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What is Sibania?
For many years we have been asked this question. What is Sibania? What does this name mean? We could not answer: the word itself does not exist, it means nothing: it is only a sound modulated by a voice.
Sibania was born many years ago, at first it echoed in the memory, perhaps from a word heard by chance and involuntarily crippled, perhaps the name of a distant country or a mysterious kingdom in the tales of the fathers, or who knows…
The Name is born first. Then the Name generates the thing.
And so the thing grew, almost inexorable, like a baby in its mother’s womb, you can’t stop it. Like an island that rises from the sea with all its cliffs and forests and the flights of birds, with all the telluric settlements that its emergence entails.
At first no one notices that it is there, then some sailors off course begin to draw it down in their maps, others look for it and do not find it…
And meanwhile, the island is there.
For many years Sibania had produced porcelain for dolls from the best Italian manufacturers, but no one knew it: it was just a word of mouth among the professionals. Someone came every now and then: some found asylum, some found the island inhospitable, some tried again, some said that everyone was crazy there. Like so… A bit to smile and a bit for real.
Like so… the years pass and Time smoothes the cliffs, turns the hardest rock into sand. It settles the balance or upsets them. Like so… if we put this beautiful poem by Gozzano to present us a bit trivially, it is because it allows us to answer the initial question: what is Sibania?
Sibania is the island that was not there.
Like so… a bit for fun and a bit for real.
“The most beautiful “
Guido Gozzano
1913, su La Lettura del Corriere della Sera
I. But more beautiful than all, the Island Never Found:
The one the king of Spain had from his cousin
The king of Portugal with sealed signature
And papal bull in Gothic Latin.
The Infante sailed off for the legendary realm,
saw the Fortunate Isles: Iunonia, Gorgo, Hera,
and the Sargasso Sea and the Dark Sea
searching for that isle… But the island was not there.
In vain the round-bottomed sailing galleys,
in vain the caravels armed their bows:
with due respect to the pope, the isle is hidden,
and Portugal and Spain still search for it.
II. The isle exists, appearing sometimes from afar
Between Teneriffe and Palma, suffused in mistery:
“… the Island Never Found!” From the high peak of Teide
The good Canarian points it out to the foreigner.
Marked on the ancient maps of the corsairs.
… Hifola to-be found? … Hifola pilgrim?…
The magic isle that glides over the seas;
mariners sometimes see her near..
And point their bows toward her blessed shore:
Among unfamiliar flowers soar lofty palms,
The divine aromatic forest, thick and lush,
Weeping cardamom, seeping rubber sap…
Herald like the arrival of a perfumed courtesan,
the Island Never Found… Yet, if the pilot draws closer,
it rapidly fades away, like a vain shadow,
Tinged with the azure color of faraway…
