The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians [1st ed.] 9783030598563, 9783030598570

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MEDITERRANEAN PERSPECTIVES

The Fishing Net and the Spider Web Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians Claudio Fogu

Mediterranean Perspectives Series Editors Brian Catlos University of Colorado - Boulder Boulder, CO, USA Sharon Kinoshita University of California Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA

As a region whose history of connectivity can be documented over at least two and a half millennia, the Mediterranean has in recent years become the focus of innovative scholarship in a number of disciplines. In shifting focus away from histories of the origins and developments of phenomena predefined by national or religious borders, Mediterranean Studies opens vistas onto histories of contact, circulation and exchange in all their complexity while encouraging the reconceptualization of inter- and intra-­ disciplinary scholarship, making it one of the most exciting and dynamic fields in the humanities. Mediterranean Perspectives interprets the Mediterranean in the widest sense: the sea and the lands around it, as well as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it by networks of culture, trade, politics, and religion. This series publishes monographs and edited collections that explore these new fields, from the span of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15161

Claudio Fogu

The Fishing Net and the Spider Web Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians

Claudio Fogu Department of French & Italian University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Mediterranean Perspectives ISBN 978-3-030-59856-3    ISBN 978-3-030-59857-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Suture mediterranee, Costanza Ferrini (2019), photographed by Rosi Giua. Used with permission of the artist This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book has been two decades in the making. Over that period, with its numerous false starts and null results, I found myself at a dead end on several occasions. My first thank you must therefore go to all those who have patiently waited for its delivery and endured repeated assertions that I was “almost there” or that I was “still working on it”, in response to their gentle inquiries. Many of those people contributed to my process with their books, talks, or in person conversations. Those who are still alive will hopefully find traces of our exchanges in my text and footnotes. But I must limit myself here to expressing gratitude to those who most directly impacted the idea and realization of The Fishing Net and The Spider Web. To my maître à penser Franco Cassano goes my most heartfelt expression of thanks for the grace of his thinking, his friendship, and his guidance. Dear Franco, our lives have not crossed more than four or five times since we met some ten years ago, but your pensiero meridiano has illuminated my research path from the day I read it.1 On this path I have, of course, met many other thinkers and scholars who nourished my own Mediterranean imaginary. In the early years, my colleagues and dear friends at The Ohio State University (OSU)—Vicky Holbrook, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Artemis Leontis, and Gregory Jusdanis—spurred my interest in the ethical and poetic dimensions of this liquid continent. More recently, Nelson Moe, Iain Chambers, Edwige Tamalet, Yasser Elhariri, Olivia Harrison, Pamela Ballinger, and Roberta Morosini, among others, engaged me on the colonial, postcolonial, and transcolonial complexities 1

 Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1996).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

of the modern Mediterranean. Closer to home, my scholarly collaboration with Lucia Re, and her writings, disclosed perspectives and angles of interpretation that I am certain she will recognize in this book. Equally precious has been the mentorship of my dearest colleague Jon Snyder. His patience with my perennial doubts about the validity of my hypotheses and my fears of being carried away by Mediterranean “metaphorics” have given me the confidence I needed to set sail without a clear map, trusting that I would find the proper islands and harbors on the way to anchor my chapters. But Lucia and Jon are no mere colleagues; they belong to a select group of close academic friends whose affection and support has gone far beyond the scholarly engagements with my arguments, the reading of chapters, or the offer of bibliographic gems. These friends witnessed the personal growth that went into the writing of this book. The work has defined my own development, its rhythms, and its challenges for the past 20 years. Wulf Kansteiner knows all about that. He has patiently journeyed with me on an exploration of meaning and accompanied me in my yearning for integration between my personal and professional life. Together, we have co-edited two books, and although the Mediterranean is remote from his scholarly interests, he has repeatedly indulged me in conceptualizing my practice as a historian. Crucially, he has kept me on track by invoking the memory of our common maestro, Hayden White, and pushing me to always think in terms of the practical past.2 I hope my exploration of “Mediterranean imaginaries” in the making of Italians has responded to Hayden’s call for a historiography that nourishes readers by presenting them with a “usable past” to address the problems of the present. I see no more urgent task today than to reframe the question of collective identity, separate from metaphors of rootedness in land, self-hood, and chimeric historical truth, and to restore it to the fluid realms of the imagination and the poetics of relations. Of course, a book is never just the result of high-sounding objectives and intellectual dialectics. A lot of help has come my way from people who have facilitated my research on the ground. I thank in particular Ettore Zeppitelli who offered his many precious connections and revealed many secrets of his native Bari to me. My dear friend, Carlo Cigliano, allowed me to access the historical archive of the Mostra Triennale delle Terre d’Oltremare in Naples, which prompted me to formulate my early hypotheses for a larger study. I thank all the staff of the Archivio Storico della Camera di Commercio Italo-Orientale, the Archivio di Stato, and the 2

 Hayden White, The Practical Past (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2004).

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

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Biblioteca Provinciale in Bari; of the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles; of the MART in Rovereto; of the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole; of the Biblioteca di Storia Patria in Naples; and of the Archivio Storico ENI in Castel Gandolfo, for their professional courtesy and beyond-the-call-ofduty help in retrieving documents and publications rarely requested before. Particular gratitude goes to Costanza Ferrini for allowing me to use her artwork on the cover of the book, and my photographer-friends Oscar Canham, Donatella Pandolfi, and Antonio Nasca who have helped me to capture the illustrations I needed. Finally, I am forever in debt to my two copy-editors, Simon Dix and David Van Eyssen. They were the first to lay eyes on the entire manuscript, to offer invaluable comments, and to fine-tune my occasionally Italianate prose. What can I say about the larger community of relatives and friends who have had to hear about this book for so many years without, for a moment, ceasing to believe in me and my ability to complete it? Collectively, my greatest fan club has been my friends on the island of Procida—in particular Domenico, Simona, Lucia, and Elisabetta. I hope the results of your support will not disappoint you. Words do not come easily to describe the love I have received from my immediate family, my sister Ilaria, my brother Marco, Elisa and Giordano, as well as from Assunta, Andrea, Fabio, Marina, Noriko, Corinne, Oscar, David, Michael, among the many friends on both sides of the ocean. Grazie. This, however, is also an opportunity to recognize special debts. First of all, to my mother, Diana, who took the time in her eighties to read chapter draft after chapter draft and, even when she was frustrated by my academic jargon, found a way to talk to me about the book in her own illuminating words. This book would not be the same without her engagement, but it would probably still be in gestation without the love, and intellectual stimulation I received from Daniela. She provided me with the support and encouragement that made the last five years the most productive of my life, while also remaining my most acute reader and critic, teaching me the pleasures of achieving ever greater precision of thought and word. To my dear father, Gianni: although you have not been able to see the finished book, I am certain you would have loved it. We both know my scholarly passion for the exploration of imaginaries comes from the many worlds we built together in my early years and from the fishing net of relations that was the essence of your being. This book is dedicated to you. * * *

Contents

1 Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries  1 2 Making Italians, Making Southerners 11 3 The Fishing Net and the Spider Web 33 4 Homo Mediterraneus 83 5 Epiphanic Mediterraneanism115 6 Between Imperium and Emporion159 7 Fascist Mediterraneanism181 8 From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum235 9 Coda: The Mediterranean Quest(ion)257 Bibliography265 Index285

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6

Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8

Cratere del naufragio (The Shipwreck Cup). (Courtesy of the Museo Archeologico di Villa Arbusto (Ischia, Italy)) 34 Francesco Rosselli (attr.), Tavola Strozzi (1472). Certosa e Museo di San Martino (Naples, Italy). (Courtesy of Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e del turismo—Fototeca del Polo Museale della Campania) 48 Muslim ambassadors to the coronation of Alphonse I King of Naples. Detail of the entrance gate to Castel Nuovo (Naples, Italy). (Photographed by the author) 48 The two busts positioned above the entrance of n. 11 Salita di San Leonardo, Procida (Naples). (Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi)50 Donna procidana (Procidan Woman), colored lithograph, Gatti & Dura (1835). Private collection. (Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi) 53 (a) The embroidered vest of the Procidan Costume. Photographed by Antonio Nasca. (b) Particulars of the vest of the Procidan costume. Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi. (Courtesy of Elisabetta Montaldo) 54 The Corricella harbor in Procida (Naples). (Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi) 56 (a) Details of Corricella stairways. Photographed by the author; (b) Stairway on the deck of the Neptune, a reconstructed seventeenth-century galleon anchored in the harbor of Genoa. (Photographed by the author) 57

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Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9 Fig. 7.10 Fig. 7.11

