Voci dal mare. Un mosaico di vite nell’opera di Evelina Santangelo

This article analyzes Evelina Santangelo’s "Il sentimento del mare" (2023) as a polyphonic literary work that reimagines the Mediterranean Sea as a living, relational, and politically charged space. Combining memoir, reportage, philosophical reflection, and social critique, Santangelo constructs the sea not as a passive setting but as an active interlocutor through which issues of migration, ecological crisis, memory, and identity are explored. The sea emerges as an ambivalent space of life and death, care and violence, foregrounding collective responsibility for contemporary geopolitical and environmental conditions. Particular attention is given to the text’s engagement with female, scientific, and marginalized voices, which challenge traditional, masculine representations of the maritime imaginary. By intertwining personal memory with collective histories, Santangelo situates individual experience within broader social and ecological frameworks. The article argues that Il sentimento del mare exemplifies an engaged literary practice that uses narrative to interrogate the Anthropocene and to propose alternative ways of understanding human coexistence with nature and with others.