The starting point of the MARENOSTRUM project is Carloforte, a small town on the Isle of Saint Peter, in Sardinia. Its inhabitants, called "carlofortini" or even "tabarkini", are the descendants of a group of Genoese people, who, in the 16th century settled down on the island of Tabarka, a few hundred metres off the Tunisian coast, to fish coral. A couple of centuries later, due to the impoverishment of the coral banks and the deterioration of their relationship with their Muslim neighbours, they colonised the Isle of Saint Peter, until that time uninhabited, and founded a new village, which they called Carloforte. Over the centuries, the fishermen became modem seamen but the population maintained its typically seafaring culture.

The MARENOSTRUM project is a long-term undertaking. It is driven by two main needs.. the need to produce a genuinely multi-.ethnical music, where sounds of the world are filtered through the musicians' sensitivity, almost chewed and digested so as to be recreated with authenticity and fteshness, and the need to preserve the dialect, one of the pillars of a traditional culture, which at worst might be integrated, but which modernisation should at no cost destroy.

The project made its first steps in 1994, when 1 began giving solo concerts (guitar and vocal/voice) with a "menu" of rock-blues and multiethnic music in Mediterranean Cesauce" in pubs in Sardinia and the rest of Italy, in particular Domodossola, Siena and Milan. And in was in Milan that on one occasion Mauro Pagani, who some years before had landed in San Pietro with Fabrizio De André for the presentation of Creuza de ma, his LP in the Genoese dialect, joined me on stage.

In '98 MARENOSTRUM developed into a band, or better still an open group of musicians who revolve around the project, under the name of Brai & Co. The basic group is made up of several musicians/friends that have moved together through most of their musical life, across the most varied genres and bands, thus giving the current project a feeling and harmony that catches the eye (and the ear). This solution, besides solving the practical problems caused by the members' different commitments, also allows a lively exchange of experiences and points of view, thus enabling both the music and the musicians to grow. It is a jazz approach then, given the importance of improvisation, that leads to a music which is always new - this is of primary importance in a closed environment like Sardinia - and facilitates tours in the rest of Italy.