Fig. 7.12

(a) Aerial view of Terra Murata, Procida. Photographed by the author; (b) Corricella (left) and Terra Murata (right). (Photographed by the author) Map of the Fucino Lake. In Carlo Lippi, Programma per l’unione dell’Adriatico col Mediterraneo. Letto nella sessione della Reale Accademia delle Scienze del 25 febbraio 1820 (Naples: 1820) The lighthouse of the Fatherland, Rome (1911). (Photographed by Oscar Canham) (a) Marietta Angelini, “Ritratto di Marinetti,” and (b) “Ritratto di Cangiullo,” from the front page of Vela latina IV, 5 (February 12, 1916) Adalberto Libera e Curzio Suckert Malaparte, Villa Malaparte (Capri, 1942). © Alamy The Palazzo di Rodi at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (Paris). In Guide officiel de la Section Italienne à L’Exposition Coloniale, Paris, Publicité de Rosa, 1931 The Italian Pavilion at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (Paris). In Guide officiel de la Section Italienne à L’Exposition Coloniale, Paris, Publicité de Rosa, 1931 The Façade of the Fiera del Levante (1931). In Saverio La Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante, Bari, Favia, 1931 Commercial pavilions at the Fiera del Levante (1931). In Saverio La Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante, Bari: Favia, 1931 Futurist-inspired cover of the Fiera del Levante. Periodico mensile (1934) The logo image of the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico mensile IV, 2, 1934 The Quartiere orientale at the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico Mensile, II, 4 1932 The Suk at the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico Mensile, II, 4 1932 “L’italia è un isola,” Mussolinian phrase appearing on a building facing the Cathedral of Monreale (Sicily, Italy). (Photographed by the author) Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’Oltremare, 1940. Main entrance and PNF Tower. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare) Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940. Vittorio Calza Bini, Torre Marco Polo. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare)

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79 84 171 206 211 212 214 215 216 217 223 224 228

229

231

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.13

Fig. 7.14

Fig. 7.15 Fig. 7.16 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

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Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940. Florestano Di Fausto, Padiglione Libia. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare) 232 Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940. Enrico Prampolini, Padiglione dell’electrotecnica. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare) 233 MTO 1941, Enrico Prampolini, Plastico murale. (Photographed by the author. Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare) 233 Enrico Prampolini, Paesaggio di Capri (1932). (Courtesy of Futur-ism.it)234 The Costa Concordia sinking off the coast of the Giglio island. © Alamy 236 The Rex sinking off the coast of Trieste on September 8, 1944. (Courtesy of Imperial War Museum) 238

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries

In a famous sequence from Il postino (The Postman, 1994), the film’s protagonist Mario Ruoppolo (played by Massimo Troisi) sits on a beach of an unnamed Italian island next to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (played by Pilippe Noiret) who recites his Ode to the Sea.1 Mario responds to the poem by declaring that he felt “sea sick” like a “boat rocked by the words” of the poem. “Bravo, Mario” Neruda applauds him: “you have just made a metaphor!” “Really?” Mario responds with bewilderment, and then adds: “So the world, and everything in it, is a metaphor for something else?” Neruda’s startled face makes Mario think he has naively misinterpreted the poem: “Ho detto una stronzata?” (Was that bullshit?) he asks. Neruda promises an answer, but the poetic economy of the film requires Pablo’s Latin(-American) humanitas to pay its respects to the humble Mediterranean genius of Mario, so the answer comes from Mario himself with a poem consisting solely of recorded sounds from the sea. The viewer is left with an undeletable image of the Mediterranean Sea as the mother of all metaphors whose infectious liquidity confounds the boundaries between image and reality, sensory experience and internal imagery, the word and the world. Roberto Dainotto has perceptively noted that, since the early 1990s, academic discourse on the Mediterranean grew unbounded

1

 Published in 1954.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_1

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and found itself haunted by the constitutional “liquidity” of its referent.2 As he remarks, one cannot help but notice a “certain inflation of discourses about the Mediterranean,” when a catalogue search in any American university library returns “more than 107 books with Mediterraneo in their title, 229 with Méditerranée, and 1260 with Mediterranean—more than two thirds of which were published in the last fifteen years.”3 The conversation, Dainotto also observes, has progressively expanded far beyond the Mediterranean basin. Contrary to the physical inbound-ness that characterizes the Mediterranean Sea, the worldwide conversation on “the Mediterranean” seems to have grown so rapidly and so extensively as to make even an account of its participants, let alone a comparative evaluation of common themes and key contributions, an impossible enterprise. The Mediterranean, he concludes, has become a “global business,” and “liquidity” has also become its discursive modus operandi.4 In so doing, it has concealed the fundamental “asymmetry” between European and non-European gazes on the Mediterranean.5 As he starkly puts it: any Italian may write about the Mediterranean […] without bothering with citing Abdelkebir Khatibi, Albert Memmi, or Taieb Belghazi. For a Turkish or Algerian author it is instead impossible (or suicidal) not to confront the “Mediterranean” canonized in European literature—provided, of course, that said author wishes to reach a Mediterranean audience beyond its national borders.6

Guilty as charged. This book does not escape either the sea-sickening elusiveness, or the asymmetrical qualities of contemporary discourse about the Mediterranean. It unapologetically accepts and departs from the premises that “the Mediterranean” is a discursive object created by Europeans for Europeans, with very limited purchase  by non-European, or even Mediterranean-area, countries and cultures. At the same time, it also assumes the liquidity between image and reality suggested by Il postino as 2  Roberto Dainotto, “Asimmetrie mediterranee. Etica e mare nostrum,” NAE 3 (2003): 5. See also the Coda in this book. 3  Ibid., 5. Dainotto’s data referred to 2003. My latest search on UCLA’s library catalogue on June 3, 2020, yielded 523 books with Mediterraneo on their titles, 769 with Méditerranée, and 3483 with Mediterranean. 4  Ibid., 5. 5  Ibid., 7. 6  Ibid.

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its very object of inquiry. My interest is not in the “Mediterranean Sea” as a  physical-geographical entity, but in its metaphoric existence as “Mediterranean imaginary,” “Mediterranean-ness,” and forms of “Mediterraneanism.” By Mediterranean imaginaries I mean configurations of mental, verbal, or visualized images that refer explicitly or implicitly to ideas of Mediterranean-ness. By Mediterranean-ness I intend the notion that the Mediterranean is a proper liquid continent—as real as the land masses we typically indicate with that term—complete with borders (port cities) and capitals (islands), but no internal divisions into nation-­ states; that a necessary communality exists among the cultures, mentalities, and people that inhabit the coastal areas and islands of this continent; that this commonality expresses itself in an ingrained sense of belonging associated with practices of exchange among these populations, as well as in  the territorializing ambitions of land-bound states seeking to extend their dominion over the liquid continent, its island-capitals, and its coastlines. Mediterraneanisms are Mediterranean imaginaries that have acquired the force of proper ideologies.7 Each of these ideas will be explored more fully in the chapters that follow, but what should be highlighted immediately, and without ambiguity, is that this book also suggests a different take on Mario Ruoppolo’s question regarding the world being a metaphor for something else, by pointing us in the direction of the bewildering symmetry between the idea of the “Mediterranean” and that of the “imaginary.” Rather than positing the “real world” as a “metaphor for something else,” this book argues that the “Mediterranean world” is an exceptionally liquid site of imaginary production, just as the imaginary itself is a mediterranean (no capital M) entity, in so far as it inhabits the liminal state between reality and imagination, shuttling between the representational and the performative functions of mental language and images.8

7  The term Mediterraneanism was first employed by Michael Herzfeld to criticize the construction of a specifically “Mediterranean” other by Franco-British anthropology in the postwar era. My use of the term is rather wider than Herzfeld’s, and I discuss it in Chap. 5. See Michael Herzfeld, “The Horns of the Mediterranean Dilemma.” American Ethnologist 11 (1984): 439–454 and “Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating.” In Rethinking the Mediterranean, W.  V. Harris ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 45–63. 8  The reciprocal liquidity of these two terms is inscribed in their grammatical hybridity, slipperiness, and reversibility: both terms are adjectives that have been turned into substantives first in romance languages, and then, also in English.

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What this book is not, is a general theory of “the” Mediterranean imaginary. As a study emerging from my primary field of research, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web explores the preeminent trope of Italian cultural history, namely, the “making of Italians,” from a postcolonial perspective that looks beyond the confines of the nation as an “imagined community” and identifies Mediterranean imaginaries as the principal source from which ideas of Italian-ness have been constructed, challenged, and even internally deconstructed. As Benedict Anderson famously argued, “nation-­ ness” is a “cultural artifact of a particular kind” for it holds “emotional legitimacy.”9 In the case of nineteenth-century European nations, this emotional legitimacy was connected, according to Anderson, to the rise of “print-capitalism” and the replacement of script-languages by national languages.10 On this score, Italy was no exception. As Alberto Mario Banti, among others, has shown, the nation-ness of the Italian Risorgimento was created by a select minority of early nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals who gave Italy its “symbols, images, figures, and values” to solicit patriotic militancy.11 The imagined community that emerged from this Risorgimento was stillborn, however. Neither Anderson’s nor Banti’s study can explain away the emotional weakness demonstrated by the Risorgimental nation in the post-unification era. Turning the fiction of a national community on its head, the idea that Italians had to be made after unification, mobilized entirely different emotional forces from those indicated by Anderson and Banti. Among them, as I argue in Chap. 2, the principal force was the “meridionist” construction of Italy’s “south” predicated on the extraction of the ex-Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the imagined community of the Mediterranean continent to which it had belonged for centuries.12 The discursive construction of Italy’s “south” in the aftermath of unification is among the most-well-studied phenomena in Italian cultural studies. Its connection to the contemporaneous discourse on “making of 9  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 4. 10  Ibid., 67. 11  Alberto Mario Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità, e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2006), 2. 12  On “meridionism” see Luigi Carmine Cazzato, “Fractured Mediterranean and Imperial difference: Mediterraneanism, Meridionism, and John Ruskin,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 26, 1 (2017): pp. 69–78. See also, by the same author “Mediterranean: Coloniality, Migration and Decolonial Practices,” Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici 5, 1 (2016): 1–17.

