Caretta caretta tartaruga di Lampedusa

It was way back in 1985, a group of young people, little more than fifteen-year-old Lampedusans including me, in the middle of a quiet summer evening, bored of the usual summer evenings, decided to go to the beach of the island of rabbits. I remember that it was a quiet and splendid evening of calm, Lampedusa at that time did not offer much and there were no rooms for boys. At that time the beach was a simple beach like the “others”, it was not a reserve and access was allowed in the evening hours. We were five or six, we arrived at the beach late in the evening, around 10 we didn’t expect to see or meet anyone. As soon as we came down with great astonishment from a distance, we saw a faint light coming towards us. At one point a gentleman with a particularly strong foreign accent came to meet us and greeted us in a broken Italian. We boys, intrigued by the bearded and blond stranger, responded to the greeting and, intrigued, asked what he was doing at night and alone in that place. beach of the rabbits “. We, incredulous and intrigued, started asking him questions. Unaware of the scientific weight of that nice man, since then every night and almost the entire summer we followed him and helped him in those wonderful, unforgettable and memorable nights on the beach of rabbits. That year Dieter recorded for the first time the caretta caretta nesting, the Lampedusa sea turtle, in the Conigli beach and the testimonies of the elderly of the time on nesting in all the other beaches of Lampedusa. We helped him in collecting these data, I remember that we were shooting with his huge quad honda, a vehicle we had never seen at that time on the island and that made all the children of Lampedusa smile. Then as now smiles and suspicions hovered around this great man who briefly attended the island, he even said that, given his nocturnal habits, he was a Russian spy who snatched secrets about the former Loran base. Thanks Dieter Gramentz for what you have made for this island, thanks to your “secret” studies the sea turtle Caretta caretta still has a place to nest. From those studies it all began, the beach of the rabbits with great difficulty became a reserve, then a marine park. The Lampedusans became aware of their fortune, turned off their stoves, changed their habits and Caretta Caretta slowly became the symbol of Lampedusa. The video is by Santino Brischetto.