From the port of Castellammare del Golfo, in the province of Trapani, a 13-meter sailboat headed for New York has departed. The boat, built of aluminum and christened Nesea, is commanded by Francesco Felice Buonfantino, an architect and sailor, accompanied by his partner and a small group of friends. The route involves crossing the Atlantic and, once it touches the East Coast of the United States, sailing up the Intracoastal Waterway, the system of canals and rivers that connects Florida and Canada and keeps smaller boats from being exposed to the open sea.
Buonfantino is no ordinary sailor: he is the architect who designed the National Museum of Italian Emigration in Genoa, opening in 2022 inside the Commenda di San Giovanni di Prè, a medieval building historically linked to pilgrimages and sea travel. His firm, Gnosis, is also currently involved in the design of the emigration museum in Naples, which will be located in the historic Immacolatella building overlooking the port. The crossing with the Nesea thus becomes a concrete extension of the research and memory work that the architect has been carrying out for years.
The departure from Sicily has symbolic value: the island, between the 19th and 20th centuries, was one of the main lands of emigration to the United States. Ports such as Palermo and Messina saw hundreds of thousands of people set sail, mainly bound for Ellis Island, the sorting center opened in 1892 in New York. From Castellammare, today, a small crew ideally retraces that journey, not in search of work or survival, but to carry a symbol of memory.
In fact, on the boat will travel the flag made by the National Museum of Italian Emigration, which will be hoisted for the duration of the crossing and delivered to New York, right at Ellis Island. There it will find its place as tangible evidence of the link between the history of the Italians who left and the current reflection on migration. “We are all children of migration,” said Paolo Masini and Pierangelo Campodonico, president and director of MEI, “and the contribution of migrants has enriched the societies of yesterday as well as those of today.
The article From Sicily to New York, a sailing trip to remember the Italian diaspora comes from TheNewyorker.
