Mediterranea was born on the long and difficult to draw border of the sea. It would be better to say on a route. We often observe that borders extend, camouflage themselves, multiply. We do so when we talk about the externalisation of borders, rather than new legal mechanisms that move them far into the desert or into the heart of our cities (CPR).

In fact, it would be more accurate to look at it from the opposite angle: the history of the human quest for freedom is made up of routes, it is the borders that affect reality, imposing the violence of a stroke of the pen, a wall, a militarised space. The Moriscos (Muslims) and Marranos (Jews) expelled from Spain by the Inquisition in the 16th century sought to reach Venice or Istanbul to save their lives at the risk of their own, along routes made possible by the complicity of a veritable conspiratorial network that crossed the Mediterranean and Europe. Afro-descendants enslaved in the southern United States reached the north of the continent thanks to the so-called Underground Railroad, a network of clandestine passages made possible by the courage of people like Harriet Tubman, who risked the freedom they had won by escaping to help others escape. To these stories are added the stories of the revolutionaries, of the exiles who, as in "Addio Lugano Bella", take the road to the North or to the South to continue a struggle that can no longer be continued where it began.

These stories, timeless and yet deeply rooted in their own time, are the ones we encounter along the route of the Underground Railroad, and which we face according to the poet's principle: "He poured the wine and broke the bread for those who said: I am thirsty and I am hungry".

Today, long before and after Mediterranea, these journeys are possible not only thanks to the strength and courage of those who, moved by hope and despair, risk their lives to save their lives, refusing to accept the border as fate. They are also possible thanks to the "conspiracy of good" that is taking place in the Mediterranean: official and unofficial solidarity networks that oppose the injustice of the border.

For more than a year, Mediterranea has been actively involved in supporting these networks in some symbolic cities, such as Trieste, Oulx, Ventimiglia, in some camouflaged transit points, funnels along the route, such as Milan's central station, and also by developing a relationship with associations "on the other side of the border", i.e. in Switzerland, France, Germany, in the countries of this Europe that promises, even in its rhetoric, to abolish it in the not too distant future.

So we met families fleeing Gaza, young women who had taken part in the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' uprising in Iran, people who had left remote Central Asia, where the Taliban had reimposed their law even in the cities, and Sudanese fleeing the endless and renewed civil war that was destroying their country. Once, just to remind us that the world is more complicated than the most vivid imagination, we also met Nepalese people dissatisfied with the current government that overthrew a terrible monarchy (contradictions within the people).

In fact, this is a way of staying in touch with the world, beyond the bubbles of social networks, within a dynamic that is alive, true, complex, irreducible to the violence of borders, but also to our narrative, but this does not mean that we have to give up telling, and this is in fact the objective we have set ourselves with the meeting we are going to have in Milan with the Land Crews that have been activated on the railway and with the foreign ones. For those who remember the film "I'm with the Bride", we want to use an equally skilful combination of narrative and reality to convey the idea of the warmth of hot meals shared with people travelling along the underground railway routes.