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Italians,” however, has remained largely unexplored. From a meridionist perspective, instead, the two processes are fundamentally one and the same: the reason why the imagined community of Risorgimento Italy became so emotionally unappealing in the post-Risorgimento era is that what was formed by the Risorgimento was not a nation-state but an Empire State, created through the occupation of a southern kingdom that was generally conceived as African soil. Quite literally, the unification of Italy was the shot across the bow of a European Imperialism that, in the last three decades of the century, would complete the occupation of the entire African continent, and construct a lasting association of the idea of “South” with racial inferiority, evolutionary backwardness, and hierarchical subordination. In the Italian case, however, national unification meant not only the paradoxical division and polarization of “North” versus “South,” but also the extraction of the latter from its geographical, cultural, and mental belonging to the Mediterranean continent. Decades of counter-hegemonic discursive practices have made us justly wary of using Eurocentric concepts such as center and periphery, but to keep referring to the area known as meridione or mezzogiorno as Italy’s south, or southern Italy, is no innocent linguistic act either. As the two most celebrated contemporary historians of the Mediterranean, Peregrine Horden and Dominick Purcell, put it, this specific south constituted for four millennia the “biogeographical center” of the Mediterranean.13 As late as the early nineteenth century, the very name of the southern Italian kingdom, “of the Two Sicilies,” indicated a long-standing vocation to “be-long”—both be of and long for—to the liquid continent: a be-longing that had almost become a reality, when in 1820 a plan was drawn up to carve a canal between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Sea that would have separated the peninsular Italian south from the European continent. Chapter 3 dwells on the ancient origins and long durée endurance of this Mediterranean be-longing. I trace its formation to the Archaic Mediterranean of emporia (trading colonies), described by Irad Malkin as “multidirectional, decentralized, nonhierarchical, boundless and proliferating, accessible, expansive and interactive” system of “self-organization,” resulting into “syncretistic,” and “fractal,” processes of identity

13  Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 687.

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formation.14 A network generating network-like forms of selfhood akin to what Édouard Glissant has called the “poetics of relation.”15 This is what I call the emporion, or fishing net matrix of the original Mediterranean imaginary and, in Chap, 3, I focus on tracing the multiple figurations of this matrix in the sociocultural fabric of the Neapolitan Kingdom. The chapter, however, also indicates that emporion was not the sole matrix of be-longing that arose from the ancient Mediterranean. The territorialized reconfiguration of the Mediterranean into a Roman Mare Nostrum transfigured the fishing net into a spider web, and produced an Imperium matrix that has proven to be historically dominant over the emporion imaginary (in all its forms). In particular Mare Nostrum became the principal figure mobilized by Italian elites in the “making of Italians.” The main thesis of this book could be summarized as proposing that the “Southern Question” was, from the beginning until today—as I argue in the final chapter—also a “Mediterranean Question.” This double question, of the South-Mediterranean, consists in the confrontation resulting between Imperium forms of imaginary that have aimed at “making southerners into northerners” by actively repressing their Mediterranean be-­ longing, and forms of fishing net imaginary that either originated in southern culture, or mobilized the emporion matrix in the service of alternative conceptions of Italian-ness. To prove this thesis, Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7 illustrate the oscillation between Imperium and emporion forms of Mediterranean imaginaries that have accompanied the making of Italians from the late nineteenth century through World War II. The relationship between the discursive formation of the “Southern Question,” the massive emigration of southerners around the turn of the twentieth century, and the theorization of a Mediterranean race by Giuseppe Sergi, takes center stage in Chap. 4. Here, the reader glimpses what will become clearer in the following chapters: the relationship between Imperium and emporion is, only  apparently, one of opposition and polarization; both matrixes show up in Sergi’s influential discourse on Homo Mediterraneus, and they also do so in the epiphanic Mediterraneanism of Gabriele D’annunzio (Chap. 5), and the programmatic Mediterraneanisms of both Futurism (Chap. 6), and Fascism (Chap. 7). As a result, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web reinterprets key processes and agents in the history of 14  Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25. 15  Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

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modern Italy from a perspective that challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete, but also rejects the polarizing logic of identifying southern-ness and southerners exclusively with emporion forms of imaginary, and northerness and northerners with those of Imperium-Mare Nostrum. The takeaway message is that Italian-ness resides in the oscillation between centripetal forces of imperialization, and centrifugal ones that reject the Imperium logic and oppose to it counter-hegemonic imaginaries of emporion. It is the perpetual oscillation  between these two poles, rather than either choosing one or the other, which is constitutive of the Mediterranean form of Italian imaginary. The case of Italy is noticeably absent from Anderson’s discussion of nation-ness as the dominant imagined community of modernity. Possibly, this is because Anderson’s book focuses on the national communities imagined and formed between the late eighteenth century and the 1830s. For Anderson, the constitutive element of the nation as “imagined political community” was that it was “imagined as inherently limited and sovereign.”16 This book suggests that the imagined community of the nation may have entered a new stage undetected by Anderson around the time that Italy unified. I indicate this stage as the transformation of Nation States into Empire States. In Italy’s case, Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the consolidation of a purely “national” form of identity, by pushing past notions of sovereignty and boundaries into ideations of “living space” and images of belonging with others. On this plane, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web contributes to the construction of a transnational paradigm for the study of Italian and other national cultures, which seeks to question whether the nation should continue to be thought of as the sole, or primary, source of collective imaginaries. In the first half of the twentieth century, Italian political and intellectual elites articulated forms of Mediterraneanism that territorialized the Mare Nostrum to make Italian-ness coextensive with Mediterranean-ness. By the same token, images of be-longing to a maritime space of interaction provided Italians with an alternative experience of identity based on the Ur-image of the Mediterranean as a sea of others. World War II brought a definitive end to the former. But the oscillation of the Italian imaginary between Imperium and emporion did not end there, nor did the subordination of the “national” to other affective communities.

 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.

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The confrontation between the Europeanization and Mediterraneanization of Italian-ness in the postwar era is the focus of the book’s final chapters. The era began with the most powerful institutionalization of the emporion imaginary in the activities of the Italian National Hydrocarbons Authority (ENI) and the fishing net of pipelines it laid on the bottom of the Mediterranean. Notwithstanding its antifascist credentials, popularity, and political sway, ENI’s Mediterranean emporion never became as hegemonic as Imperium had been in the preceding half century. By the mid-1960s, a formidable adversary had entered the fray to compete for the hearts and minds of Italians. Born in 1941, on the small Mediterranean island of Ventotene, the idea of united Europe had emerged from the war as the key legacy of Italian antifascism.17 It rapidly replaced the territorializing spell of Mare Nostrum by providing a new continental referent for the postwar imaginary of Italians and affecting the hybridization of Imperium and emporion in the formation of a new Mediterranean imaginary for European others: Italia balneare (seaside Italy). Emerging, initially, as the icon of “Italy-as-destination,” and connected to the flocking of Northern European tourists to Italian beaches and islands, the identification of seaside Italy with a consumer image of prêt-à-porter Mediterranean-ness is a truism that would find few dissenters. The Mediterranean Sea appears inscribed in the very geographical fabric of this peninsular nation, and the global consumer industries of cinema, tourism, and cuisine have enthusiastically participated in making Italy the Mediterranean destination par excellence. But Italia balneare is not where the story ends. Rather it is the bridge that takes us to the final transfiguration of the Imperium matrix of Mare Nostrum in its dystopian obverse of a mare aliorum (sea of others). Nothing in the postwar era changed the lives of Italians and challenged their image of themselves more than the thousands of humans that, since the early 1990s, continually crossed different stretches of the Mediterranean Sea to reach Italian costs or islands in search of asylum. Images and characterizations of this “sea of others” have rapidly coalesced especially in the discourse of the new political forces that have emerged from the tectonic shifts that have jolted Italian politics in the post-Cold War era. In particular, the resurgence of meridionism in the image of mare aliorum is on full 17  Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, Per un’Europa libera e unita. Il manifesto di Ventotene. The manifesto was written in 1941 and distributed via clandestine agents in the antifascist front. It was published in 1944.

