The Libyan Mausoleum, respecting history and restoring dignity

HISTORICAL NOTES: In 1911 the Giolitti government started a colonial war against Turkey, which dominated Libya. An Arab-Turkish counterattack surprised the Italian soldiers in Shara Shatt on October 23 of the same year, killing 500 of them. The Italian repression was immediate and ruthless: over 2,000 Arabs were shot or hanged and 5,000 deported to Italy and confined to the islands of Ustica, Ponza, Favignana, Gaeta and Tremiti. The deportation began on October 26, 1911. Libyans, captured in the Tripoli area, arrived at the Tremiti: beggars, wealthy owners, farmers, merchants, traders, elderly people, even women and children. All accused of conspiring with the Turkish enemy. After three days of navigation, where the first deaths were counted, the first ship arrived at the Tremiti Islands with 600 deportees. Eventually the Libyans landed in the Diomedean archipelago between 1366 and 1391. In June 1912, 437 people died, a third of those arriving, due to hardships and diseases such as typhoid and cholera. THE PROJECT: Following the Italo-Libyan agreements of 4 July 1998 and 5 August 1999, the Italian Institute for Africa and the East, a public authority closed in 2012, promoted the creation of a commemorative work around the burial places of Libyans deported and died in the Tremiti Islands between 1911 and 1912. The people of the Tremiti Islands wanted to restore dignity to those who were no longer alive, and until 2006 completely erased from history, regardless of nationality and religion, through a worthy burial in an open-air mausoleum in the places where they had been forgotten in a common grave. The Mausoleum inaugurated in 2006. The Mausoleum was completely redesigned due to the extreme conditions of decay in which it was found in 2019, according to the fundamental elements of the original project and developing others: 1. The Entrance Portal marks the gap between earthly reality and the house of God; 2. The Minaret or Tower signals the presence of the temple, like a lighthouse on the coast and culminates at the top with the Islamic crescent; while below the "five duties on which Islam is founded" are mentioned. 3. The third element identifies, in the circular entrance area, an imaginary dome, which represents the cosmos, of which the individual is an integral part. The area converges, through an overturned cone, downwards into the "earthly zone" of the Minaret and opens up "towards infinity". To the left of the circular sacred area we find the names of the Libyan deceased engraved on the plate; on the right, the slab creates a contemplative seat in the shape of an Islamic crescent. 4. The fourth element is represented by the road one takes to get to God, a straight path in the direction of Mecca, which ends in a small open-air exedra dedicated to prayer, where the sounds emitted by an organ in the wind remind the visitor of the human sacrifice consumed on the island. At the edge of this area there are 24 iron rods, representing the broken lives of the children and adolescents who died in this sad page of Italian history. 5. The fifth and new element finds a foundation in the materials used: the wooden planks housed along the path, recycled from the 2006 Mausoleum, and the corten steel of which it is made, recall shipwrecks, metaphors of human sacrifice in research of freedom and dignity.