From the "dawn of time" to the present and beyond, the sea has been and continues to be one of the greatest mysteries, something humans cannot hope to fully understand. Not even with science, in the strictest sense, which measures and weighs things in its attempt to capture their essence, seeking answers to a question which is flawed right from the start: attempting to find the truth by breaking things down into parts and putting them back together in rational order. But the wisdom offered by the sea through its powerful, universal metaphor goes beyond reason, and is applied to all vital stages in experience, from human destiny to the perennial mobility of living things and everything that is. For the sea is continuously in motion, incessantly in transformation; it is both cause and effect, life cycle and death, a power which might be called invisible, where we seek laws that not even today's chaos theory can capture. Understanding the sea means reclaiming the silence of the word to open it up to intuition, learning to listen to an idiom which has codes, but penetrates the secret of interpretation by blending timeless wisdom with our pure sensibility. On the sea and in the sea, we must feel things to understand them. This means rediscovering our origins, a presence that has accompanied the evolution of life on earth and been its parent, cradle and friend. Silent but noisy, gentle but frightening, reassuring but threatening: the sea is the gauge of all possible emotions that can challenge human thought, on the beaches of poetry, among the waves of the arcane, in the abysses of mystery. In his book "Oceano mare", Alessandro Baricco writes: “In the imperfect circle of its optical universe, the perfection of this oscillating motion spoke promises that the unrepeatable uniqueness of every single wave condemned to be broken. There is no way of stopping this ongoing alternation of creation and destruction. Its eyes sought out the describable, regulated truth of a certain, complete image, and ended up running after the mobile indecision of this coming and going that cradled and derided all scientific consideration." It is our desire to contain the infinite within the liquid perimeter of the intellect that fascinates us when we find ourselves before something we cannot grasp, but at the same time induces us to deride it in order to have some power over it. Sometimes until we lose all respect for ourselves, because we realize that we cannot truly know things merely with our names, calculations, instruments and definitions. In the enlightened despotism of reason, a simple name given to a thing chains down its meaning to make it universal and objective, but at the same time decrees the end of its absolute singularity. The mystery appears to have disappeared, and the illusion of control over the world is created. This is why human nature is quick to despise things, due to an archaic underlying sense of inferiority before the mystery, which comprehends its grandiose scale but fears its unknown effects. And so fear becomes aversion, enchantment gives way to indifference, and the shadows of our presumption become the wounds of nature, whose children we are, becoming disrespectful as soon as we reach adulthood. We are holding this exhibition because the sea is so close to us and yet so far away from most of us. It covers 71% of the earth's surface, but it is no longer the primary route we travel between the countries it unites and divides, displaced by today's routes through the sky. It is the favorite destination for holidays and outings to escape from the city, but we know little or nothing of the natural treasures concealed within its immense dominions. It is the guardian of thousands of years of history which have sunk within its depths, when we still attempt to reconstruct it piece by piece through the artifacts of our past on land, as if forgetting that all the keys to our entire human past lie down there. And finally, it is the artifice of a majestic beauty that goes beyond the most fantastic imagination, and therefore a ready source of inspiration for forms and visions for an entire culture whose forms of artistic expression have imitated nature over the centuries. We have a lot to learn from the sea about the absence of boundaries between tangible things and about the ideas we have about sharing. Also through the anthropomorphic figures which represent the sea in our mythologies, this watery king who rises at all times as a magister philosophiae to reveal to us the true essence of giving and having. Not only is water - fluid matter, body and soul of the sea - an essential element for the earth's survival, but its very fluidity is like all the world's other manifestations of energy, which makes all things possible, placing them in a system of relationships of mutual and continual exchange, without falling into the artificial logic of negotiation, of giving in order to receive. The ancient Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum. We might now apply the name to all the seas of the world, to remind us that the sea belongs to us, and we belong to the sea, with all the responsibilities involved in an indivisible relationship.