COVER  NOTES
FMO

The photomontage shows two mountains in the antipodes, even though in geographical terms Annapurna and the Sibillines are not in the antipodes at all. The distance between them, however, is so great that we can find no better image to represent it than that of opposiition, of diametrically- opposed positions. An opposition consisting moreover of altitudes and incomparable civilizations. And yet both these mountains  are places of sacredness: Annapurna the goddess of Abundance, and the Sibyl the oracle-whispering prophetess. In an attempt to dissolve the distance and the alterity between them, to frustrate their, or rather, our idea of the antipodes (in Greek, 'having the feet opposite'),came a group of people from the Marches who arrived in Nepal, no chance tourists, a group of people who have been unable for some time to touch the ground with their feet and who move in their lives and in their travels by means of a wheelchair. Their mobility and their challenge have drawn a horizon that surpasses the roof of the world and all the various barriers beneath it, marking an ideal line of contact between nearness and otherness. The so near and so far, measured with the spreading of solidarity and the correlated awareness of human limits, that can overcome any altitude or latitude.