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display in the path that has led the populist Lega Nord (Northern League) born in 1991, to lose its northern connotation and become, in 2018, the Lega (League) tout court. The original regionalism and anti-southernism that animated the secessionist Northern League have been jettisoned in favor of a national appeal of the League based on the externalization of the “South” into the Mediterranean of others. In the process, the Lega can also fashion itself as the anti-European union party while resting firmly on the Europeanization of Italian-ness that has led to the expelling of the Mediterranean from the heart of making Italians. After the demise of Mare Nostrum, the exhaustion of emporion-ENI in the mid-1960s, and the Mediterranean for others of Italia balneare, with mare aliorum the principal figure of reference for the making of Italians seems to have definitively exhausted its function. I didn’t know the shape of the story I was about to tell when I started writing this book. I never expected it to be one in which beginning and end would result coterminous. It was only when I put the final period to my last chapter that I realized that a coda was needed, and that this conclusion could have equally functioned as the book’s introduction. My love affair with the Mediterranean Sea comes from my personal identification with the island of Procida—the very same island where part of the scene in which Mario Ruoppolo wonders about the poetry of the Mediterranean in Il postino,  took place. But the spark that ignited my search for Mediterranean imaginaries came in 1992 when I read Jacques Derrida’s The Other Heading for the first time. There it was, in plain words—not something customarily associated with Derrida’s prose—the ante litteram response to mare aliorum: the idea of Europe as “a cape” with a single geophilosophical predicament, namely, that of “heading” toward its “Other,” the North African shore of the Mediterranean.18 For Derrida, this navigational heading meant questioning the power of capital, and of nation-states. In his own words: “European cultural identity [must be] responsible for itself, for the other, and before the other, to the double question of le capital, of capital, and of la capitale, of the capital.”19 These words have guided me on my own research path but also inspired a uniquely Italian spur of geophilosophical discourse on the Mediterranean that has both enriched the evolution of my study, and become the object of my final reflections. In the works of Franco Cassano, Massimo Cacciari,  Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 19 and 35. 19  Ibid., 16. 18

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and Iain Chambers, one can readily identify the most sustained elaboration of Derrida’s spark, but also the Ur-matrix of the emporion imaginary and reversed mirror image of mare aliorum. Theirs is the “sea of others,” where the “of” does not stand for threatening territorialization, but for processes of de-­territorialized be-longing. ***

CHAPTER 2

Making Italians, Making Southerners

“Fatta l’ltalia, bisogna fare gl’italiani.” “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” The most famous maxim in the mythology of Italian unification (1860) bears repeating and observing from close-up so that we are able to grasp its subversive ambiguity. It turns the cultural theory of nation-building on its head: the constitutive subject of the nation (a linguistic and cultural community) is first posited as being absent and is then proposed as an objective that must be attained through a retroactive, and yet obligatory (bisogna), act of legitimation. One might, therefore, interpret it as simultaneously challenging and reinforcing the doxa that nation-­ states are the expression of “imagined communities” united by common languages, customs, history, or racial fantasies.1 Following the first reading, the last European nation to be created in the second half of the nineteenth century could be seen as having reversed the natural order of things by being born as a state before it ever existed as an imagined community. Considering its makers, instead, one could take notice of how quickly and collectively they hastened to reassure the world that they intended to restore the natural order immediately by working on creating the national community post facto. Both readings, however, contribute to give the  Italian  adage the status of making explicit the cultural norm of all nation-building: national communities are a perennial work in progress, and they never cease to be made and remade well after the nation-state has  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 1

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_2

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been formed. The Italian case, however, does present an anomaly. Donna Gabaccia notes that at the time of unification, Italians had been made abroad rather than at home for centuries, by both themselves and others.2 The geographical, linguistic, cultural, and political fragmentation that had been a feature of the history of the Italian peninsula and islands since the early modern period had not prevented the formation of diasporic communities that imagined themselves—and were imagined by those around them—as the embodiment of a civiltà italiana (Italian civilization) comprising “Italian art, music, science, architecture, humanist scholarship, and urban pleasures.”3 The cultural bricks for the making of Italians were therefore readily available in the aftermath of unification, as they had been used for centuries. Furthermore, the adage’s rhetorical emphasis on the act of poiesis (fatta/bisogna fare) successfully transfigured the implicit referent of the civiltà italiana: creativity and artistry. Yet, its very longevity, and its continued inspiration for generations of Italian scholars, intellectuals, artists, and politicians, does not attest to a rapid normalization or resolution of the poiesis gap between a “made” nation-­state and the creative nationalization of Italians; rather, it points to a far darker side of Italian nationbuilding, which the highly discursive history of the adage itself elicits. The maxim in question is nowhere to be found in the writings (Ricordi, 1867) published after the death of its alleged author, Massimo D’Azeglio, who was one of the “moderate” fathers of the Italian nation, nor was it reported anywhere in the immediate aftermath of unification. It was constructed and turned into a trope by Ferdinando Martini, a friend of D’Azeglio, several decades after the publication of its reputed source, following the defeat of the Italian army by the Ethiopians at Adwa in 1896, and it only became a true national dictum during Fascism.4 As Stephanie Malia Hom starkly puts it, the motto’s “rhetoric of poiesis […] culminated not only in making Italy, but also in the making of ‘greater Italy,’ that is, in sustaining colonial expansion and the Fascist Empire.”5 The making of Italians, in other words, belongs to the history of state- and empire-­making rather than nation-building. In this respect, the longevity of the adage  Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2000).  Ibid., 16. 4  Stephanie Malia Hom, “On the Origins of Making Italy: Massimo D’Azeglio and “Fatta l’Italia bisogna fare gl’italiani,” Italian Culture 31, 1 (2013): 1–16. The defeat at Adwa took place during a military campaign to expand the territories occupied by the Italians in Eritrea in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It was the first defeat of a white colonizer by an African army. 5  Ibid., 11. The Greek term poiesis is used here to emphasize the common semantic root of poetry and making. 2 3

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captures a discursive sphere of imaginings and reimaginings of the Italian community that has connected generations of post-unification writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians, in spite of the political caesura between Liberal and Fascist Italy.6 In addition, if one reads the poietic overflow of the maxim against the grain of its discursive history, one also recognizes the false premises projected by its first stanza: fatta l’Italia. The Italian nation-state was not “made” either in 1861, when it was declared, or in 1866, when the Italian army “freed” Venice, or in 1870 when it finally conquered its soon-to-be capital Rome. Like the making of Italians, the making of Italy was dominated by the colonial logic of achieving a Grande Italia (Greater Italy) that included both entering the Great War under an agreement to annex the Austrian territories south of the Alps and create a protectorate over Albania, and the colonial wars that led to the occupation of Eritrea (1882), Somalia (1890), Libya (1911), Ethiopia (1936), and Albania (1939). The dual poiesis of making Italy and Italians not only anticipated Fascism, it also presupposed a logic of colonial expansion that went hand-in-hand with the territorialization of the national community and concealed the violence that was implicit in both processes.

Making Northerners, Making Southerners At its most basic level, territorialization refers to the act of organizing a territory, as in the case of a state organizing a nation into administrative departments, regions, provinces, etc. In their seminal works of the 1970s, the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed a more constructivist notion of territorialization in which a “territory” is not a given, but is created by invoking the nation-state, which likewise involves the organization of the individuals within it. Deleuze and Guattari used the notion of territorialization primarily to develop the twin concepts of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, which they used to analyze capitalist processes of libidinal investment, divestment, and reinvestment.7 Their analysis did not directly refer to nation-building, and yet it had everything to do with the question of national identity, especially in 6  Hom, “On the Origins,” 3. Scores of influential commentators still deny that Italians have ever been truly made, and countless scholars and members of the public have lamented the fact that the original deficit in the nationalization of Italians has never been overcome, even during the Fascist ventennio. 7  Eugene Holland, “Deterritorializing ‘Deterritorialization’: From the Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus,” SubStance 20, 3 (1991): 55–65.

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the case of making Italy and Italians. According to Deleuze and Guattari, territorialization defines the trait d’union between a nation that assembles its territory and an identity that organizes itself by territorializing: that is, by marking its social space of interaction as a national territory.8 The “making of Italy” was therefore, from the very beginning, the “making of Italians.” It is a well-known fact that even the first act in the making of Italy and Italians was anything but a unified or unifying effort. Politically, it was the work of (at least) two diametrically opposed agents that found themselves working together in 1859–1860, when Monarchist and Republican patriots led a two-pronged military campaign. One army—led on land by the Piedmontese Monarchy of Savoy—moved against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the north east, while the other—the celebrated Spedizione dei mille (Expedition of the Thousand)—led by the popular “Hero of the Two Worlds,” General Giuseppe Garibaldi, and inspired by the writings and actions of the Republican ideologist Giuseppe Mazzini, moved by sea, landed in Sicily, and proceeded to “liberate” the south of the peninsula from the Bourbon monarchy that ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The fact that this haphazard process of national formation was actually given a specific name, and that this name—Risorgimento—referred in the most emphatic, most Catholic terms to a sacred political body that resurges or is resurrected, still stands as a reminder of the deep fractures that unification not only swept under the carpet, but actually created, and that name sought to exorcise. On the one hand, the sacralizing figure of a resurgent national body did away with the history of cultural, political, and territorial fragmentation that had characterized the peninsula and its surrounding islands from Medieval times on, and on the other, it glossed over the gap between the committed minority of middle- to upper-class patriots and the vast majority of the population of the peninsula who had remained passive and suspicious of, if not outright hostile to unification. In so doing, it further denied the depth and historical rootedness of separatist and republican expectations alike, which were widespread in the “liberated” regions that had belonged to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Above all, it sacralized the violence employed by the newly formed state to repress the insurrections that flared up in these regions even before the ink on the new monarchical constitution was dry. The term brigantaggio (banditry), which was used by military officers and civilian commentators of the time 8

 Ibid., 56.

