Logos and Phronesis are two cornerstone concepts of ancient Greek philosophy, often described metaphorically as the “spiritual” children of Minerva. They represent the fundamental qualities of which the goddess is the protector. The former is mathematical reason, the efficiency that calculates and optimises. The latter, its elder sister, is prudence, the sense of limits, bearing the divine antidote to excess, asymmetry and imbalance. In the ancient world, Logos remained subordinate to Phronesis; modernity has reversed this relationship, leaving Logos alone, convinced that it is self-sufficient, in an obsessive attempt to overcome every limit.
A contemporary reading of this relationship was proposed by economist and philosopher Serge Latouche, who associates Phronesis with Mediterranean reason (S. Latouche, 1999). The Mediterranean thus becomes a possible counterweight to modernity: a place of conciliation, measure and rebalancing, capable of questioning a model of development founded on growth and performance. Its ancient romantic baggage can be reread, in a postmodern key, as a possible proposition for a qualitative, relational way of life, more attentive to the value of measure.
Anthropology, the media, the social sciences and even politics have long tried to define its boundaries. At times, as a simple geographical expression, the sea from which it takes its name; at others, as an idea, a symbol, a discursive field in which hopes, conflicts and illusions intertwine. The term belongs, so to speak, to a family of amphibious concepts: they live on the streets as much as in university classrooms, in politicians’ speeches as much as in research laboratories. This layering has produced different narratives over time, often contradictory. And today, a new identity narrative of the Mediterranean seems to be emerging, one capable of overturning decades in which it was told primarily as a synonym for backwardness, mystery and otherness. To give just one of the many possible examples, we might think of the cover of the Dutch magazine Elsevier Weekblad, which in 2020 published an illustration depicting a industrious and highly productive North, represented by a female manager and a worker operating enormous gears, and a gluttonous South, with a man — typically portrayed with a moustache — enjoying the sunshine while a woman takes selfies for social media.
Today, however, even within the interstices of politics, academia and civil society in Southern Italy and across the Mediterranean South, a different narrative is gaining ground. The South is reclaiming its own virtues: balance, slowness, relationality, and the ability to offer an alternative to the dominance of an increasingly cold, accelerated and excessive Western rationality. It is as if, to borrow Francescomaria Tedesco’s image, we were swinging on a pendulum that keeps returning to the same narrative space, merely feeding its opposites: on one side, an idle and lazy Mediterranean; on the other, a slow and virtuous one; on one side, a flaw in modernity; on the other, a breach in the Western logic. Neither completely exotic nor completely familiar, the Mediterranean finds itself suspended between a here and an elsewhere, between an us and a them, between a genealogy of intimacy and a geography of otherness. This is where we started from with Magma 2026: not entirely willing to accept the pendulum’s movement, but rather confident that we could better understand the complexity of the contemporary Mediterranean and, in some respects, its elusiveness.
We therefore asked ourselves: what does it mean to be Mediterranean? Is it right to seek a shared framework of meaning among the peoples who inhabit it, or does the very meaning of being Mediterranean lie in its mosaic-like composition? We will try to answer these questions on 26 and 27 November in Matera, through the voices of those who study, act, make decisions and live for and within the Mediterranean every day. We will do so together with EIT Culture & Creativity, Fondazione Fitzcarraldo, the ISMED Institute and Fondazione Matera-Basilicata 2019. To do so, we have chosen to follow two directions, two vantage points from which to observe the key issues shaping this geographical area: economies first; communities second.
We begin with the economy.
It is through employment rates and productivity rankings that the Mediterranean has for the longest time been described as an unfinished version of a model developed elsewhere. Its businesses, often too small and too informal, have frequently been seen as unable to keep pace with the demands of contemporary economic and financial life. After all, this pattern has deep roots. In the eleventh century, Maghrebi merchants, whose letters resurfaced from the Cairo Geniza, conducted trade from one shore to the other through a reputation-based system in which a person’s word was worth as much as a contract. Many centuries later, a strand of Italian economic sociology recognised in industrial districts and networks of small businesses a distinctive way of producing value. At the same time, between 2022 and 2024, more than 175,000 young people aged between 25 and 34 left Southern Italy, even as youth employment was growing — a sign that work alone is not enough to make people stay. So, what kinds of business systems and models can we imagine today that are capable of generating economic value, identity and sustainability within their specific context?
On the second day, we turn to communities, exploring the themes of coexistence and otherness: in cities reshaped by mobility, in shrinking inland areas, and in forms of cooperation that allow a collective economy to keep a village alive. Public discourse habitually treats coexistence as a problem to be managed, a pressure to be contained at borders and in peripheral areas. But what are the people who cross these shores — and those who choose to remain — already building between them? And under what conditions could this become a shared agenda? Despite the complexity of the questions before us, we are convinced that, thanks to the contribution of our partners and the participation of people from institutions, civil society, research and business, we can begin to construct an answer to the question: What kind of Mediterranean do we want to build for ourselves and for those who will inhabit it? An answer capable of promoting a model free from the rigid postures of recent years, and open and welcoming towards otherness.