I would have liked to begin by describing its blue—the wavelength, the purity of its radiance, its chromaticity—to approach that color that had no name until the Middle Ages, perhaps because it was difficult to contain the sky, the gods and dreams in a single word. I would have liked to evoke that absolute blue, that pure pigment, the blue we strained to glimpse behind the mountain, the blue we watched for as children from the back seat of the car, alert, waiting to be the first to point to it, the first to shout its name. That blue missing from the coastline where we lived then, reminding us every summer just how gray the English Channel is; that blue of returning to the native shore.

I would have liked to pay tribute to the inner sea, the sea of philosophy, the place where consciousness was invented, where democracy and great systems of thought were developed; to remember that this is the sea of the great logos, the cradle of literature; that we live under the rule of its myths, in the mirror of its heroes; that we immerse ourselves at will in its stories of the violence of human passions—love, lust, revenge—that shape our imagination; that it forms a melting pot where more than 25 languages circulate—including Arabic, Greek, Berber, Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian and Croatian—but whose only truly official language is translation. Yes, of course I would have liked to do that.

I would have liked to spread a map across the table and study its shape again, run my finger along its edges, read all the names, list the cities and lighthouses, the coves and temples, the Calypso Deep, plunging five miles beneath the surface where the African and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. I would have looked again at the thousands of islands scattered across it. I would have seen once more the sea between worlds, the sea that binds worlds together, the sea that connects continents—Africa, Asia, Europe—a bridge between people, a sea of exchange, commerce and passage. Mare Nostrum. And, in a kind of burst of enthusiasm, I might even have declared it the sea of diversity. Yes, I might have dared to say that.

I would have liked to linger over those suspended hours in Beirut, in a café in Raouché, where the searing voice of Fayrouz floated through the air, the sea spread out sensuously and languidly before the ruined shoreline, while I read on my phone that my friend was dying; to revisit the day we arrived in Mahón after nearly sinking in the Gulf of Lion, the boat’s sails torn apart in the storm, which we had to sew back together on the harbor quay before going to play checkers with some old fishermen; those nights in Stromboli, when the lights on the masts of the boats mingled with the stars and we wondered whether we would make it with the baby who was about to be born; that Sunday in Algiers, when I followed a young man with eyes lined in black through the Casbah until we stood before a cage holding a goldfinch that sang for us; the day I saw the Bay of Alexandria for the first time, the very embodiment of splendor; the woman who told me her entire life one night on the ferry to the Cyclades. I would have liked to tell those journeys, those crossings and that longing, those stories of the Mediterranean.

But I will not write that text.

The blue, the beauty, the great logos, the civilizations, democracy - no, frankly, it is over. Finished.

When I typed méditerranée into the search engine of the French newspaper Le Monde, the first result, laconic and inevitable, referred to yet another shipwreck: 12 migrants whose bodies were recovered on Aug. 23. The second article warned of the unprecedented warming of the Mediterranean, whose impact on marine life was leading scientists to say they were entering “an unknown world.”

I was not surprised.

I sank into the black water.

Twelve drowned. Twelve more. Tunisians. Twelve individuals carrying with them their past, their feelings, their stories, their clothes, the photographs in their plastic-wrapped documents, medals, talismans, along with their dreams and fears.

Twelve to remind us, if we need reminding, that the central Mediterranean route is the deadliest migration route in the world: 26,734 people have died over the past decade, according to the International Organization for Migration, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, hoping to cross the Mediterranean from Libya or Tunisia. A figure comparable to the death toll of a war, although, as in a war, the true number of lives erased can never be known.

Twelve bodies bringing the death toll since the beginning of 2026 to 914 and pointing to a killing machine that is growing ever more deadly. The number of people who drowned more than doubled in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier.

The scale of this massacre, and the magnitude of the phenomenon now haunting the Mediterranean, expose the hardening of the border between its European and African shores, where in antiquity it was known as Mare Nostrum, our common sea.

Turning inward and ignoring those in front of them, the states along the northern shore are deploying increasingly harsh measures to control and reduce migration flows from the southern shore, when the urgent priority is to save lives.

Here and there, a body is reported to be washed up on a beach, a corpse floating silently on the water, where it becomes a perch for birds, if it does not sink to the bottom of the sea.

Abandoned, it will remain unburied, while a new cemetery is being built on Lampedusa.

— Translation by Maria Baiocchi © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED