, the lagoon, the Vaipoiri cave, the surfing spot of Tehaupoo.
Lunch at La Plage de Maui (lagoon view, Polynesian cuisine).
Drive to Tautira village, northern coast.
Eat and sleep at VANIRA LODGE (2 nights).

DayS 6-8: TAHITI TO Moorea
Take your fast ferry (Aremity5) to Moorea (45 min).
Morning 4WD land excursion to the Opunohu Valley:
juice and jam tasting at the Lycée Agricole Opunohu,
visit to pineapple plantations.
Afternoon water excursion in the lagoon with Harold
(Moorea Expedition): whale watching, swimming
with rays and lemon sharks.
Eat at roulotte La Paillotte.
Sleep at MOOREA BEACH LODGE, Hauru Haapiti
(2 nights).

DayS 8-11: MOOREA TO Bora Bora
Fly with Air Tahiti to Bora Bora (1 hour).
Private boat transfer to Motu Tevairoa.
Activities lily pond and tropical garden, tennis, kayaking, outrigger canoe, catamaran cruises, minigolf, table tennis, Manea Spa.
Eat and sleep at BORA BORA PEARL BEACH
RESORT & SPA, The Leading Hotels of the World
(overwater/garden bungalows) (3 nights).

DayS 11-12: BORA BORA TO Tahiti
Fly back to Tahiti.
Visit to Société des Études Océaniennes - Te Niu Ihi Ma’ohi, Tipaerui, Papeete (bookshop and archives).
Drive anticlockwise from Taravao to Papeete.
Lunch at Restaurant Terre-Mer, Baie de Phaëton.
Scenic drive to black sand beaches, northern and eastern coastline, proceeding anticlockwise from Taravao to Papeete.
Sleep at INTERCONTINENTAL RESORT (1 night).

Extra Favourites:
Heiva i Tahiti festival, Tahiti (July), including the traditional show on the Marae Arahurahu and the traditional sports Heiva Tu’aro Ma’ohi (coconut climbing, javelin throwing, coconut shelling, stone lifting, fruit carrier races, Va’a Taie regattas).
Heiva i Bora Bora festival, Vaitape, Bora Bora (July).
Market stall Saveurs de Moorea @moniasaveurs (organic produce, pickles, chutneys, tartare), several locations.

For more information:
Tahiti Tourisme (www.tahiti-tourisme.it, www.tahiti-tourisme.com).
Heiva i Tahiti (www.heiva.org).
Air Tahiti Nui (www.airtahitinui.com).
Société des Études Océaniennes - Te Niu Ihi Ma’ohi (www.seo.pf).
Musée de Tahiti et des Îles - Te Fare Mahana (www.museetahiti.pf).

Itinerario Sardegna

Destination Sardinia
Itineraries by Cartography

Sardinia

DAYS 1-2: Cagliari
Fly to Cagliari-Elmas Airport (CAG). Rent a car and drive to Cagliari (10 min), Castello neighbourhood (old town).
Eat at Restaurant Sa Piola (Slow Food).
Visit Cattedrale di Santa Maria (16th-century cathedral)
and Sala Settecentesca, University Library, Cagliari.
Sleep at HOTEL CALAMOSCA (1 night).

DAYS 2-5: Cagliari to SULCIS-IGLESIENTE
(via SS195/SP71, scenic drive and beaches of the south-west)
Eat at Su Furriadroxu restaurant, Pula.
Visit Area Archeologica di Nora.
Swim at Malfatano beach, Teulada.
Stop at Torre de Pixini belvedere.
Stop and swim at Porto Pino sand dunes and beach.
Drink at Taverna Blue Marlin restaurant.
Eat and sleep at BORGO ROSSO PORPORA, Loc. Is Loccis Santu, Carbonia-Iglesias (3 nights).

DayS 6-8: MARMILLA TO CAMPIDANO DI ORISTANO
Drive to Oristano (1 hour).
Lunch and tea at Librid.
Drive to the Sinis Peninsula, Cabras (30 min).
Visit the old rural village of San Salvatore di Sinis and
San Giovanni di Sinis/Area Archeologica di Tharros.
Swim at Is Arutas and Mari Ermi beaches.
Sea excursion to Malu Entu/Isola di Mal di Ventre
Protected Marine Area.
Dinner at Ristorante Craf Da Banana.
Sleep at HOTEL REGINA D’ARBOREA (2 nights).

