Italy and the Mediterranean

Words, Sounds, and Images of the Post-Cold War Era

N. Bouchard, V. Ferme

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137343468
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

The Mediterranean has always loomed large in the history and culture of Italy, and since the 1980s this relationship has been represented in ever more varied forms as both national and regional identities have evolved within a globalized context. This interdisciplinary volume puts Italian artists (writers, musicians, and filmmakers) and intellectuals (philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists) in conversation with each other to explore Italy's Mediterranean identity while questioning the boundaries between Self and Other, and between native and foreign bodies. By moving beyond nation-centric models of cultural and ethnic homogeneity based on myths of progress and rationality, these wide-ranging contributions fashion new ways of belonging that transcend the cultural, economic, religious, and social categories that have characterized post Cold War Italy and Europe.

Chapter 1

The Return to the Mediterranean in Contemporary Western Thought

Old Contexts, New Approaches

Since the 1980s, a vast corpus of artistic expressions and scholarly writings on the Mediterranean has animated Western culture. Filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, and poets express in their works Mediterranean themes and concerns, while scholars from Barcelona to Marseilles, Athens to Messina, and New York to Toronto organize conferences, publish essays and monographic studies, edit volumes, create journals, and launch Mediterranean institutes and research centers. Meanwhile, disciplines and degree programs—from geography, political science, and economics to anthropology, philosophy, and literature—revamp their curriculum and coalesce around new institutional and interdisciplinary cores called “Mediterranean Studies.”

This conceptual and discursive framework arises from a transition whereby the concept of the transnational region has replaced that of the nation as a category of imaginary and critical understanding. Its sheer vastness, however, makes efforts to provide a synthesis daunting, legitimizing Predrag Matvejević’s observation that the Mediterranean is suffering from an excess of discursiveness bordering on verbosity.¹ Nonetheless, this discursive attention provides a context in which to situate the widespread intellectual and artistic concerns with the Mediterranean that have emerged in contemporary Italian culture. This chapter thus introduces the Mediterranean as a system of interactions between diverse cultures, societies, and ethnicities coexisting with but also confronting one another across the waters of a landlocked sea. While aspects of Mediterranean interaction originated as early as the Bronze Age, in the course of the region’s millenary history, thalassocracies, empires, state monarchies, and nation-states have sought to unify extremely diverse spaces, alternatively aiming to transform this sea into a Roman, Muslim, Christian, or Turkish lake before the East-West divide turned into a North-South one with the advent of European colonialism and modern capitalism. However, in the changed geopolitical landscape of the post–Cold War era, revisitings of the Mediterranean place emphasis on unearthing past- and present-day crossovers, contaminations, exchanges, and border crossings, thus complicating our understanding not only of self and other but also of the Eurocentric epistemologies that sustain it.

Enigma Variations of Tectonic Geology

“What is the Mediterranean?” asks David Abulafia in the introduction to The Mediterranean in History before setting the geographical boundaries of the region as “the coastline that runs from the rock of Gibraltar along Spain and southern France, around Italy and Greece to Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and then the entire coast of North Africa as far as Ceuta, the Spanish town on the tip of Morocco, opposite Gibraltar” (“Introduction” 11). Abulafia’s cartographic mapping soon fails him. “The Mediterranean,” he writes, “cannot be simply defined by its edges,” and the nature of this space remains one that “does not admit of a straightforward answer” (ibid.). Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell begin their monumental The Corrupting Sea with the same question but opt for a definition that encompasses not just its coastlines but also the land that stretches inland from the sea for several miles. Like Abulafia, however, they voice the challenge posed by a geographical definition of the Mediterranean: “Obviously, no single brief answer can be given to that question” (Horden and Purcell 10). The difficulty of defining the Mediterranean by way of its geography leads us to endorse Matvejević’s description of the Mediterranean as a region whose borders are like the drawings of chalk, written to be erased and inscribed only to vanish.² Yet, despite eluding definitions, the Mediterranean has endured a long tradition of totalizing imaginings, visions, and hegemonic projects, of which geographical mappings and rigid cartographies are but one obvious expression. Not surprisingly, these imaginings, from the first millennium BCE to very recent times, have attempted to turn the fluidity of Mediterranean space into the object of cultural, social, and political coherence and homogeneity.

