"This book could be a historical or travel book, but in reality it is a book that depicts forms on the landscape, a book about the turmoil caused by the symbolic waves of people who have crossed the Mediterranean so many times."

Thus begins this peculiar and personal story with which the leading Catalan author Baltasar Porcel invites us on a fascinating journey through time and space, weaving the multifaceted web that constitutes the common historical, artistic, and literary memory of the Mediterranean. Porcel's narrative takes us from Greece to the Nile Delta, from Constantinople to Andalusia, from Corfu to Jerusalem, from Malta to Venice... it advances, or sets course, from island to island and from port to port. In the pages of this unique journey, all the great heroic figures of the Mediterranean past appear, Odysseus and Achilles, the Romans, Scipio's armies, the Berber pirates and the knights of Malta, Suleiman the Magnificent and Napoleon Bonaparte. At the same time, the literary world is present: Homer and the Alexandrian Cavafy, Pliny, who narrates the eruption of Vesuvius, the Andalusian poets, the Sicilian Leopardi who speaks of the death of his world. But the ordinary people also find their place, who carry the Mediterranean experience.

As the French thinker Edgar Morin states in his preface, "this book-pilgrimage is an invitation to non-Mediterraneans to inscribe the Mediterranean in their heritage of memory and culture, and an invitation to Mediterraneans to acquire or regain their multiple, epic, tragic, amazing heritage, an invitation to accept Mediterranean diversity, not to be led back to division but to seek understanding and ultimately unity."