The well-known Italian-American director Martin Scorsese, author of great cinema masterpieces, is about to land in Sicily to shoot a docufilm dedicated to ancient shipwrecks. The filming will in fact be carried out during the summer in the Strait of Sicily, with the collaboration of the Superintendency of the Sea for the entire marine and underwater part, where in ancient times it was a crossroads of traffic including works of art from the Hellenic world to the ancient Rome. Probably in the lost cargo of one of the sunken ships, perhaps due to some storm, there was also the bronze statue of the Dancing Satyr fished in March 1998 by the Mazarese motor fishing vessel “Capitan Ciccio” and kept, after the restoration, with other treasures of the sea in the museum in Piazza Plebiscito in Mazara del Vallo.
Even the Dancing Satyr, whose extraordinary forms would have been attributed to the genius of the great Praxiteles, will come to the attention of the cinematic eye of the director of “Goodfellas”; it will be an important opportunity to enhance the statue which to date, after the infatuation following its discovery, seems to have almost fallen into oblivion. Scorsese and his crew will stop in other locations in the province of Trapani where important testimonies of antiquity are kept: in the archaeological park of Selinunte, at the Cave di Cusa, in the site of Marsala-Lilibeo, in Marausa where the wreck was recently discovered ” Marausa 2” – and, again at the Agostino Pepoli regional museum in Trapani, at the Salinas regional archaeological museum in Palermo.
Furthermore, among the chosen locations there are the Tonnara di Favignana, the island of Mozia, Erice and Pantelleria; other locations being identified. On his tour of Sicily Scorsese will also stop in Polizzi Generosa, the hometown of the director’s grandparents. The film will be based on a project by underwater archaeologist Lisa Briggs, professor and researcher at the University of Cranfield in England, and will be co-produced by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Sicilian Region, by ‘Sikelia Productions’ which is headed by Scorsese himself, from Sunk Costs Producions, Chad A.
Verdi and LBI Entertainment. “We welcomed the initiative with enthusiasm – said councilor Francesco Paolo Scarpinato – making available all the sites, archaeological parks and museums pertaining to the department, considering the relevance of the project and the huge image return for Sicily and its cultural heritage”.
Francesco Mezzapelle
