Venice welcomes a new hub for ocean knowledge with the opening of the SEA BEYOND Ocean Literacy Centre, an initiative by UNESCO-IOC and Prada Group, developed with key scientific contributions of CMCC. Located on the island of San Servolo, a cultural hub in the Venetian Lagoon, the Centre is designed to engage a wide audience in understanding the ocean’s role in our lives and the urgent need for its protection.

The first and only Italian Centre dedicated to ocean literacy opened on April 3, 2025, with the aim to encourage a wide and diverse audience to engage with the crucial interactions between the ocean and human beings. The initiative is promoted by Prada Group and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (UNESCO-IOC), and forms part of the SEA BEYOND project, which has been working since 2019 to increase awareness among the younger generations of issues surrounding sustainability and ocean preservation.

CMCC has played a key role in this initiative by providing its expertise in ocean sciences and global ocean data from both CMCC and Copernicus, which are now integrated into the Centre’s immersive displays. In collaboration with Dotdotdot, CMCC also supported the preparation of oceanographic data for the exhibition space, offering visitors an interactive and scientifically grounded experience.

This marks only the beginning of CMCC’s involvement in the initiative, as the Centre continues to evolve. By bringing ocean science into an accessible and engaging format, this project helps foster awareness and action for marine conservation.

The Centre’s activities – designed to foster dialogue and employ an accessible, inclusive and multisensory approach – have been developed for students of all ages, local communities, researchers, residents, and tourists from both Italy and overseas. These diverse audiences will be addressed in a similarly broad language that compares ideas and perspectives from different disciplines. The aim is to encourage visitors to think critically about their relationship with the ocean, and the lagoon, and to adopt positive behaviours in favour of a more sustainable future – transforming ocean knowledge into action.

The concept of the Centre organically brings together the three main spaces. Zooming in from a macro to a micro level, from 10 million metres to 1,000 metres from the Earth, visitors are taken on a journey through three rooms: the first provides a global perspective, the second adopts a local dimension, and the third focuses on the human scale, examining the power of action. Large interactive tables encourage guests to explore immersive maps, created in collaboration with the CMCC Foundation and Dotdotdot, a multidisciplinary firm specialising in interactive design. These provide a dynamic visualisation of currents, temperatures, salinity, shipping routes and animal migrations and their evolution over the decades, highlighting their interconnectedness at a global level and the relationship between humans and the ocean, and emphasising how the entire planet is connected by a single ocean.

The visitor experience: From macro to micro

The main display in the first room, A World of Islands, is centred on the Spilhaus Projection: a map drawn by the geophysicist and oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus in 1942 that presents the ocean as a single interconnected body of water, turning traditional cartography’s anthropocentric perspective on its head. A 3D extrusion of the map is presented as a table of water, 60 centimetres off the ground to make it accessible to all. The visuals are accompanied by audio descriptions. Feel the Change – located in the same space – is a predominantly tactile installation, allowing visitors to touch reconstructions of marine ecosystems, both in their natural state and when damaged by acidification. Meanwhile, the Water Salinity activity allows guests to taste water from parts of the ocean with different salt levels.

The Venetian Lagoon takes centre stage in the second room; a table displaying a 3D extrusion of the lagoon is set against a wall with windows that forge visual continuity with the outside landscape. The story narrated in the previous space here takes on a local dimension, illustrating how tides function in an area that acts as a buffer between land and sea, where hydrodynamic exchanges influence temperatures, salinity and currents, and shape the entire habitat. The lagoon’s extraordinary biodiversity can be examined in a child-focused tabletop science lab. This area features digital and analogue microscopes, including one connected to a screen that projects an enlarged version of the image onto the side wall – a further inversion of micro and macro. Here visitors will be able to analyse samples collected from the lagoon on guided boat trips organised periodically by the Centre. Audio elements – bioacoustic recordings – allow guests to experience natural sounds like the noise made by colliding icebergs and man-made sounds in the undersea environment, and to reflect on noise pollution, which is also found under the sea. These stimuli round off an exploration of a unique environment that provides us with a vast source of knowledge, with certain parts yet to be explored even by the lagoon’s own inhabitants.

Finally, the third space – The Power of Actions – introduces a human dimension and more explicitly invites us to take action. It employs an interactive and fun approach, particularly through a floor game in the shape of the island of San Servolo, honed in partnership with game designer Luca Borsa, which challenges young visitors to create their own ocean literacy project. The library along the wall of the Centre, with chairs and a variety of books to browse, provides the ideal setting for the activity. Here, interactive screens provide information on four educational initiatives, including some promoted globally by SEA BEYOND, with the aim of inspiring users. The stories are told by: Carmelo Isgrò, a biologist and founder of the MuMa Museo del Mare of Milazzo, Sicily; Meghan Marrero from the NMEA (National Marine Educators Association), which takes schools on a quest to become Blue Schools; Carlo Barbante, Professor of paleoclimatology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Scientific Director of Follow the Ice – The Memory of Glaciers project; and One Ocean Hub, a research programme focused on ocean sustainability and conservation.