Latitude 35°30’N – Longitude 012°33’E. They seem to be coordinates, like many others, numbers of those codes that human beings have given themselves in an attempt – sometimes vain – to overcome fear by relying on ingenuity and science.

Instead, they are the coordinates of the dramatic shipwreck of October 3, 2013, when at 3.30 am at least 368 people lost their lives within sight of the coast of Lampedusa.

People are not numbers and that shipwreck, after all, represents a thousand others, in Lampedusa or elsewhere. That piece of the Mediterranean is a symbol, an appeal, so that people will never again die at the border. This is at the same time the last and the first stage of this Path of Peace, so that the safeguard of human life could always be the main priority of all human beings, of institutions and their policies, of laws and regulations. Everything, but really everything, comes afterwards. A strip of sea, with its coordinates, today represents a black hole, one of those maelstroms that populate so many tales of the sea in the mythologies of the north, where one feared to sink, victims in body and memory, forgotten and lost.