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to refer to the civil war that was waged in the south of the peninsula between 1860 and 1865, complemented the sacralization of state violence in the name of the Risorgimento with the criminalization of the savage law of nature. Never properly defined, and eternally amorphous and swathed in mystery, brigantaggio figured ubiquitously in law and discourse as the opposite of civilization. In brigantaggio, writes John Dickie, “civilized violence and barbarism” were mutually constituted,9 and this process took place through a further act of territorialization. The repression of the first Italian civil war went hand-in-hand with the creation of a far deeper division and polarization than any associated with the making of Italy. This was the geographical division and cultural-social-­ economic polarization between an Italian “North” and an Italian “South” (which was also known as the mezzogiorno, or meridione), or rather, as Dickie so perceptively explains it, between “Italy” itself and “the South” as “Italy’s Other.”10 The day after Garibaldi met with Victor Emanuel II in Teano and uttered his famous “Saluto il primo Re d’Italia!” (I salute the first King of Italy), Count Cavour’s envoy Carlo Farini would write these words to his leader, which would later be echoed in description after description of brigantaggio: “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouins are a flower of civilization compared to these peasants.”11 Farini’s sentiments were immediately echoed and made specific in a Piedmontese saying that spread widely in the aftermath of unification: “Garibaldi did not unify Italy; he separated Africa!” The geocultural creation of a divided image of “Italy-North” and “non-Italy-South,” was therefore the most immediate, consequential, and long-lasting result of the territorial expansion and transformation of the Kingdom of Piedmont into the Kingdom of Italy. It was also the constitutive act of making Italians. Traditional historiography on liberal Italy has generally viewed the discursive field of “making Italians” as being separate from the so-called questione meridionale (the Southern Question) and meridionalismo (southernism): that is, the discourse revolving around the causes of, and the remedies for, the backwardness of the South compared with the rest of 9  John Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South: 1860–1900,” in Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South. The Mezzogiorno Revisited (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press), 125. 10  Ibid., 119. 11  Farini, cited in Claudia Petraccone, Le due italie. La questione meridionale tra realtà e rappresentazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), 6.

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the country. To the poiesis of making Italians—which was largely the province of public intellectuals, poets, and other literary figures—meridionalisti responded with the pragmatics of facts and statistics. The two groups have rarely encountered one another in the same monograph. More recently, scholars such as Jane Schneider, John Dickie, and Nelson Moe have challenged this fictitious separation by showing how widespread the formation of stereotypes of the “South” was, far beyond the discourse on the Southern Question, and how the cultural bricks upon which meridionalismo rested had been laid across Europe long before the unification of Italy.12 As Dickie puts it, “the South” was constituted as an “imaginatively charged synecdoche of the problem of nation-building,” and meridionalismo effectively “transposed on to a geographical axis” the fundamental question of the “relations between elites and masses.”13 This revisionist perspective has, however, remained closely tied to the writings of Pasquale Villari, Leopoldo Franchetti, and Sidney Sonnino in 1875–1876 as the “origin” of the Southern Question. Moe and Dickie, therefore, have reaffirmed the poietic premises of nation-building rather than problematizing them, and showed little concern for the territorializing logic that underpins the discursive construction of the Italian South. This study considers the connection between making Italians and the Southern Question from the standpoint of a growing body of postcolonial critical literature, and specifically from the perspective that Luigi Carmine Cazzato has aptly named “Meridionism.”14 Meridionism, which is seen as being parallel and analogous to Orientalism, stands for the discursive construction of “Souths” in modernity, beginning with Southern Europe in the early eighteenth century all the way through to Africa as the world’s perennial South at the end of the nineteenth century.15 Italy’s South arose precisely at the mid-point 12  Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998); John Dickey, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (London: Macmillan, 1999); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 13  Dickie, “Stereotypes,” 128. 14   Luigi Carmine Cazzato, “Fractured Mediterranean and Imperial difference: Mediterraneanism, Meridionism, and John Ruskin,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 26, 1 (2017): 69–78. 15  Orientalism, the imaginary-ideological construction of the Orient, famously described by Edward Said is also at the center of the authors’ reflections in Jane Schneider’s Orientalism in One Country.

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between these two, and was informed by what Anibal Quijano pertinently calls the logic of “coloniality.”16 In contrast to early modern New World colonialism, coloniality is specific to post-French Revolution modernity, in that it bases relations of territorial domination on the exercise of epistemological power: that is, on the hierarchizing of difference.17 The first epistemological movement of coloniality consisted in the temporalization of the “imperial space of differentiation,” which resulted in the twin ideas of Progress and History and the related hierarchies of “advanced” and “backward.” The second movement involved the simultaneous racialization and hierarchizing of the relations between “dominant” (colonizer) powers and “dominated” (colonized) subjects, which resulted in a “relationship of biologically and structurally superiors and inferiors.”18 Variety was reduced to dichotomy, and dichotomy to hierarchy, while spatial differentiation gave way to the normative temporalization of North as progress and South as backwardness. It was not just one dichotomy that emerged from this process, therefore, but two: while coloniality constructed the Orient as Europe’s external and inferior Other, it also defined Southern Europe as the “internal antithesis” of Northern Europe, and in so doing affected both the making of Italy and Italians.19 To put it in stark terms, far from being parallel to and separate from the discourse on “making Italians,” the Southern Question preceded and pre-constituted it as to both its modalities and finalities. The earliest and most cogent exemplification of the Meridionist framework connecting the Southern Question to making Italians is Giacomo Leopardi’s poem La Ginestra (The Broom, 1836), which is as much an ode to the vanishing wisdom of Neapolitans as it is a diatribe against the “proud and foolish century” whose intellectual sons “praise” its “bubbling” of progress. With delicious irony, the Recanati native apostrophized the men of progress, and challenged them to visit the desolate slopes of Vesuvius to ascertain “the ‘magnificent and progressive fate’ of the human 16  Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantia: Vies from the South 1.3 (2000): 533–580, and “Coloniality and modernity/rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (March/May 2007): 168–178. See also, in the same journal’s volume, Walter D.  Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking,” 155–167, and “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” 449–514. 17  Cazzato, “Fructured Mediterranean,” 28. 18  Ibid., 29. 19  Ibid., 39.

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race” and see “how carefully our race is nurtured by loving Nature.”20 While ridiculing naïve positivism, the poem identified the Vesuvian fields with a mental horizon in which human nature was still understood as subject to the Laws of Nature, rather than belonging to History and its Law of Progress. The Broom thus recorded the transformation of Naples from a metonymy of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism to a synecdoche for the fateful subordination of Nature to History in modern times. It also captured a moment in time when the signification of Naples as Italy’s South began to collapse into that of Italy as Europe’s South. The eighteenth-­century acclaim of the Italian South as a “liminal” space in which Europe, Africa, and Asia met and coexisted began to give way to the Meridionist image of southern backwardness and savagery.21 During the course of the eighteenth century, the idea of civiltà italiana, which had been developed over the centuries by diasporic would-be Italians, began to be obfuscated by a far more vibrant Northern European image of Italy as Europe’s South.22 Initially, this image was fairly benign in its liminality, and was aligned with the Grand Tour’s passion for the picturesque and the Enlightenment’s search for a harmonious balance between the forces of nature and man. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, however, polarizing images of northern and southern European-ness began to circulate widely in popular novels like Madame De Stael’s Corinne, or Italy (1824) or Victor de Bonstetten’s treatise, serendipitously entitled The Man of the North and the Man of the South (1825), in which the latter is firmly—and exclusively—associated with depictions of Italy. In particular, Italy’s southern-ness started to be associated with the transformation of the celebrated otium Romanum and dolce far niente (sweet idleness) into the vice of “indolence.”23 This moral degradation was also commonly gendered and engendered in the Italian cicisbeo, who was a ubiquitous presence in late eighteenth-century literature and theater. Identified as a young male lover of a married lady who 20  Translated quotations from the poem are from a translation that can be accessed at: https://www.poetr yintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Leopardi.php#anchor_ Toc38684164 (accessed December 14, 2019); see also Moe, The View, 50–52. 21  Ibid., 40. 22  See Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. 23  Ibid. and Robert Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes. Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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accompanied her in public, feigning effeminate (homosexual or unthreatening) traits in order to hide the affair and allow the cuckolded husband to save face, the figure of the cicisbeo projected the image of an emasculated, morally deprived, and sexually permissive people: “Italians,” concluded a non-Italian observer of the age, “had ceased to be men.”24 Italian patriots could not agree more: while spurring his countrymen toward unification and the reclamation of their moral and cultural primacy, Vincenzo Gioberti ended his Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) with a scathing critique of his countrymen’s “principal vice” of indolence. Cesare Balbo said much the same thing, albeit insisting that this was only a “temporary condition” and that unification would “regenerate Italians.”25 In Della nazionalità italiana (On Italian Nationality, 1843), moreover, Giacomo Durango claimed that Italians had lost their taste for industriousness due to an “intentionally emasculating” education.26 Finally, Giuseppe Mazzini, the putative ideological father of Italian nation-­ building, sealed the connection between work, the elimination of vice through the sacrifice of one’s indolence, and the regeneration of Italians’ multiple “personalities” into a single people “of character” in a direct appeal to “working men” in his Dei doveri dell’uomo (On the Duties of Man, 1860).27 Mazzini’s discourse on character was both the basis and the target of the writings that D’Azeglio himself dedicated to the topic in his Memoir, and which lay at the origin of the famous maxim about making Italians.28 D’Azeglio echoed Mazzini when he advocated that “the most immediate need” after unification was “to form Italians who would know how to do their duty; in other words, to form men of high, strong character.”29 By suggesting that this task had not been accomplished by the making-of-­ Italy process, and re-proposing it as the very content of making Italians, D’Azeglio and his followers entered an entirely new and different discursive arena from the one inhabited by Mazzini. For Mazzini, blood and selfless dedication to the cause was the only adequate path toward the re-­ masculinization of Italians and their acquisition of character. For D’Azeglio, the goal was specifically identified with forming Italians of “Piedmontese  Patriarca, Italian Vices, 36–45.  Ibid., 32. 26  Ibid., 30–33. 27  Giuseppe Mazzini, Dei doveri dell’uomo (1860) (Milan: RCS, 2010), 67–76. 28  Hom, “On the Origins,” 13. 29  Massimo D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1866), 8–9 (my translation). 24 25

