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Tears and Salt

Tears and Salt

Literature

(italian) Piero Bartolo Lidia Tilotta

73K0

Living in Lampedusa is not easy. This small beach broke away from the African continent and migrated towards Europe, as if willing to become a symbol of the bridge between the two. Its destiny has been written by the peculiar geographical conditions, and this destiny not only dominates the land, but also dominates the people who settle on it. Lampedusa, an island closer to the African continent than to mainland Italy, has become a transit point for countless African refugees entering Europe. Desperate people choose to use the most humble and dangerous way of smuggling to stay away from the war and pain in their homeland. The ocean, originally a road of hope, often becomes a hell where its fate is overturned. Organ trade, rape and robbery, brutal smugglers, frequent shipwrecks... Piero Bartolo, the son of a poor Lampedusa fisherman, resolutely returned to his hometown in 1991 and opened the first clinic on the island. He never imagined that his clinic would become a trench on the front line of the refugee crisis. Countless emergency treatments, inspections, rescues, and autopsies... For Bartolo and other Lampedusa people, it is unacceptable to leave anyone at sea to be at the mercy of fate. This is the rule of the ocean that no one can violate. Dr. Bartolo uses words as precise and sharp as a surgical scalpel to present a broken life and the mental trauma that can never be healed. These personal records sharply interrogate the boundaries of civilization and identity, asking us to ask why these tragedies occur, and how a society and minds that are increasingly numb to the suffering of others can face the ultimate suffering created by mankind.