Everything started in 2014 as I was back to Messina after years abroad and felt myself drawn to the part of the city that lies around the central station, a place of frictions and confluences, encounters and combinations, at once a boundary that hides the sea and a passage leading beyond the tracks, to a territory enclosed by abandoned buildings and factories, invisible from the city. A trashed stripe of sand whose oldest inhabitant lives in a shack without running water or sewers, the last of dozens built along the coast after the second world war. Not far, women and men who have no other place to go live in a 17th citadel, greatest monument survived the earthquake that wiped out the city in 1908. For five years I’ve been spending my time with the people who live on a strip of coast that the train tracks separate from the heart of the city, along the edges of messina, where the garbage and rubble of the past emerge while the shore is bathed in a sea of magic and tragedy. This experience comes from the necessity of establishing a real connection with a city that doesn’t keep traces of its past. It’s a diary of a moving toward a center, both anatomical and emotional.