A seasoned sailor, the writer from Rimini offers a poetic essay on these natural forces that have fascinated or inspired fear since the dawn of time. A work carried by the breath of mythology, literature, and the genius of the language unique to sailors.
From its very first pages, The Breath of the Mediterranean by Fabio Fiori evokes the dazzling Mediterranean Breviary by the Yugoslav writer Predrag Matvejević. This is no surprise, as the former considers the latter, his « Homer of the Balkans, » as a master. In the student, we find the same love for precision and scholarly digression, the same gyrovague and dreamer spirit.
Neither a travel diary nor a logbook, The Breath of the Mediterranean is a poetic essay dedicated to the winds, equally reliant on mythology and literature as it is on lived encounters with contrary winds, engaging both knowledge and the senses. For those who know them well, indeed, each wind, whether it blows from the sea or from the land, has its own smell and color.
Capricious Deities
Fabio Fiori considers himself an « anemophile, » a person who needs wind to feel good and dreads dead calm above all. The native of Rimini has sailed extensively, both on the Adriatic and throughout the Mediterranean. He learned from reading the classics that the winds are changing, capricious deities. It is crucial to respect them, and futile to oppose them. Why persist in tacking against an opposing wind when patience will be rewarded with a broad reach that will fill the sails and carry you to the right port? Another sign of respect is that the names of winds must always begin with a capital letter: Tramontane, Ponant, and so on.
Anyone who sails the Mediterranean finds themselves in the wake of Jason and Ulysses. By showing the latter subject to the fury of Zephyr, Boreas, Euros, and Notos, which correspond to the cardinal points, Homer sketches a rudimentary wind rose. A chapter devoted to « anemography » addresses the art of defining, classifying, and representing winds. We learn that Anaximenes of Miletus, the « philosophical father of the wind, » considered air a vital principle, that Strabo identified the origin of winds as the evaporation of the seas, and that for Kant, winds were the current of the « aerial ocean. » Even the Roman architect Vitruvius placed great importance on them, recommending that city streets not be aligned with prevailing winds.
Treasures of Folk Art
At the tops of the masts of trabaccoli and bragozzi, traditional Adriatic trading vessels, weather vanes indicate the direction of the wind. These mostraventi, simarole (whose etymology shares roots with « cime ») in Istria, penei (brushes) in Venice, are often treasures of folk art that sailors carve and decorate in their spare time. The splendid wind roses of Renaissance portulans identify and name up to 32 directions. Once these were known, the intensity had to be defined with nuances that have unfortunately disappeared from modern navigation language. By saying « southeast three » instead of « mild little breeze of Sirocco, » one gains cold efficiency at the cost of poetry.
Like Joseph Conrad, Fabio Fiori pays tribute to the beauty of the sailors’ language, inventive and imagery-laden, capable of conveying both the promise and the threat that accompany the wind. Depending on its strength, it is « chilly, a light breeze, a fresh breeze, a strong breeze, a gale, steady, lively, forceful, terrible, furious, unleashed, tempestuous, stormy. » One of the book’s great charms is also giving us a sense of the lingua franca spoken aboard ships throughout the Mediterranean, a blend of Greek, Arabic, Catalan, Venetian, and Genoese words.
Absolute Rulers
It is the wind rose, once again, that gives structure to the book. Eight chapters indeed guide us through each of the main directions: Tramontane, Grecale, Levant, Sirocco, Ostro, Libeccio, Ponant, Maestral. The cruise ends with a tribute to three winds that, though regional, are absolute rulers due to their frequency and dominance. How could one imagine the Greek islands without the Meltemi, beloved by Kazantzakis and Lawrence Durrell, which shapes the landscape by bending trees to the south? Perhaps the poetry of Umberto Saba would be different without the Trieste Bora, or the Marseillaise detective trilogy by Jean-Claude Izzo without the Mistral.
