Description
THE BOOK
The volume consists of distinct essays that, together, propose, for the first time, a coherent and complete hypothesis of unitary reading of the entire iconography of the paved mosaic of the Otranto cathedral. These studies have defined the basis for the work of developing the film project Il viaggio di Seth ad Otranto by Michele Fasano, and later for the production of the creative documentary that resulted from them. The research was conducted, with different methodologies, by Michele Fasano (director and independent producer), Laura Pasquini (medievalist and archaeologist) and Giovanni Barba (author), with complementary results that belong to different disciplines: theology, philosophy of the image, visual anthropology, historical and artistic-historical research. Perhaps precisely because of this the book succeeds in opening out that deep universalist and pluralist spiritual Mediterranean meaning to contemporary sensitivity that up to now historical-artistic research alone, often turned above all to the West for mythology, sources and theological verification, has not been able to grasp in interpreting the Otranto masterpiece.
General Characteristics:
Format: 24×22, wire stitching
Book pages 300
Preface: Franco Cardini
THE DVD
The documentary describes the masterly contents of the paved mosaic of the Otranto Cathedral and brings them alive through a journey in our times through the oriental Mediterranean horizon to which Otranto belonged when the mosaic was laid out. Along an itinerary that touches Albania, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Israel and Palestine, the story clarifies, in great depth, how the universal sense of that radical abolition of exclusions that characterised the original Christian spirit is still alive today. The admission of the non Hebrews and, in Otranto, of the non-Christians, (Hebrews and Moslems), with their original experience of faith in the Lordship of God that acts in the present. A Christian theological summa of the southern XII century that reflects strongly the influence of Islamic and Hebrew mysticism, in one, of the Mediterranean culture of the time.
” …joy in form and colours, real and imaginary flow, the multiplicity of the figures of the mosaic, the faces and places met on the journey harmonise in a cinematic embrace, ample like those of the great low branches of the Otranto Tree of Life: leaves, flowers and fruit of the same Unique plant of Reality, suspended between heaven and earth…”
General characteristics:
Title: “Il viaggio di Seth a Otranto”;
Direction: Michele Fasano;
Cast: Monika Pupa, Abdurrahman Tevruz, Jihad Yussef, Susan Nathan;
Audio contents: Arab, French, English, Italian, Turkish;
Duration: about 125 min. ;
Genre: creative documentary;
Video format: 16/9 – PAL
Audio: Stereo;
DVD type: DVD9.
