Borneo

There is a distant place that resonates in the Italian imagination first through the writings of Emilio Salgari, then through the sad story of deforestation, palm oil and land taken from orangutans.

The third largest island in the world, where giant butterflies and moths fly, monkeys with human-like noses walk, and the rising and setting of the sun is marked by the chirping of insects: this is Borneo.

Politically divided between Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, Borneo is the largest of the Sunda Islands and is surrounded by three seas: to the north by the South China Sea, to the east by the Celebes Sea and to the south by the Java Sea.

This land, cut in two by the equator, attracted us for cultural and naturalistic reasons, both gathered in the title of a book that I came across by chance a year ago. “In the forests of Borneo”, published in 1902 by the famous Florentine botanist Odoardo Beccari, intrigued me because it spoke of rainforests, of the travels of 19th-century explorers, of ethnographic traditions that have now disappeared and of a very rich biodiversity. For Lorenzo, on the other hand, it presented itself as a challenge: would he be able to give voice to an equatorial ecosystem, he who had always worked in mountain or alpine environments?