Under the waters of Mediterranean there are more than 18 thousands of bodies swallowed by the sea: men, women and children dead and missing in the last 25 years of migrations from North Africa to the Southern coasts of Europe. A slow but continuous massacre, the scope of which is hidden by a careful journalism in the sinking of the moment, but that often loses the sight on the long-term phenomenon.

A mostly silent massacre in which the sea forever off the voices of the victims, breaks the story of their life, deletes their face. There are no official statistics on this topic or an institutional catalogs of each event: the most complete and comprehensive dataset is edited by a journalist, Gabriele Del Grande, who follows the phenomenon since 2006 on his blog Fortress Europe collecting data from journalistic sources and the daily news.

What follows is intended as a narrative outline of the lost stories gathered by Del Grande, a common thread that links all these tragedies and shows the true color of our Mediterranean sea. At the time we geolocated the events in the last four years (2009, 2011, 2012). View map also in a new window.

Alessio Cimarelli

Sono giornalista free-lance e sviluppatore web. Dopo la lau­rea in fisica all’Università Sapienza di Roma, ho con­se­guito il master in Comunicazione della Scienza alla SISSA di Trieste e ho comin­ciato a girare l’Italia, tra gior­na­li­, uffici stampa e ricerca pura. Sono co-fondatore di dataninja.it e attualmente collaboro con varie testate ita­liane (Corriere della Sera, Secolo XIX, Wired) e alcune agen­zie edi­to­riali in ambito di svi­luppo web e data jour­na­lism. Sono mem­bro della comu­nità Spaghetti Open Data e ormai scrivo quasi più in java­script e python che in ita­liano o inglese.