Perceptions of the Mediterranean as a bounded entity are as old as the recorded history of the region. While the name mare Mediterraneum only enters common usage between the third and sixth century CE (when it is mentioned in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies [12.16.1]), in ancient Semitic languages of the Levant the Mediterranean is already described as the “Great Sea,” suggesting that its waters somehow constitute a single entity. This definition traverses antiquity, being recorded in the fragments of the philosopher Hecataeus of Mileto around 500 BCE (Horden and Purcell 10) and in Plato’s Phaedo, where a single sea stretches “from the River Phasis [ . . . ] to the Pillars of Heracles” (cited in Harris 11). It is also present in Aristotle’s De mundo, where it becomes he eso thalassa, or the “internal sea,”³ and in the Arabic image of a single water mass separable from the al-bahr al-zulumat, or “oceanic sea of darkness.”

The Mediterranean’s physical morphology, however, challenges univocal descriptions.⁴ The region hardly constitutes a stable geographical entity and should more properly be seen as a “continuum of discontinuities” (Horden and Purcell 53). The waters that lie between the shores of Africa, Asia, and Europe are, in reality, a succession of seas,⁵ marked by differences in degrees of salinity, depth, fish life, and temperatures. Likewise, the climates, landscapes, and topographies that surround this sea are varied. If the Mediterranean climate is frequently associated with mild winters and dry, hot summers, the region presents dramatic variations in temperatures and rainfall.⁶ Similarly, Mediterranean topography reveals that the region is hardly uniform. Defined by James Macintosh Houston as “the enigma variations of tectonic geology” (51), the Mediterranean is equally home to the rugged, fragmented mountain reliefs of the Alps and the Pyrenees as it is to river basins, desert plateaus, dunes, lowlands, and rolling hills. The biodiversity of the region reflects this climactic and topographic variety. The plants and cultivars that are often adduced as examples of the Mediterranean landscape or as symbols of the region—the holly oak, the olive tree, the Aleppo pine, the scrub woodland of the maquis, the vine, the fig, the carob, the pistachio, the myrtle—are not only unevenly distributed (King, “Introduction” 5–6) but often not even native to the region, having been imported from Africa and the Near East, when not from central and southern Asia or as far as Australia (Rackham 48–49).

The Great River of Antiquity

An equally complex mosaic of cultures, ethnicities, and societies matches the region’s diversity with regard to biology, climate, geography, geology, and topography, the result of historical contacts that have happened since Neolithic times. While Mediterranean societies were separate enough to develop distinct cultures, they also had unique means to interact with one another: the relatively calm and tideless waters of a landlocked sea whose currents facilitated navigation.⁷ Thus, unlike the rugged Mediterranean terrain, from antiquity onward, the sea came to function as a “great river”⁸ for communication and interaction, enabling peaceful as well as violent confrontations among people who sought to further trade but also establish colonies and wage wars: “The Mediterranean Sea acted as both route-way and barrier, at times dividing the cultures and people around its shores, at others providing the means whereby they might influence—or conquer—each other. Invariably, however, these confrontations and collaborations formed part of a broader process of human interaction” (Proudfoot and Smith, “Conclusion” 303).

