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In the context of Mediterranean geopolitics, refugees crossing and drowning, fortress Europe, colonial history, skewed markets, condescending north to south (top to bottom) attitudes, post-colonial stagnation and so forth, means the simple rotation of the map is a big political statement with humanizing tendencies that make transnational ties look more intimate. That is an artistic statement in itself. This does not mean it will work for all maps, but it does so with the Mediterranean basin given the weight of its contemporary politics and long rich history.

What Réthoré’s artwork also does is furnish a metaphysical canopy to Gianluca Solera’s idea of transnational Mediterranean citizenship and breathes life into the dying political imagination

the grim reality of securitization, refugee crisis, and a pandemic overturning the world as we know it, can eclipse the years that saw thousands of initiatives taking place, stories, theorizing, training, in what Solera has deemed a Mediterranean “Shadow government.” Moreover, the region is moving towards a thinking in which the social contract will require rewriting as it faces the pressures of epidemiological threats, climate change, alarm at the dominance of big tech, to the receding of the long-haul flight in favor of local and regional travel, a travel bubble in some cases.

Before the pandemic struck, fewer than 60 of Italy’s 7,903 municipalities had a dedicated Islamic cemetery, in a country that is home to more than 2 million Muslims. The limited number of burial spots has to do with the peculiar relationship between Italy’s Muslim community and Italy’s local officials. According to a 2019 U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, there were “only five mosques that Italy’s regional governments and Muslim religious authorities both recognized.” The faith’s other 1,200 religious centers nationwide are registered simply as nongovernmental organizations.

In 2015, legislators on the right proposed and passed a law to map the “Muslim cultural centers” and introduced a national registry for imams in order to aid police counterterrorism operations. “Under the excuse of terrorism, people are forced to pray in garages and basements, even on the sidewalks, denying them the right to open a mosque,” Somali Italian writer Shirin Ramzanali Fazel recently wrote. 

Muslim migrants to Italy often pay thousands of euros to repatriate the body of a loved one to the person’s country of origin. According to a 2018 paper issued by the Initiative for the Study of Multiethnicity, a think tank that studies the impact of migrants on Italian society, roughly 90% of relatives of the dead preferred to repatriate the body of a Muslim family member. The pandemic brought the issue of burial space to the forefront. Since Italy stopped allowing bodies to be sent out of the country on March 1, many had to be buried on Italian soil, and the stricture to hold the burial within 24 hours could not always be honored. 

The Synagogue Street, a narrow pathway with a mishmash of colors and smells from fishmongers and spice-sellers, lies at the heart of Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city. The street starts at a stone’s throw from the Hellenistic-era agora and snakes through the historical commercial center. It derives its name from the nine synagogues in its vicinity, four of which were in ruins until half a decade ago. “Unlike many cities of Europe, the Synagogue Street — or better, the Synagogue District — is right at the heart of town,” Nesim Bencoya, the coordinator of the Izmir Jewish Heritage Project, told Al-Monitor. “It is a compact neighborhood with its synagogues, cortejos [houses where families lived together], a rabbinate and numerous shops and businesses on the crisscrossing streets of Kemeralti, the commercial center. It is also an area where synagogues stand side by side with mosques, where businessmen from the Muslim, Jewish and Orthodox community engage in trade and songs in Turkish, Greek and Ladino are sung one after the other from the nearby taverns.” For the last 12 years, Bencoya has been going door to door to drum up support for his plans to revive the area and build a Jewish heritage center that would draw in locals and tourists.

At its zenith in the mid-19th century, the 50,000-strong Jewish population made up the second largest community after the Greeks in the city known in the Ottoman Empire as “Izmir, the infidel.” The city had 34 synagogues, a sophisticated hospital, local Torah schools and a posh college offering a curriculum in French. The city’s first printing press was a Jewish one, printing books in Hebrew, Ladino and eventually in English, and boyoz, the Jewish pastry whose name "bollos" means “little bread” in Ladino, became one of the city’s staple foods. 

Today, thanks to support from German Consulate of Izmir and the  Israel-based Mordechai Kiriaty Foundation, the elaborate wooden carvings at the ceiling of Ets Hayim Synagogue, the sumptuous floor mosaics of Hevra and the corridors of the Foresteros that tie several synagogues to each other have reemerged.

An analysis of newly released data from the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that by 2050 an additional billion people will be living in arid areas and regions with high water stress, where at least 40 percent of the renewable water supply is consumed each year. Two-fifths of the world’s population — 3.3 billion people in total — currently live in such areas.

the Middle East and North Africa regions have the highest level of water stress in the world. Climate change is shifting traditional precipitation patterns, making the regions drier and reducing their already scarce water supplies. Population growth and industrial use of water are expected to increase demand.

The WRI analysis accounts for surface water, but not groundwater stores that are tapped when lakes, rivers and reservoirs run dry. This means the new estimates may underestimate risk. Many rural areas use groundwater for drinking water and farmers worldwide rely on it for irrigation. But groundwater often replenishes much more slowly than surface water.