Extra Favourites:
Pretziada Headquarter, Is Aresus, Santadi (www.pretziada.com).
Foresta di Pantaleo, Santadi (Forest and Trail).
Festa di Sant’Efisio, a religious procession dating back to 1652. Every year on 1 May, from Cagliari to Nora (Pula).
Corsa degli Scalzi (“Barefoot race”), popular festival held every year in the first weekend of September
in San Salvatore di Sinis, Cabras, Oristano.
Carnevale di Mamoiada, the carnival parade with traditional Mamuthones and Issohadores masks. Every year in late February in Mamoiada, Nuoro.
Experience Hotel Su Gologone, Oliena, Nuoro: Nido del Pane (“Bread nest”), A la carte Restaurant, Kitchen Herb Garden, Botteghe d’Arte, Tex Willer Garden, Corte de Su Re.
Lanthia Resort, Santa Maria Navarrese, Golfo di Orosei.

Roberto Petza

Text by Carlo Spinelli
Photographs by Luca De Santis
Set Design by Kyre Chenven

With chef
Roberto Petza

It could all start from the magic, from the rite of scented water which chef Roberto Petza still remembers from his childhood. In an ancient land where the heat burns barrenly and in the meantime mixes with the tombs of giants and the Mamuthones masks of Sardinia’s remote sheep farming culture, once upon a time housewives used to collect flowers and herbs in the countryside to scent the water while they recited their prayers. This liquid was then left to marinate overnight and the day after was used to wash away impurities and the evil eye from all the family. Then, with the same herbs, they prepared soups and salads, in a sort of virtuous circle. This story is just a tiny piece in the great game of Sardinia. Other enchantments are yet to come.

Like the magic of opening a restaurant in the middle of nowhere in the Cagliari hinterland, in Siddi, and suddenly discovering that you’re one of the most fascinating chefs in the world. With his S’Apposentu, Roberto Petza embodies the island past and present. He has the age-old legends of Sardinian culture in his blood, but also the desire to transform them into contemporary cooking. “When I was little, my dream was to carry on my grandfather’s trade, joinery, but my parents thought that the work was too hard and strenuous. So, unbeknownst to my mother, at the age of 14 I enrolled in catering school. After tasting the world, halfway around Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, in my thirtieth year I decided that the time had come to return home, and carry on my revolution in Sardinian cooking!” The various stages in his career are known from the biographies in the Michelin guides: in 1998 he opened S’Apposentu in San Gavino Monreale, his home town; in 2002 he then opened in Cagliari; and finally, for a fresh start, in 2010 he moved to the historical region of Marmilla, to start on that path that brought him to Siddi and his sophisticated take on Sardinian cooking.

At the moment, Petza seems to be the only cook who really wants to throw open Sardinia’s golden treasure chest, and make it explode. It’s a strong metaphor: him digging with his bare hands in earth full of worms and flowers, dry soil and animals’ sweat, to uncover its treasures. His cuisine takes shape from the sublimation of culture. Petza is a distiller who obtains the pure essence of Sardinian cuisine, the best, but only after sweating blood as he explores and studies it, sifts through it and safeguards it in a still. As Sardinian scholar Roberto Flore – who has worked for years at chef René Redzepi’s Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen – recounts, “this land has all the elements to try out new things, while recalling its magical traditions”.
There are no end of examples for those who dare: casu marzu or casu fràzigu (literally, rotten cheese) is sheep’s cheese containing cheese fly larvae to boost its brave consumer’s protein levels; suckling goat rennet cazu de crabittu is of Neolithic origin and has been part of Sardinian cuisine for over 700 years; the shepherds of Barbagia’s highly characteristic fiore sardo cheese at times displays a most anti-modern, brutal smell and taste, especially when very mature; then there are the sheep’s guts and blood used in archaic rites, always cleaned and boiled. Instead, for lovers of the vampire genre, a delicacy is the sheep’s blood sausage, sambeneddu, from the island’s interior: the blood is cooked inside the sheep’s stomach, adding salt, thyme or other aromatic herbs, onions and the unleavened bread, pane carasau (historically recalling the crumbs of harasau bread stored in the semi-nomadic shepherds’ sacks); then it is made to boil again and cooked in a pan with pennyroyal mint. Finally, it is left to dry out and mature to become a salami.
While casu marzu and cazu de crabittu are regenerating and reinvigorating aphrodisiacs, in the past Vernaccia wine and drunkenness were prompted divinatory acts, sacrifices and merry feasts to shoo away evil spells or to win over demons. In Cabras, palaeobotanists recently discovered vine seeds from 3,000 years ago, in wells dug out of the rocks by the inhabitants of the time to store food. In these “early refrigerators” they also found walnuts, hazelnuts, fig seeds, pine nut cones, pulses, venison…

