Mare, porti, città, migrazioni e contaminazioni culturali

The article deals with the relationship between seas, ports and cities by developing the analysis around the Mediterranean Sea as a transformative space between cultures. If we imagine the Mediterranean ports as the backwash of the centuries-old cultural, social and economic concentration of that sea, of the looks and perspectives that dominated it, they become an interesting space for observing the contemporary world. The Mediterranean ports and their cities, historically places of interculture and exchange, become the synthesis of complex social dynamics that tell the contradictions of the global economic system. On the one hand, some of them are berths of large cruise ships with a significant impact on the local economy, on the other they welcome large ships engaged in rescuing migrants at sea, with a significant political, social and economic impact on cities. The article will analyze the contemporary phenomenon of the overlapping of the figures of the migrant and the cruiser in two Mediterranean cities, Messina and Cagliari, telling of an encounter between cultures and “habitus” that never dialogue, but are two sides of the same coin.