The recent collaboration agreement signed by the Central Institute of the Intangible Heritage* and the municipality of Porto San Giorgio has led in a very short time to the realization of a center dedicated to the intangible heritage of the central Adriatic area. It is a new touristic-cultural attraction for the city and the entire region. The room, inside the Palazzo Trevisani, in the historical center of Porto San Giorgio, is divided into 3 sections: the Storm, the Harbor of the Sounds and the Changing Wave.

The first section, that is the Storm, is constituted by a “microcinema”, an immersive audiovisual structure in which you will have the feeling of being dragged into the thundering Storm, a tempest that struck the Adriatic coasts on March 30, 1935 and defined by the Le Marche region’s fishermen as the “the end of the world”. This microcinema is based on the oral stories in the ancient Porto San Giorgio’s dialect of the survived sailors, which were collected during the 1970s by the curator of the project Francesco De Melis, a visual anthropologist, film-maker, photographer, composer and curator of ethnographic museums, as well as director of the documentary.

The second section, that is the Harbor of the Sounds, constituted by several aligned screens, wants to produce the “sound field” of the maritime environments.

It is a documentary shot in San Benedetto del Tronto by the ethnomusicologist Francesco De Melis, a cinematographic homage to the fishing harbors of the Adriatic area, ancient places of a historic seafaring. A documentary which tells the “environment” of the harbor, the shapes of the boats, and the fishing, industrial, trading, military sounds. The voices of ship’s carpenters and sailors are mixed and blended with the other sounds, creating a sort of “mixing in the open air” of which the wind is maybe the main “sound engineer”.

In the third section, that is the Changing Wave, there is a traditional and original lug sail with a “tailwind” which shows you how the vessels and their own sails have been changed over the years.

The works of video art belong to the international project “Unwritten structures – Racconti (In)visibili”, and they are dedicated to the sea theme, to the fishing and sailing. However, they will also be used for didactic activities and thematic meetings dedicated to the customs and knowledge of the central Adriatic area’s seafaring.

By this collaboration agreement with the municipality of Porto San Giorgio, the Central Institute of the Intangible Heritage not only launches an important project for the intangible cultural heritage of the Adriatic seafaring and the knowledge of living with the sea, but also reinforces some fundamental and precious points for the current emergency: to support the communities and the territory by offering a technical-scientific collaboration aiming at developing the activities to safeguard, enhance and spread the knowledge of the intangible cultural heritage, contributing also to the development of the cultural tourism and its related territorial microeconomies.

Free entry: friday and sunday 16.00 – 20.00; saturday 18.00-23.00

*Istituto Centrale per il Patrimonio Immateriale – ICPI