L'ARIA DEI MESSAPI

On March 1997 Luigi Caricato together with the poet Giampiero Neri came out with the idea of an unusual publication that didn't have a precise referring period. The title, "L'Aria dei Messapi" (The Air of Messapi), refers to ancient inhabitants of Salento.

"The AIR", and not "The EARTH" instead, because according to Neri the concept of AIR effectively implies the sense of movement and width of views and boundaries as well, that the EARTH cannot express as such. So far, almost forty booklets of ARIA DEI MESSAPI have been published.

Each of them has a limited run of 500 copies in order to offer a more profound and clear reading, less vanishing of our reality, and with a privileged view on rural world and in particular on olive and oil.Why oil? The initiative, whose reasons are merely affective, started in the first place as support to the communication activity of Luigi Caricato's family farm.

Caricato's parents and brothers, in fact, own a farm placed nearby the Messapi capital town Rudiae, close to the present Lecce, in the Salento region.

The farm, founded in 1815 by the great-great-grandfather Luigi Guido, includes some olive estates and an oil mill. Still bound to his family, Luigi decided to show his contribution and closeness to them through his "spiritual", rather than "material" support.

Most of the texts in the booklets are unpublished works of contemporary authors, except some unexploited literary productions that are reproposed here as a tribute to their authors. Among them, voices of poets such as Giuseppe De Dominicis (1869-1905) and Girolamo Comi (1890-1968) are worth to be mentioned...

Among the unpublished works there are texts of Giampiero Neri, Maurizio Cucchi, Antonio Riccardi, Giuseppe Pontiggia, Vivian Lamarque, Franco Loi, Cesare Greppi, Roberto Mussapi, Donatella Bisutti, Ermanno Krumm, Tomaso Kemeny, Carmen Gregotti, Roberto Carifi, Angelo Crespi, Bianca Garavelli, Marina Corona, Meeten Nasr, Elvira Battaini, Giorgio Mannacio...