Sardinian cooking is therefore extreme adaptation to the land, something which Roberto Petza was born into. For years he has wallowed in this age-old fermentation of dairy products, the lengthy, underground cooking times of suckling pig or porceddu, and the primordial simplicity of fregola (semolina, water and nothing else) in broth, a dish that has now disappeared from grandmothers’ kitchens. These wonders are taken up again on the menu at S’Apposentu and adapted to the present day, in terms of tastes and cooking techniques, like the first farriers did with iron as soon as the Bronze Age was over. Take, for example, the homemade saffron ice-cream, which the chef uses to create a dessert using the few sweet elements of the Sardinian tradition: saffron, the ricotta of baked formaggelle and the gattò or almond brittle.
How many cries of envy can you hear from other parts of the earth where you can count their precious ingredients on the fingers of a single hand? Petza answers proudly: “In some work a few years ago by University of Cagliari researchers it emerged that in a municipality in Goceano there were no less than 57 types of plants used for culinary purposes. There are lots of examples and of course we can’t forget s’erbuzzu in Gavoi, a soup that uses twenty types of wild herbs picked in spring by the women in the region of Gennargentu”.
It is not just its products, but also Sardinia’s stories and storytelling, trademarks of the archaic taste for marketing peasant folklore, as well as wild mixed leaf salad and food to chew on from Michelin-starred menus. It is the mystical, religious and ceremonious aspect that also arouses curiosity in the ancestral relationship between cooking/food and religion. Again the chef from Siddi tells us where to find the most energetic and mysterious places close to his restaurant: “On the Giara di Siddi there is a giant’s tomb from the sixteenth century B.C., while in Baradili there’s the fountain of Santa Margherita, dug out of the rock in the nuragic period; and finally there’s the Sa Fogaia park in Siddi, a wood at the foot of a nuragic palace where until a couple of years ago I used to organize dinners with friends from all over the world.”
From here, it’s an almost natural step to pass to supernatural forces: the land of Sardinia is full of them. Religious traditions mix with pagan beliefs, joined by the common thread of the word “food”, giving rise to rites that have remained untouched in time: the bonfires of de piricoccu, known as the herb of Saint John, picked in the moonlight and kept for a year to chase away envy from the door and then feed the purifying fire. It’s an example originating from the ancient custom of using toxic plants to hunt: euphorbia (lua) was used to kill eels and fish, giving rise to the exclamation parece alluao!, “you look poisoned” or in a state of confusion. Or the appearance of su nenniri, the grain germinated in the dark by the women during Holy Week and then thrown off cliffs, a practice connected to the mysterious pagan cults of the Greek god Adonis. And then, going on and on, fires and masks, the continual embrace of pagan and Christian culture, divination of the Sun god and the cult of water, sacred resources in every remote corner of the Mediterranean maquis.
Shout “Sardinia” and an ancestral cuisine quietly emerges, made of centuries-old rites and beliefs, which we almost risked losing in recent decades under the influence of globalization, the rejection of our origins and the desire to keep up with the times, while mystifying the past. Roberto Petza continues in his search to discover and glorify those products that are part of the centenarian islanders’ diets, abounding in pulses, wild herbs and unusual meats such as mutton, a heritage that unfortunately is relived on few occasions. His is a cultural investment to make it understood that industry is not the way to go in Sardinia, and that what’s needed is investment in farming and food.
Besides, the very existence of a story such as that of the demon Ammutadori is telling in itself. Striking when its prey is asleep, it causes a sensation of anguish, suffocation and oppression. Once, because of this demon, Sardinian shepherds were afraid of nodding off, in the shade of a tree perhaps, for fear that the demon would attack them, and maybe strangle them while they were asleep. It was thought that this phenomenon took place in the moment between wakefulness and sleep, or vice versa. In this particular phase, the body is asleep but the mind still conscious. And so Roberto Petza no longer sleeps: he cooks the demons of the past and transforms them into the food of the future.

Tahiti-The Temple of Paofai

The Temple of Paofai in Tahiti
by Cartography

TAHITI

The Temple of Paofai in Tahiti is the heart of the Ma’ohi protestant church. It was built in 1981 on the site of the first small chapel made of bamboo and woven leaves, constructed in 1818. The Sunday 10 o’clock service is well attended by the community. In their best Sunday dress, their heads covered by large hats woven from plant fibres, the faithful leave their pick-ups parked in triple file in the small street alongside the pastel pink church and take part in the sermon, singing the long hymns (himene) at the tops of their voices. 45% of Tahiti’s population is Protestant, 34% Catholic, with 6% members of the Mormon church and other minor connected cults.