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character” by endorsing the British ideal of the “self-made” man.30 In fact, the formulation in D’Azeglio’s Ricordi (1867) that comes closest to the famous maxim can be found in a passage in which he criticizes Mazzini’s all-too-Catholic and sacrificial conception of character with these words: “If we want to have Italy we first need to make Italians; and once they have been made, Italy will do it on its own!”31 As Silvana Patriarca has shown, D’Azeglio placed the emphasis on self-­ reliance and the self-made man, which were the pillars of the doctrine of “self-helpism” authored by Charles Smiles, whose Self-Help had recently been published in 1865 and immediately translated into Italian. The book sold 75,000 copies in Italy, spurring a plethora of publications on the lives of Italian self-made men, including edifying fiction and textbooks addressed specifically at children.32 So prominent was this literature on the self-making of Italians that it led to the Italianized term self-helpisti being coined to define devotees of Smiles’s ideas. On the surface, the self-helpist movement advocated the moral virtues of work in general as a privileged, if not the only, milieu for constructing Italian character, but this discourse actually applied only to the public sphere and was conceptualized in purely masculine terms. Its rapid spread was predicated on, and in turn reinforced by, the long-standing connotation between effeminacy and indolence that had been codified by the association of Italians with dolce far niente. As Susan Stewart-Steinberg has argued, even the two classics of the Italian literature of the time—Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) and Cuore by Edmondo de Amicis (1886)—which were acknowledged to be the principal literary agents for turning Italian children into men of character, bore the marks of self-helpist solutions for the submerged but widespread anxieties about Italian masculinity.33 The overarching logic behind the earliest post-Risorgimento phase of making Italians was therefore one of gendering; however, the polarization of a female pre-unitary polity and a male unified nation made for a cross-­ gendering image of the Risorgimento that attached itself easily to the parallel logic of Meridionism. As Patriarca has again perceptively argued, the very tendency to reiterate the same stereotype of female laziness over and  Ibid., 60–65.  Cited in Hom, “On the Origins,” 4. 32  Patriarca, Italian Vices, 60–65. 33  Ibid., 73; and Susan Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect. On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 30 31

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over again in literature, the popular press, and political discourse was both the most unifying trait among Italian cultural elites and the clearest sign of their remarkable dependency on a view of Italy-making that arrived “from the Thames.”34 Not only had Great Britain greatly influenced the political and military process of unification, but from the London-exiled Mazzini to D’Azeglio and the self-helpisti, an ideal cultural identification with Europe’s North had also come to be the principal common denominator across a politically divided patriotic front. No wonder the last term in the series of associations in post-unification discourse associating Italian-ness with effeminacy and indolence was that of the now reified “South.” Both Gioberti and Balbo had explicitly transfigured Bonstetten’s polarization of northern and southern Europeans in their patriotic classics.35 Gioberti had  literally replaced Paris with Rome as projecting a happy fusion of North and South in an ideal center. Yet, when commenting on the spread of indolence among the populations of the Italian peninsula, Del primato did not reify a North vs. South dichotomy but still referred to specific regional differences. It was therefore the consolidation of Europe’s South into a unitary nation-state that allowed the geocultural polarization of Europe to be grafted on to the territorialized body of the new nation. Territorial differences that had hitherto been attached to Tuscans, Piedmontese, Venetians, Neapolitans, Sicilians, etc., each with their own specificities, were reorganized and schematized into “Northerners” versus “Southerners,” and “Southerners” were invariably identified as being idle and effeminate.36 With indolence placed squarely at the feet of the South, the normative content of making Italians found its definitive discursive realization in meridionalismo and the questione meridionale. The public conversation between southern and northern intellectuals around the causes of and remedies for the backwardness of the South developed in the mid-1870s, and was therefore built on the cultural bricks that had been laid by the Europe-wide Meridionist discourse, but with a key added component: the medicalized discourse of biopolitics. As Moe has shown, both the Neapolitan Villari and the Tuscan duo of Franchetti and Sonnino made liberal use of medical metaphors with which to treat the criminal trinity of brigantaggio, camorra, and mafia in biological terms, and by which to identify the South as a potentially fatal illness for  Ibid., 72.  Moe, The View, 113–120. 36  Ibid., 13–36. 34 35

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the resurgent nation.37 For Villari, the ruling political class that had tackled the “plague” of southern criminality had been composed of “excellent surgeons, but awful doctors,” and had done nothing to alleviate the social root of the criminal illness: that is, poverty, or rather “miseria,” a word that in Italian emphasizes the moral abjection induced by poverty.38 While not directly related to discussions on camorra, Villari’s association of Naples with cholera epidemics reinforced the marriage of moralist and organicist language in meridionalismo by highlighting the foundational opposition between Italian civilization and a South that remained dominated by the laws of nature. It is no wonder then that Villari would literally posit the mafia as being “born of spontaneous generation.”39 Even more openly and explicitly than Villari, Franchetti and Sonnino admitted that as members of the first ruling political elite (the so-called Destra storica, i.e., the monarchist and moderate liberal right), they had been bad doctors. For “fifteen years” they had not taken care of the “sores” and “wounds” of the south, and had therefore allowed them to “become gangrenous” and to “threaten to infect Italy.”40 Yet, implicit in these conclusions was the fact that, alas, more acts of surgical violence were needed, because “in a weakened organism” such as Italy had become, “those same causes that would produce barely noticeable effects in a healthy body lead to a complete breakdown.”41 Just as Villari had commented at one point that “the enslavement of the Negroes [had] harmed the slaves’ masters most of all,” so Franchetti and Sonnino also concluded in similarly paternalistic terms that “the first to suffer cruelly” from a lack of surgical violence would be the members of the ruling class themselves.42 Whether surgical (Franchetti and Sonnino) or homeopathic (Villari), the solution to the Southern Question was autoimmunization by the ruling class. Any exhaustive consideration of the writings of Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino should contextualize the words quoted above within the political scope of their concerns for the recent electoral defeat of their political side, and the moral compass of their times.43 Similarly, no evaluation of their writings can be divorced from the role they played in buttressing  Ibid., 224–249.  Pasquale Villari, quoted in Moe, The View, 228. 39  Ibid., 79. 40  Ibid., 247. 41  Ibid., 248. 42  Ibid. 43  Petraccone, Le due italie, 7–12. 37 38

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positivism and combatting the ascendency of idealism in the cultural wars of fin-­de-­siècle Italy.44 Finally, the influence they exercised over the generations of meridionalisti who followed in their footsteps, and who continued to quote them in their texts, attests to their success in building an extremely cohesive and stable discursive field that is still alive today.45 Pasquale Turiello, Napoleone Colajanni, Ettore Ciccotti, Giustino Fortunato, Francesco Saverio Nitti, Alfredo Niceforo, Gaetano Salvemini, and Antonio Gramsci, to cite only the most prominent of them, each brought new political and disciplinary insights to the Southern Question, but they did not dramatically change the relationship between meridionalismo and making Italians that had been set in motion by Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino. By the same token, it must be acknowledged that quite apart from the often conflicting diagnoses and prognoses they offered, participation in the discourse initiated by Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino on its own served the key purpose of nationalizing southern Italian elites to the logic of Meridionism.46 Quite literally, the making of Italians into men of character identified its appropriate subject in the very southern intellectuals who were discussing the Southern Question. In other words, the first goal of making Italians was achieved by having southern intellectuals accept, if not actually welcome, the surgical violence of the newly formed state and simultaneously divorce themselves from the southern populace by identifying themselves with the northern power of “facts.” Here, the discursive development of meridionalismo confirms the postcolonial insight that coloniality operates not merely by subordination, but principally via “colonization of the imagination of the dominated,” so that northern “cultural Europeanization was transformed into an aspiration” for most southern intellectuals.47 As Moe’s work documents, the precise intersection between the logic of Meridionism and the construction of the Italian nation-state can therefore be located in the mid-1870s when the task of making Italians shifted quite effortlessly from the general brief of making “men of character” to the very specific one of making “Southerners into Northerners.” To conclude, rather than providing solutions, fostering nationalization, or welding the nation-state to the imagined community,  Ibid., 224–249.  See, for example, Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance. Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (London: Associated University Presses, 1997). 46  Moe, The View, 224–249. 47  Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity,” 169. 44 45

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meridionalismo inscribed the whole project of making Italians within the logic of Meridionism and coloniality as theorized by Cazzato and Quijano and documented ante litteram by Moe and Dickey. Yet, while Dickey’s postcolonial reading of the Southern Question restores the violent edge to the poiesis of making Italians, and Moe’s point of view “from Vesuvius” inserts the voices of Southern intellectuals into the process, neither fully account for another territorializing dimension of Meridionism-­meridionalismo: the creation of the Italian “South” implied the separation and isolation of its lands and islands from the waters to which they had always belonged, and the active suppression of the entire peninsula’s projection into the Mediterranean Sea. This geophysical aspect of territorialization is the central concern of this book.

