The "Metamorfosi” project was born in collaboration with the Minister of the Interior Luciana Lamorgese, the Excise, Customs and Monopoly Agency and its General Manager, Marcello Minenna, and the Milan - Opera House of Prison.

The Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti Foundation (https://casaspiritoarti.it/en/), since its inception in 2012, has been promoting witness projects to make people aware, especially the younger generations, of the drama experienced every day by migrants trying to reach the Italian coasts, often losing their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. They are children, women and men who, due to wars, poverty and famine, decide to undertake these journeys, which are their only hope to think about a future of dignified life.

Many children are left by their parents with relatives and make their journey alone on these boats: they are the "unaccompanied minors".

Faced with this contemporary tragedy that sees the Mediterranean Sea as the largest cemetery in Europe, our Foundation wanted to think of a cultural and knowledge project: “Metamorfosi”.

“Metamorfosi” (Metamorphosis) because the idea is to transform the wood of the boats into musical instruments and objects of testimony of a sacred nature, so that people and especially young people can know a reality that is often removed, looked at with indifference or faced and told in ideological way.

The people detained in the Milan - Opera House of Detention transform the wood of the boats coming from Lampedusa into objects of hope.

For 10 years, in fact, the workshop of Lutherie and Carpentry (https://casaspiritoarti.it/en/projects/lutherie-workshop-in-the-opera-prison) has been active in this Institute, where 5 detained are employed by the Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti Cooperative, which works together with the Foundation.

The idea is that a model that can be replicated in other Italian and foreign prisons can be born from the Opera prison.

The value of the transformation of wood is twofold: on the one hand, work and dignity are given to detained people, on the other, we want to propose a project to create awareness, especially among young people: the wood that the prisoners work is in fact the bearer of a story to reflect deeply on.

In the Lutherie and Carpentry workshop inside the prison, the first violin was born, taken from a few woods of the boats brought to prison in Christmas 2021, which was called "The Violin of the Sea" (https://casaspiritoarti.it/en/projects/metamorfosi/the-violin-of-the-sea). Hence the idea of asking the Minister of the Interior Luciana Lamorgese for some boats so that a real orchestra made up of violins, cellos and violas could be created from the wood of these boats, which could become a sign of itinerant testimony.

From the boats, on which migrant people who often lost their lives have traveled, the Foundation will give birth to the "Orchestra del Mare" (The Orchestra of the Sea) project, which will take place over the two-year period 2022 - 2023.

From the 10 boats that were entrusted to the Foundation by the Ministry of the Interior and transported to the Opera prison on 23 February, a second violin, the first viola and the first cello will be obtained in the Workshop in the course of 2022.

Over the course of 2023, the detainees will make 6 violins from the same wood.

Supervising the work will be the craftsman Francesco Tuccio and the luthier Enrico Allorto, who will personally make the instruments together with the prisoners.

In December 2022 the instruments to form a string quartet will therefore be ready.

This first group of instruments will be lent to Italian and foreign orchestras in order to be a signal of testimony.

With each orchestra that asks for the instruments, the Foundation will establish a musical program and share the spirit so that these instruments can be played, bringing with them a culture of knowledge, hospitality and integration through beauty and harmonies.

In 2023, other violins will be added to the string quartet to form a real orchestra whose instruments, as for the string quartet, will be lent to even more numerous ensembles.

The "Orchestra del Mare" project therefore comes to life when the instruments obtained from the boats are played by the orchestras that adhere to the project: it will travel, through them, to witness, in Italy and abroad, the drama that hundreds of migrant people experience every day.

Along with the musical instruments that will make up the Orchestra del Mare, crosses will be built in the workshop inside the prison to be donated to Italian schools. In this way the Foundation project called “The Journey of the Lampedusa Cross” develops even more (https://casaspiritoarti.it/en/projects/the-journey-of-the-lampedusa-cross), opening up to an even broader testimony and it addresses, in agreement with the Ministry of the Interior, to all Italian schools.

The Foundation has collaborated since its inception with artists friends who are able with their art and their sensitivity to communicate the incommunicable: human pain. So it was with Ennio Morricone, who donated his composition La voce dei sommersi (“The voice of the submerged people”) to the Foundation, dedicated to the drama of those who die at sea in search of a future of hope. When the “Violin of the Sea” was created, the Foundation asked Nicola Piovani to write an original composition for this instrument and like Ennio Morricone, Piovani accepted with immediate enthusiasm to share the Foundation's project by writing the composition Canto del legno (https://youtu.be/W7BSsa7ozv4).

“Metamorfosi” is also a project of face-to-face acquaintance with the boats that come from Lampedusa.

