The port

The port of Gioia Tauro was always there, yet was never there, in my youth. Something so big and yet so out of place.

No one seemed to be working at the site of the port of Gioia Tauro on a Monday morning in November 2017. I had driven by the port fences many times before but that time I stopped. Where was everyone? At 12.00 on a Monday morning, shouldn’t it be buzzing with activity? It struck me as an anomaly that one of Italy’s busiest ports, as far as I knew, was so deserted.

I didn’t know much about ports then. I did not know how containers were moved from one place to the other; I didn’t really know how drugs were moved through containers either.

In summer 2018, on the beach of San Ferdinando, in front of a €4 Aperol Spritz as orange as the falling sky over the sea, on the left there it was, the port again, with the cranes over the water, the arms of global trade over the sea, as I would learn visiting other ports from 2019 for research on drug importation and organized crime on the waterfronts and harbours around the world. It’s strange how certain things, even if they are always there, impossible to miss, eventually get missed.

It’s difficult to unpack in my head why the port of Gioia Tauro was always there and yet was never there when I was a child. A self-contained world, that of a port, in the middle of three towns – Rosarno, Gioia Tauro and San Ferdinando – that looked completely out of place in comparison with the surrounding territory. The port is progress and international trade. The triad of Rosarno, Gioia Tauro and San Ferdinando – part of the so-called Piana, the flatland – is historically a territory linked to agricultural sectors. Lines and lines of olive trees and citrus groves here. The asymmetry between the port and the land behind it; the lack of a city behind the port; the clear disparity and tension between internationalization and attachment to the local, between progress and self-preservation.