By the eighth century BCE, interactions between diverse groups were a constitutive trait of the region, having started in the fourth millennium of the Paleolithic Period when Cyprus imported obsidian flakes from Anatolia and Malta brought metals to fabricate various utensils from Sicily, while the cities of Gerico and Çatal Hüyük (Anatolia) traded with regions around the Red Sea, Sinai, and Syria.⁹ This early commerce was limited, and only during the Neolithic Period and Early Bronze Age did “space movement” and “system of circulation” become essential traits of the Mediterranean network.¹⁰ From the Fertile Crescent and the riverboat trade on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, as well as more directly from the Nile in Egypt, large quantities of goods that were necessary to support the societies of lower Egypt began circulating in the Mediterranean: cedars from Lebanon, bitumen from the Red Sea, and oil and wine from Syria. In the second millennium, the Syro-Lebanese (possibly ancestors of the Phoenicians) and the people of the Aegean or proto-Greeks exchanged customs, goods, ideas, and techniques, giving rise to a cosmopolitan society created on the interdependence between the diverse populations of empires and maritime cities.¹¹ In this system of exchange, the islands played a significant role. The Mycenaeans traveled frequently to the Tyrrhenian coast and reached Italy through the Aegean archipelago,¹² while the Cyclades and Rhodes functioned as links to Anatolia. Crete was the “‘gateway’ into the Mediterranean” (Suano 80), linking East and West in the commerce of raw materials and prestige objects. Catastrophic events at the end of the Bronze Age, however, led to the collapse of Cretan, Hittite, and Mycenaean civilizations.¹³ The system of exchange they had created—what Abulafia calls the “first Mediterranean [ . . . ] whose scope had extended from Sicily to Canaan and from the Nile Delta to Troy” (Great Sea 59)—declined amid economic and political chaos.

Over the span of several hundred years, a new order arose. No longer centered on Asiatic empires, it relied on commercial networks created by communities of traders from Cyprus and the Levantine coast, as cities such as Arvad, Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and Utica grew on the coastal region of Canaan or Phoenicia,¹⁴ while Carthage, the Phoenicians’ most important settlement in Africa, became a powerful player in its own right. Their inhabitants, who were speakers of “Ugaritian, Moabite, Hebrew, Aramaic and other Semitic dialects” (Suano 93), advanced westward. While they often subjugated weaker societies in the process, the Phoenicians did so not to impose political control but rather to secure a denser system of trade routes to consolidate their economic hegemony. These routes took them north via the sea and the islands of Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic; west via Otranto and the Sicilian coast; and east via Gibraltar. Through them, they exchanged wool and dyes extracted from the murex mollusk but also pottery, furniture, drinking vessels, ceremonial burners, caldrons, and jewelry produced by their highly skilled artisans and craftsmen. The importance of this merchant society extends beyond its considerable trading of commodities and material goods. The Phoenicians spread their alphabet in the Mediterranean while bringing to it an “Orientalizing culture” (Torelli 106) based on models and institutions developed in Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Urartu that would become “an indispensable instrument for the exercise of power in the archaic societies that were evolving from primitive ideas of royal power towards domination by aristocratic elites” (ibid. 106–107).

In the sixth century, other merchant societies arose—most notably, the Etruscan and the Greek—that imitated the Phoenicians’ models of trading by creating emporia throughout the Mediterranean coast while also competing for control of commercial routes to France, Italy, and Spain. By the eighth century, the Greeks had developed powerful city-states, or poleis, in the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Macedonia, the Peloponnese, and Thessaly. These cities had autonomous identities and varied in size, social structure, and political structure, as the cultures of the most famous among them, Athens and Sparta (and later Corinth), testify. During the Iron Age (especially between 800 BCE and 395 CE), they became instrumental in the transmission of Hellenic culture, “bringing goods and gods, styles and ideas, as well as people, as far west as Spain and as far east as Syria” (Abulafia, Great Sea 83–84). They did so through migration and settlements but also through colonization, expanding eastward to Asia Minor and the Black Sea and westward toward Sicily, southern France, and Spain: areas already occupied by complex settlements of Phoenician origin. At first, the Greek poleis formed short-term alliances and confederacies to exert control over one another or to respond to threats of external aggression.¹⁵ However, in 338 BCE, Philip II of Macedon established an imperial monarchy, inaugurating the evolution of Greek cities into territorial states. Statehood facilitated an unprecedented accumulation of resources that enabled Philip’s son, Alexander (336–323 BCE), to expand Hellenic influence southward to Egypt but also east to Afghanistan, the steppes of Asia, and the Punjab on the border with India, effectively fusing “Greek culture [ . . . ] with the ancient cultures of Persia and Egypt” (Abulafia, Mediterranean 125). For some, this process of Hellenization even preceded the fourth-century creation of the Hellenistic world, since the economic and cultural prestige of the Greek city-states had been consolidated in prior centuries (Torelli 116). After the death of Alexander, his short-lived empire fragmented, and by 300 BCE three dynasties emerged: the Ptolemy in Egypt and the Levant; the Seleucids in Afghanistan, Syria, and Turkey; and the Antigonids in Macedonia.

