Page 428 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

428 from Italy to the Canary Islands

daydream also has measure. And it is this measure that takes a
myth down from the sky and gives it a human face. All is under-
stood in an instant, a fragment of time when suddenly everything
that has been thought takes form and content. Who knows on what day - at
sunrise, at sunset - that instant passed through the mind of Lanzarotto
Malocello... That fragment of becoming did not dissolve, but turned in-
stead into a small mausoleum of sense, architecture that opposes transi-
ence, a jewellery box that holds an adventure, an intuition that marks an
existence. Lanzarotto Malocello as the creator of one of the most incred-
ible trajectories of History. In the wake of Romans and Phoenicians, he
ventured toward worlds where every horizon, every sunrise and sunset,
meant the illusion of sighting God. What’s adventure if not a deep, silent
request to capture the Absolute?
Lanzarotto Malocello as the architect of a crucial moment of an era not yet
perceived as “Modern History”. Although he belongs to the 14 century, a
th
world still “medieval”, he anticipated the great discoveries of the Modern
Age, not as a Conqueror but, more righteously, as an Explorer. As a man
seeking knowledge and new horizons, he carried with him fragments of a
mercantile civilization along with humane principles with which to seek
out adventures of fate unknown. And if he stayed in one of the islands of the
archipelago for more than twenty years, in that sacred area of his house
from which to gaze at a no longer feared ocean, it was perhaps because his
peaceful soul, void of any idea of struggle and conquest, found in that spot
a place to live, maybe a possible Eden. He brought calm to that corner of
the world of the Canary Islands. How distant from those who would take
to sea in the following centuries! How far from the words conquest, dis-
possession, blood! And thus, as we experienced the figure of “Lanzarotto
Malocello”, we do not feel daring in defining him a champion of peace,
over there, between the ocean storms and the cruelty of the men who would
come.

Dr. Fernando Acitelli
journalist, writer