Italian with English subtitles
Country of Origin: Italy
Director: Lorenzo Scaraggi
Producer: Omero su Marte
How many lives can an island have?
How many men could it have housed?
Sosandra talks about the story of a special island.
I have been in the heart of an archaeological excavation.
It happened last summer, July 2022.
I was a guest of the archaeologists of the Universities of Bari and Foggia on the island of Sant’Eufemia, off the coast of Vieste, Apulia, Italy.
The island has hosted places of worship for hundreds of years: dozens of men have stopped there due to the presence of the sanctuary or a source of water.
To the 3rd century BC some finds found near a cave sanctuary date back, linked to the cult of Venus Sosandra; the sanctuary over the centuries has become a Christian rock church.
In the mid-1800s, following the unification of Italy, the island became the site of a lighthouse.
Unfortunately the island has also been used as a quarry and many of the more remote testimonies have disappeared.
Today only one cave remains of the ancient sanctuary which however bears dozens of inscriptions on the walls which have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct part of its history. Among the inscriptions, the one left by Doge Orseolo II is worthy of mention: he stopped here with his ships before liberating Bari from the Saracens in 1003.
Even the many light-makers who have followed have left traces of their passage, sometimes erasing inscriptions hundreds of years old.
Apart from the history, the finds, the excavations, it is fascinating that over the course of 2500 years, whether it was for the devotion to Venus, the Holy Mary or for the presence of the lighthouse, the island has been a sacred place for position, for the opportunity to constitute a precious landing place, almost as if the island itself were the incarnation of Venus or of the Madonna, as if the island were Sosandra, the savior of men.
Director Biography – Lorenzo Scaraggi
Lorenzo Scaraggi, journalist, videoreporter, traveler.
Born in 1976, a graduate in literature, he defines himself as a curious man. Because of this curiosity he has always tried to travel, document, film or photograph everything that could satisfy his need for research.
Behind him numerous reports of a social nature, of war and the effects of war.
In 2012 he bought a 1982 camper van, renamed Vostok100k, in honor of the first mission of man in space, with the intention of turning it into a sort of bandwagon of stories, a mobile editorial office.
Over the years the Vostok100k project has grown.
On board the Vostok, in 2016, he traveled 20,000 kilometers alone along the borders of Europe, recounting the journey for Repubblica TV (collaboration continued for another two years).
In 2017 it was the turn of the South Cultural Routes, a journey commissioned by the MIBACT in search of social, anthropological and ethnographic stories told on social networks.
To 2018 instead dates back “Lungomare Italia”, a journey along the Italian coasts that has traced the footsteps of the “Long sandy road” traveled by Pasolini in 1959. In addition to dozens of interviews that tell the Italians’ relationship with the sea, “Lungomare Italia “had a regular column in” Radio 2 summer club “, RAI radio broadcast by Mauro Casciari.
2019 was the turn of “Madre Nostra”, a two-month long journey to make a documentary that represents, in effect, his first long documentary now on Amazon Prime Video.
In 2020 he wrote and directed IONIO, A DIALOGUE BEETWEEN TWO SEAS, a documentary about relationships beetwen Italian and Greek history in Taranto and Corfù.
KINTSUGI, a documentary about the childhood educational poorness, which he wrote and directed, was launched in 2021 and had its premiere at the GIFFONI FILM FESTIVAL 2022.
