Survivors Return To The Shore Of Memory
Lampedusa, Italy | 03 October 2013

Edge of Humanity Magazine

1 day ago

Photographer Sonia Fattori is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘03 October – Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration’. To see Sonia ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Survivors of 3 October 2013 return to Lampedusa from different parts of Europe. They come back to the place and to the day when their lives changed forever.

Fortunately, they are—the ones rescued by fishermen and by the boats that, at seven o’clock that morning, were out at sea and noticed bodies floating or people desperately waving their arms just half a mile from the shore. Those 155 survivors, among so many who did not make it.

Luckily, for those who come from that side of the sea, from that part of the world, moving freely and safely and arriving alive at their destination is still not a right, but a gamble, a prayer.

Yet theirs is a fortune they cannot celebrate, because they know of those who did not have it—the 366 fellow travelers who went down with the boat. Every cell of their bodies still remembers the land so close, the smoke raised to signal the engine failure, the sudden listing of the vessel, and then its capsizing and disappearance, swallowed by the sea on an October day, just a step away from Europe.

Texts by Marta Daneluzzi

Sonia Fattori was born in Udine, Italy, in 1967. At around the age of ten, she discovered photography, and since then the camera has been her travelling companion and her way of observing the world. It is through travel that her photography finds its fullest expression, through a visual language attentive to the relationship between people, place, and memory. She founded the association «Vento di Terre Lontane» to support cooperation projects in Mali and Burkina Faso through photographic storytelling. She has produced reportages, multimedia presentations, and exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 2022, together with journalist Marta Daneluzzi, she published the photographic book A Rock Called Lampedusa; in 2026, the biographical book Franco Maschio, Simply an Artist, dedicated to the artist Franco Maschio.

All images © Sonia Fattori and text © Marta Daneluzzi