The Mediterranean Question The criminalization of southern opposition to the Italian state was accompanied by the establishment of a new prison system that was expressly devoted to locking up briganti, camorristi, and mafiosi, often for life. These prisons were built on various Mediterranean islands located all around the peninsula: the Tremiti (Puglia), the Giglio (Tuscany), Lipari, Ustica, and Lampedusa (Sicily), Ponza and Ventotene (Lazio), and Procida (Campania—the only one that had existed previously). This extensive use of islands to imprison the enemies of the newly formed nation-state reflected and implemented an imaginary of Mediterranean encirclement and insecurity that was widespread in the political and military establishment of the Italian State, especially after the disastrous defeat inflicted on the Italian Navy by the Austrian fleet at the battle of Lissa in 1866.48 The fact that this first military wound to national pride came from the sea not only reinforced the profound diffidence of the ruling elites toward anything maritime, but also reached deeply into the imaginary of those few people who already saw themselves as Italians and were fighting to make others feel as they did. The leading journal of the Italian Navy, Marina Militare did not print a single article on the Mediterranean Sea—except for a few on the Suez Canal—in its first ten years of publication (1868–1878). In 1872, on the other hand, a dystopian novel-reportage written by an anonymous naval officer captured the imagination of many Italians in a manner not unlike the impression that Orson Welles would 48   See Ezio Ferrante, Il mediterraneo nella coscienza nazionale (Rome: Rivista Marittima, 1987).

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make on American radio listeners in 1938. Il racconto del guardiano di spiaggia (The Tale of the Beachside Guardian) imagined an Italy that had lost a naval war with France, had had its cities bombed and sacked, and was first invaded and then reduced to a colony with no opportunity for economic development.49 This popular novel clearly projected on to the whole nation what had recently taken place in the southern regions of the peninsula, while at the same time buttressing the image of a “fortress Italy” that needed to separate itself as far as possible from the sea that surrounded it. The dystopic displacement of the South on to the colonized body of the nation was therefore conjoined with the suppression of the Mediterranean Sea as a constitutive element of its history, geography, and cultural heritage. In fact, this suppression had started long before the defeat of Lissa. It had been there all along during the very process of national territorialization. From political thought and action to literature and poetry, the Mediterranean as a sea—and also as a seafaring space and maritime world, including its islands, its coastlines, its ports, and its economies of trade— was either ignored in Risorgimento writings or appeared as an enemy, an obstacle, and a place of tragedy. In the minds and words of the agrarian elites who led the Risorgimento and the unified nation into modernity, the sea was primarily associated with the ever-present threat of cholera epidemics, which had reached the peninsula through its ports in 1835–1836, 1849, 1854–1855 during the pre-unification era, and would do so again, following unification, in 1865–1867, 1884–1886, and 1893.50 Additionally, Italy’s Mediterranean coastline had been the place where the majority of attempted insurrections had foundered, from the Bandiera brothers in 1844 to Carlo Pisacane’s trecento (300) at Sapri in 1857. Most significantly, not even the epic and successful spedizione dei mille (Expedition of the Thousand) would give the resurrected Italian nation a maritime imaginary: despite being raised as a sailor, spending most of his military life as a ship’s captain, and achieving fame as “the Hero of the Two Worlds” thanks to his daring maritime exploits, Garibaldi is represented as a General on a horse or standing on ground in almost all of the paintings and monuments that immortalize him in Italian villages and cities, rather than as a

49  Anonymous, Il racconto del guardiano di spiaggia (1872). Cited in Ferrante, Il mediterraneo, 18. 50  Paolo Frascani, Il mare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008).

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commander at sea.51 Even the Friulian-born Pacifico Valussi, perhaps the most Mediterranean of thinkers in the patriotic canon, would all but reverse his original seapolitan ideas in the aftermath of unification. As the editor of La Favilla (The Spark) in the 1840s, Valussi had taken the porto franco status of Trieste, with its multilingual, multireligious, and cosmopolitan community, as a model for theorizing a quintessentially antinationalist creed. He explicitly identified “borderlands” as “centers” of a cosmopolitan form of nationhood in which the pernicious tendencies of nationalism to highlight and weaponize differences could be diffused and counteracted.52 His bordertopia expressed the Mediterranean status of Austrian-ruled Trieste, the newest port city to assume a prominent position in the Adriatic trade system in the nineteenth century, in unique ways. “Owing to their position and traffic,” Valussi argued, “Venice, Trieste, and the Adriatic were destined to develop into a ring between various nations,” and thereby represent a Mediterranean vision of nationhood in which port cities were the physical centers of ideal nations whose liquid extensions touched and interacted with one another’s.53 Within a decade, unfortunately, we find Valussi in Milan among the most rabid and renowned irredentists, “pushing with hyperbole and national chauvinism for the incorporation of the Veneto, Friuli, and Istria into Italy.”54 Valussi’s turnabout highlights the connection between Meridionism and the suppression of a Mediterranean imaginary in the patriots charged with making the nation. The repression of this Mediterranean horizon in the Risorgimental imagination becomes most significant, however, when it is seen in the context of the connotations attached to the Mediterranean Sea in the literature charged with making Italians in the aftermath of unification. In 1881, the most popular and world-renowned character in Italian literature, Pinocchio, sprung out of the imagination of the Florentine writer Carlo Collodi. In the adventures of the wooden puppet turned boy, commentators then and now have recognized the enduring icon of the relentless and never-ending process of making Italians.55 A self-reflexive 51  Ibid., 29. See also Erika Garibaldi ed., Qui sostò Garibaldi. Itinerari garibaldini in Italia (Fasano: Schena Editore, 1982). 52   Dominique Kirchner Reill, “Bordertopia: Pacifico Valussi and the Challenge of Borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century,” California Italian Studies 2, 2 (2011). Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4r76c785. 53  Ibid., 19. 54  Ibid., 20. 55  See Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 10–12.

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story of divided limbs that needed to be “educated” into the young body of a boy (nation) in flesh, blood, and bones constituted a perfect invitation for Italians to educate themselves into Italian-ness.56 That this brilliant tale of transformation should be born out of a pastiche of universal stories (Jonah) and popular cultural motifs (the money tree) is unsurprising, given its almost universal appeal, with translations into 200 languages and multiple art forms. It is, however, remarkable that the otherwise faithful depiction of the Tuscan landscape that can be recognized in the puppet’s adventures on land was not replicated in the sea off Versilia, which the author knew so well. The sea in Pinocchio immediately becomes an ocean populated by monstrous pescecani (sharks), which in several versions of the tale become whales or, more precisely capodogli (sperm whales): that is, species of oceanic fish that are not typically found off the coast of Tuscany. The image of Geppetto taking a small wooden boat to go looking for his son “di là dal mare” (beyond the sea) evokes both the “emigrant nation” that would lead a third of the male population of the newly born Italy to settle in distant lands within the space of three decades, and the absence of the Mediterranean Sea from the making of Italians at home.57 This notion of “beyond the sea” was echoed two years later in Giovanni Verga’s novella Di là dal mare (1883). In this short story, the Tyrrhenian Sea between Naples and Palermo is depicted as the site of the illusory survival of a vanished picturesque vision of the social and natural balance, in which the clandestine love between the two protagonists is accompanied by the melodies of Sicilian songs at the bow of the ship and Neapolitan songs at the stern.58 Whereas the ocean obliterated the Mediterranean Sea in Collodi’s di là dal mare, in Verga’s the sea is cast as a long-gone space of authenticity that disappears instantly under the weight of social roles and conventions on land. Verga’s sea has the same status as a horizon of illusory expectations in the many short stories and novels written by the Sicilian author in the 1870s and 1880s, from Storia di una capinera (1871) to Rosso malpelo (1879), in which the sea is either the site of a fatal escape or appears as a luminous corpse. This negative status would reach epic proportions in his masterpiece, I Malavoglia (1881), in which the tragic  Ibid., 12.  Marc Choate, Emigrant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 58  Moe, The View, 289–296. 56 57

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image of the sea as a cruel and inescapable destiny passed on from father to son is given its most iconic expression. What makes the absence of any positive connotation attached to maritime life in Verga’s extensive oeuvre particularly relevant is not only the fact that he was responsible for fathering the first truly national Italian literary movement, verismo, but also that he was a southerner, just like most of verismo’s leading figures, from the young Luigi Pirandello and Luigi Capuana, who were both Sicilian, to the Neapolitans Federico De Roberto and (Greek-born) Matilde Serao, to the Sardinian Grazia Deledda. The Mediterranean is absent from most of their writings, except as a marker of social inequalities, as in Serao’s Ventre di Napoli (1884), in which she remarks on the difference between the crystalline waters of the rich neighborhood of Posillipo and the “melmose acque” (murky waters) of the Marinella neighborhood.59 Even when verism finally delivered an epic tale that takes place entirely at sea with the romanzo-inchiesta (novel-­reportage) Sull’Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889), by Edmondo De Amicis, the nation-­ in-­the-making was offered a first, and most shocking, representation of fin-de-siècle Italian emigration, while at the same time witnessing the sea sinking under the symbolic weight of the ocean. The emigrant nation we encounter in De Amicis’s novel-reportage is a rural one as described by the author—who travelled with the migrants— during the 22-day voyage between leaving from Genoa and arriving in Montevideo (Argentina). In the first seven chapters of the book—while the boat is still in the Mediterranean before reaching Gibraltar—the narrative focuses on the social microcosm of the boat, on its chaotic swarming, crawling humanity. It is only when we reach the Atlantic Ocean in chapter 8 that “the sea” makes its first appearance. De Amicis’s use of the words “sea” and “ocean” is revealing. As Roberto Fedi has noted, despite the much longer time spent on the actual ocean compared with that spent on the sea, the word “sea” occurs 158 times, while the word “ocean” only appears on 44 occasions.60 The two words are not used interchangeably, however, but rather to connote very different aspects of the “liquid continent.” In a book that is virtually devoid of metaphors—a literary trademark of verism—De Amicis consistently associates the ocean with the 59  Matilde Serao, “On Naples: Six Translations,” translated by Jon Snyder, California Italian Studies 3, 1 (2012). Retrieved at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7492w5hs. 60  Roberto Fedi, “Mare crudele,” in La letteratura del mare (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2006), 245–310.

