L’Atlante Linguistico del Mediterraneo (ALM) – The Mediterranean Linguistic Atlas – is a body of work put together thanks to the great effort of experts in the field of linguistics and dialectology in collecting material dedicated, in primis, to sea life and life on the sea. The project was defined in Oslo and Venice between 1957 and 1959. It was illustrated by Deanović and Folena, with the support of Fondazione Cini di Venezia (FC) as a stable partner. The last of the thirteen issues of the ALM bulletin – Bollettino ALM (BALM) dates back to 1980-1986. It was a time when a number of meetings and congresses were held to define the structure of the questionnaire and the delicate problem of the phonetic alphabet, to establish data collection points, data-collectors, and the creation of an ALM body. It is with these very objectives in mind that 60 years after its creation, new promoters and established scholars have got together to promote ALM’s precious heritage and to relaunch this ambitious geo-linguistic project. I have been assigned the Syrian-Lebanese area and the task of illustrating the work of Giovanni Oman, ALM’s most prolific datacollector for the first issue of BALM magazine.