Visions of Mediterranean Unity: The Roman Mare Nostrum

To the west, Rome was growing from an undistinguished town in Latium into a monarchy, a republic (509 BCE), and finally an empire (29 BCE). As it grew, it superimposed itself on the civilizations that had flourished on the shores of the sea—Egyptians, Minoans, Mycaeneans, and Phoenicians—while incorporating the Italian Peninsula’s Latins and Samians to the east and south as well as the Etruscans to the north and the thirty Greek colonies of Magna Graecia.¹⁶ Over the time frame of the three Punic wars (264–146 BCE), Rome defeated the Carthaginian heirs to the Phoenicians. It also captured Corinth, enslaving its inhabitants and sacking the city as an example of what happened to those who supported Hannibal. Concomitantly, Rome took advantage of the strife among the three Hellenistic kingdoms to gain control over the Mediterranean. Under Octavian Augustus, imperial Rome extended its rule over a vast expanse that stretched from Spain to Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Black Sea but also from Britain and the Danube basin to North Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea became a fundamental component of a process of unification envisioned by its emperors. The Roman Empire became the oecumene, the center of orbis terrarum, and the Mediterranean became its mare nostrum (“our sea”), the center of Greco-Latin culture and an integral component of Rome’s hegemony.

Diverse strategies were initiated to achieve cohesion and unity in the region. Braudel notes, with some hesitancy, Rome’s “‘fair’ policy” of granting Roman citizenship to people ethnically and linguistically nearby while reserving half-citizenship for those perceived to be more distant (La méditerranée 275). To further bind and control subordinate cultures, Rome promoted local elites to govern the provinces, often encouraging their upward social mobility in the empire itself, as exemplified by the emperor Trajan, a man born in the province of Spain in 52 CE. The Romans also put in place a system of political, social, and economic order sustained by Roman law and jurisprudence to tie the periphery to the center. Other strategies included an efficient network of communication and transport technology as well as an urbanization program based on the refurbishing of old cities—especially those of Carthaginian and Hellenistic origin in the eastern and southern Mediterranean—and on the creation of new Roman centers in western Europe,¹⁷ whose repetition of the Roman castra topographic design was thought to facilitate the Romanization of the border regions. The extension of Latin as the official language of the empire and the legalization of Christianity in 313 CE by Constantine (as well as its promotion to state religion by Theodosius in 380 CE) achieved further levels of cultural cohesion and integration. The empire’s totalizing vision did not cease with the scission of 395 CE into the Eastern and Western Empires ruled from Constantinople and Rome, respectively. While the Western Roman Empire collapsed after the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE and Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus in 476 CE, the Eastern Empire endured. Under Emperor Justinian, the Byzantine Empire reconquered many lost territories, including Italy and areas of the Maghreb settled by the Vandals from the fourth century onward, thus continuing to exert the hegemonic vision of Rome over vast areas of the Mediterranean.

Mare Nostrum and Mare Aliorum

By the seventh century, another group was advancing claims over the Mediterranean, seeking to transform the Roman mare nostrum into what would be perceived, from a Christian perspective, as a mare aliorum.¹⁸ After the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632 CE, the Arab Umayyads spread from Medina, in the Arabian Peninsula, to Syria and Palestine. From there, they moved in ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Old Contexts, New Approaches
• Chapter 2: From Discourses on to Discourses from the Italian Mediterranean
• Chapter 3: From Massimo Cacciari and Franco Cassano to Mario Alcaro and Beyond
• Chapter 4: Musical Traditions and Adaptations in the Italian Mediterranean
• Chapter 5: Revisiting Italy and the Mediterranean through the Lenses of Globalization
• Chapter 6: Vincenzo Consolo, Carmine Abate, and Erri De Luca
• Chapter 7: The Mediterranean of Migrant, Postcolonial, and Exile Writers
• Postface
• Notes
• Bibliography