un euromediterraneen en marseille

The room was full and only few people where still hanging at the translation equipment table in order to get the headphones. It's always like that, they enter, they take a seat and they think that everybody will speak only in English. Then they get disappointed with all the French which is spoken and they finally realise that the translation equipment is made for this reason (...) so the room was full and the speech on intercultural dialogue in the Euro-Med region started with the usual mixture of common senses, stereotypes created to fight stereotypes but still with a some serious scientific construction of the speech and obvious references to the city of Marseille.

Then Al Idrissi was screened into the room... or rather his map, the one that he made for Ruggero il Normanno (king of Sicily). The Arab geographer would have laughed though if he would have been standing on the stage below the power point screen, because (obviously?) the technicians of the event reversed the orientation of his map, they put the north on the top, as they were used to do it. This would have been a total scandal or a strange innovation in the cartography of the XII century...

...it was just a mistake of the technicians, but actually what was happening, or already happened, outside the conference room, in the streets and in the port of Marseille was exactly the same thing: many actors already turned the map of the city upside-down.

In rue de la Republique, in the Panier, on the old docks of the Jolliette and now almost touching the market of noailles, the North replaced the South: Paris instead of Algiers. Not only a simple gentrification of the old city but a real revolution, st. charles station and the TGV vs the traffics of the harbour (most of them transferred to Fos). Marseille, candidate for the European Cultural Capital 2013 and transforming itself thanks to the Euro-Mediterranée project sponsored by the central state.

What stayed? A fantastic city, beautifully mediterranean, sunny, pastis, pagnol. Fabio Montale, petanque.... le 13 coins still serves a pastis for 1 euro 50 but until when?