Cayetana Guillen Crow in ' Pandataria'

Pandataria is an island belonging to the Pontine archipelago, Tyrrhenian Sea and measures 1.54 km2. During the time of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, women of the empire who did not conform to the norms (adulteresses, powerful, independent, politicians) were exiled to Pandataria to clean up the image of authority.

Julia the Elder was the first, followed by her daughter and granddaughter at different times in her life. Life in exile on such a small island with no possibility of leaving could be very boring and suffocating.

But Pandataria, as a prison island, came to represent a paradise for the forgotten. After the end of the Roman Empire, in 1941, three men named Spinelli, Rossi and Colorni ended up on the same prison island under the orders of Mussolini. They had questioned the dictator's rise to power and were exiled to Pandataria, which had already changed its name to Ventotene.

There, following in the footsteps of Julia the Elder and her descendants, they found their own paradise and drafted the text that would be the breeding ground for the Europe we know today: the Ventotene manifesto, whose full title is “For a free and united Europe”.

And it is curious that in a square kilometre surrounded by the Tyrrhenian Sea, with both physical and ideological borders that were impassable, the three men dreamed of eliminating all borders on the continent.

And that is Pandataria: the catch-all, the prison island, the island of the marginalized, of those who are not part of the norm, of those who come from the defective lot, of those who are not legal citizens, the island of those who are left over, of those who shake the world, of those who are not valid.

There is no instruction manual to know who is valid and who is not, but we know how to recognize transgression and we set it aside, we lock it up on an island of one square kilometer for fear of what is different.

 

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