The project actually begins in the Milano-Opera prison house, where three boats have been placed inside the prison, forming what has been called the "Piazza del Silenzio" (Silence Square). Inside this square located in the center of the prison, young people from schools will be able to stop and listen to the testimony of migrants who have personally experienced the journey on the boats. "I for one, until I was in Lampedusa, did not realize that more than 60 people could travel crammed into a boat of only 6 meters" - says the Foundation president, Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori - “I did not know that in the very small holds, children traveled for whole days, and when these boats capsize, they are the first to die trapped. Until this drama is seen first-hand, one cannot really understand even a small part of the pain and story of those who face these journeys ".

In this way, school children will therefore be able to undertake a real immersive and knowledge journey to become aware of this contemporary drama.

- Minister of the Interior, Luciana Lamorgese:

"The “Metamorfosi”  project is a very important opportunity to promote a new awareness on a complex and dramatic theme such as that of migration. The initiative highlights the ability of institutions and civil society to walk together towards a common commitment: to offer a new project of life thanks to the work of those who are serving their sentences in the Opera prison and in other prisons that will join the project. The fact that the wood of the boats arrived in Lampedusa will take the form of musical instruments assumes a strong symbolic value, a sign of hope like the cribs already made for Christmas 2021".

- Minister of Justice, Marta Cartabia: 

Although - with regret - I cannot be with you, I would like to communicate to you, to the Minister of the Interior, to the director general of the Customs and Monopolies Agency, to the president of the Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti Foundation and to all those present my sentiments of gratitude for the progress of the “Metamorfosi” project for the birth of an "Orchestra del “Mare”, conceived in Opera. Apparently almost an oxymoron for a maximum security prison. Instead, it is a concrete project that unites Milan and Lampedusa; which intertwines the hopes - and the tragedies - of migrants with the expectations - and pains - of prisoners, in the universal language of music. By welcoming these ten boats, today we are giving a second life to apparently irrecoverable boards, which can instead be sublimated into musical instruments. At the same time, we give a second chance to those who, while serving their sentence, will work to transform those boats into a violin, a viola and a cello. Building a violin is an art that requires patience, care, effort. The same patience, care and effort necessary in a reintegration path for those who have committed a crime and undertake to make amends. When these woods, impregnated with salt and hopes, will play in the future “Orchestra del mare”, they will give voice to all this: to the dreams and anxieties of those who have sought a rebirth on these boats; to the extreme breaths of those who have never finished that navigation and to the efforts of those who have sought redemption. Lampedusa and Opera; the Favaloro pier and the prison lutherie. Distant and different realities, approached by the “Metamorfosi” project, capable of uniting institutions and civil society. So I wish everyone good work, waiting to be able to applaud a concert by the “Orchestra del Mare”.

- Director General of Excise, Customs and Monopoly, Marcello Minenna:

"The Excise, Customs and Monopoly Agency has also the task of removing and disposing of boats used by migrants, sunk within 12 nautical miles or otherwise abandoned on the coasts and beaches of Italy. Contributing to the “Metamorfosi” project constitutes for us a source of great pride and testimony of how the synergistic action of state institutions can always constitute an added value, particularly when they support awareness and solidarity initiatives ".

- Director of the Milan-Opera House of Prison, Silvio Di Gregorio: 

"With real pleasure but also with a deep sense of respect and responsibility we have embraced the “Metamorfosi” project, so that we can offer a further opportunity for change to the detainees, if they wish so. They will have the opportunity of a "wise" reinterpretation of their crime while, with infinite patience, planing and smoothing the wood of the migrants who tell so much about human suffering. The time devoted to this work will help them to recover their human dignity and, therefore, to change the cardinal points of their lives, taking care of the civil community and contributing with their work to the "material or spiritual progress of society" (art 4 , co. 2 of the Italian Constitution). In short, a project of human and social redemption, which takes care of people and which, starting from their personal history, helps them to reorient their present and future life towards that goal that animates everything and moves everything according to very specific, even if sometimes mysterious, designs. Precisely for this reason, everyone is an infinite surprise! "

- President of the Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti Foundation, Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori:

“Metamorfosi” is a project of witness, so that people, especially the younger ones, can know and become aware of the drama that migrants live every day in many countries of the world, forced to flee from wars, persecutions, poverty, famine. A project that speaks through art and spirituality, going beyond any political exploitation of such a delicate issue, in front of which we must first of all be silent. 

- President of the Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti Cooperative, Luisa Sorrentino:

“The profound comment of the Minister of the Interior Luciana Lamorgese is reflected in the function carried out by the Cooperative Casa dello Spirito e delle Arti which literally lives alongside the Foundation to concretize the meaning of projects through work. It is in fact the operational tool that deals with offering prisoners real opportunities for regularly paid work: a way to atone for their mistakes, as well as with dignity, with a view to future social reintegration." 

- A special thank to the head of the Excise, Customs and Monopoly Office of the Sicilian Channel, Luca Benini, who has completed the operations of entrusting the boats, also coordinating the logistics. In addition to the sense of duty, he clearly made his own feeling of sharing be perceived with the spirit of the project.