Terrapiattisti in Ustica, who left the Veneto in search of the end of the earth

They wanted to land in Lampedusa but they were not migrants fleeing wars and poverty. They were a Venetian couple convinced followers of the Terrapiattist theory. During the confinement, perhaps with the secret dream of being able to jump away from the flat planet now infected by Covid 19, they decided to look for the “finis terrae”, the “edge” of the flat world. A border that according to the two was very close to the Sicilian island.

But his attempt soon turned into a true odyssey. To tell it, three months later to the newspaper The impression It was Salvatore Zichichi, a doctor from the Office of Maritime Health of the Ministry of Health who usually cares for migrants. “The two left Veneto during the Lampedusa confinement, violating all restrictions. At Termini Imerese they sold their car and bought a boat. For them, Lampedusa was finis terrae.” At this point the problem was getting from the Tyrrhenian to the Sicilian Channel, circumnavigating the island and reaching Lampedusa. “The funny thing is that they orient themselves with the compass, an instrument that works on the basis of terrestrial magnetism, a principle that they, as flat terrestrials, should reject,” said Zichichi.

But not even the compass helped them especially since the couple found themselves in Ustica, a Sicilian island but in front of Palermo. The exhausted couple from the voyage were detained and quarantined in Palermo as a precaution on board the ship. At this point, the staunch landowners also tried to escape. But the Port Authority men in no hurry, perhaps confident in their ability to navigate not exactly like sea lions, retrieved them three hours after their departure.

“A few days later – Zichichi- concluded, they tried to escape again, they ended up in the house of a mythomaniac who claimed to be positive for Covid but luckily it was not.” Thus, the discovery of the edge of the earth became secondary to the safe return home. And the two, navigating the sea again only to take the ferry from Messina to Villa San Giovanni, returned to Veneto by land.