Mare Memoria Viva is many beautiful things at once: an eco-museum that narrates Palermo and its sea through memories and artistic works on the city's coastal landscape; a cultural, educational and environmental center, a garden, a space for gathering, conversation and meetings.

The venue is the former Sant'Erasmo’s Locomotive Depot, a large pavilion with a pagoda roof, cast-iron pillars with Art Nouveau decorated capitals builded in 1886 and surrounded by a large garden that was part of a railway complex by the sea.

We are the only urban ecomuseum in south Italy that tells the story of Palermo's coastline from the voice of its inhabitants and artists, a laboratory museum that proposes ecological and cultural practices on the sea and the city.

The Ecomuseum's 'collection' is an audiovisual archive of photographs, videos, interviews, documents, testimonies, maps and works by artists and artists that compose a choral history of the urban coastal landscape and its transformations from the post-war period to today. The path of our multimedial exhibits moves symbolically from the sea to the land, from the seabed of the Gulf of Palermo to the concrete covering the Conca d'oro told through stories of people and places, animals, plants, buildings. In the middle flows the Oreto river with a section devoted to its care, flora and fauna.

The sea acts as metaphor and thread.

The archive is the living material on which we cultivate educational activities, work with artists, culturally based development processes and social capacity building.