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symbolic horizon of the emigrants’ hopes and their unique experience of loss of self before its awe-inspiring vastness. In other words, the “ocean” captures the psychological fuel of the emigrant body, but not so the “sea.” The ocean is labeled as a “sea” whenever it is depicted as a physical entity that leaves the peasants sick, fearful, or crying like babies, or when it pounds the vessel for days at a time—as in the tempest De Amicis describes at length in chapter 17.61 The ocean therefore becomes an intellectual sublimation of the physical sea, which in turn seems to be a rebellious adolescent, a minor disruption of the reader’s contemplation of the former’s gravitas. From De Amicis’s drowning of the sea in oceanic poetics of infinitude it is just a small step to the exoticization of the ocean we find in the most popular and prolific Italian writer of the age, Emilio Salgari. An avid reader of travel literature who never traveled abroad himself, Salgari produced a staggering number of adventure novels, which may constitute the single-­ most extensive corpus of exotic colonial literature anywhere.62 Set for the most part in the colonial age—prevalently in the nineteenth century—the Salgari’s heroes’ adventures take place on every continent, but especially on the oceans and their archipelagos, from Sandokan’s Malaysia to the Antilles of the Black Corsair. Mediterranean islands or shores are notably absent. Only two of Salgari’s novels, Le figlie dei faraoni (1906) and Cartagine in fiamme (1906), do take place in the Mediterranean, but both are uncharacteristically set in ancient times. The “sea”, quite clearly belonged to the imagination of the past. The present was associated with an exoticized ocean, which provided a very welcome escape from both the dreary pedagogy of nation-making and the all-too-real anxieties of emigration. Both literally and literarily, the Mediterranean Sea did not just disappear from the space between the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and North Africa, as in the epigraphic anonymous Turinese adage that had Garibaldi separating them rather than uniting Italy: it was removed from all around the peninsula. This, however, was not limited to the literature aimed at making Italians. In perfect Meridionist fashion, the most consequential erasure of the Mediterranean Sea from the making of Italians came about in the discursive construction of the Southern Question itself. Besides the  Ibid., 309.  Vittorio Sarti, Nuova bibliografia salgariana (Milan: Sangottardo, 1994). On Salgari, see Ann Lawson Lucas, Emilio Salgari. Una mitologia moderna tra letteratura, politica, società, 4 vols. (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2017). 61 62

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criminalization of all dissent and insurrection in the triad of brigantaggio, camorra, and mafia, the most enduring and ubiquitous marker of Southern-ness in meridionalismo was the image of the unproductive latifondo (large agricultural estate).63 The latifondo offered an iconic meeting point between the twin figures of southern indolence and archaism. It also linked all types of criminal activity with the “agrarian question,” namely, the combination of unproductive agriculture and abject poverty.64 Between Villari’s Lettere (1875) and Gramsci’s Note (1926), the identification of the South with agriculture, land, and rural values remained constant and unchallenged, despite the wildly different analyses and solutions suggested by each commentator, and while the fact that Tuscan landowners such as Franchetti and Sonnino would not dedicate a single page of their famous Inchiesta in Sicilia (1876) to the importance of the Mediterranean Sea in the history, society, and cultural imaginary of Sicilians cannot come as a complete surprise, the same absence in southern meridionalismo assumes far greater significance. From Colajanni’s Settentrionali e meridionali (1889) to Fortunato’s Il mezzogiorno e lo stato italiano (1926), we find not one word on maritime life, culture, and economy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, nor about its foreign policy toward the Mediterranean basin, in any of the classics of Southernism. Even when the maritime ­history of Naples before 1860 was given some consideration, as in Nitti’s Napoli e la questione meridionale (1903), it was done in purely dismissive terms to affirm that Naples “never played any important role in Mediterranean commerce.”65 The persistent absence of the Mediterranean Sea from the writings and consciousness of meridionalisti highlights conclusively the intersection between the territorialization of the Italian “South” and the poiesis of making Italy/Italians. Seen in connection with the parallel suppression of the Mediterranean Sea in the literature tasked with the making of Italians, and Verismo in particular, the phenomenon acquires greater specificity. The Risorgimental consolidation of the Italian nation and its subjects made it necessary to repress Mediterranean imaginaries and forms of belonging, precisely because these had for centuries characterized the lives 63  Pasquale Villari, Lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Torino: F.lli Bocca, 1885), 27. 64  Ibid. 65  Francesco Saverio Nitti and Domenico De Masi, Napoli e la questione meridionale (1903–2005) (Napoli: Guida, 2005), 69.

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of those who were being “made” into southerners. Italian nation-­building, in other words, not only construed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as Italy’s “South,” but did so by suppressing its long-standing status as a Mediterranean “middle ground.” It cut off the making of Italians from the Mediterranean imaginaries that had nourished the collective identity of the people who had inhabited that middle ground for centuries.66 These imaginaries, in fact, had not merely existed in Roman antiquity, when the Italian south was terrritorialized under the magniloquent name of Magna Graecia: they dated from far earlier, and as we shall see in the next chapter, they had permeated social relations and processes of identity-formation in the Italian mezzogiorno from the Archaic era to the formation of the Italian nation and beyond.

66  For the notion of “middle ground” see the discussion of Irad Malkin’s A Small Greek World in Chap. 3.

CHAPTER 3

The Fishing Net and the Spider Web

“I am Nestor’s cup, good to drink from. Whoever drinks from this cup will be seized straightaway by desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite.” This inscription appears on a clay drinking cup in the small museum of Villa Arbusto on the island of Ischia, one of the three Phlegrean islands opposite Naples, Italy.1 The so-called Coppa di Nestore (Nestor’s Cup) was retrieved from a tomb in the necropolis of the ancient Pythekoussai, the first Greek colony in the West, which was founded on Ischia by men coming from the island of Euboea. It is justly famous for two exceptional reasons: being dated 730 to 720 BCE, the inscription is considered to be the earliest surviving example of archaic Greek language; equally significantly, the text refers to a famous episode in Homer’s Iliad: King Nestor drinking from a precious gold cup. As such, the inscription speaks to us of the literary origins of the “West” and the key role the Greek colonies in Southern Italy would play in the Hellenization of the West’s first Empire: Rome. Rome and Greece met on the fertile lands of Campania (the region around modern Naples), and their marriage was consummated in the Latin name the Romans gave the whole area: Magna Graecia (Great Greece). This Roman territorialization of the Greek civilization in Southern Italy anticipated and set in motion the more extensive territorialization of the Mediterranean Sea itself as Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). It tied both Southern 1  http://www.pithecusae.it/materiali/arbusto.htm. The other two islands are Capri and Procida.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_3

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Italy and the Mediterranean to the landmass to the north of the sea, and to its triumphant destiny. The lure of this Ur-Western artifact is inseparable from the metanarrative sequence that binds the names of Greece, Magna Graecia, Rome, the West, and Europe. The “idol of origins” against which Marc Bloch admonished historians always to be on their guard is on full display here to ensnare the visitor’s historical imagination.2 One needs to pause, and to look around. Just before coming across Nestor’s Cup, a visitor to the Villa Arbusto museum can admire a vase from the same period known as Cratere del naufragio (The Shipwreck Vase) (Fig. 3.1). On it, the artist has depicted the scene of a shipwreck in late-geometric style, with a capsized boat, fish under the water, and bodies floating on the surface. The depiction of these bodies in the water is arresting because of its spatial configuration and unfamiliar asymmetry. It suggests a relational immediacy between image and everyday life that is rarely encountered in Greek pottery. This sense of lifelike realism is confirmed by the content of several display cases in the first room of the museum in which weights for fishing nets, anchors, and fishing hooks speak to us of the maritime life of this first Greek colony in

Fig. 3.1  Cratere del naufragio (The Shipwreck Cup). (Courtesy of the Museo Archeologico di Villa Arbusto (Ischia, Italy)) 2

 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954), 24–28.

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the West. Despite the literary reference to the Iliad, the early archeological record of Pythekoussai connects the island more closely to the archipelagic realm of Odysseus’s maritime wanderings than to the epic saga of the Greek siege of Troy. There are more surprises in store for us as we move on to the second room of the museum, however. Most of the artifacts in its display cases relate to a very land-based activity: metallurgy. Weights and scales for weighing precious metals, molds, tools, and stone vases for holding the liquefied metals, all appearing to have been buried with the dead as if they were as precious as the very products of their labor. This island, one might surmise, must have been full of precious metal ores, which must be why the Euboeans chose it as the place to establish their first colony. And yet, geological studies of the island have revealed no significant ores of any metal. Puzzling questions of beginnings, rather than origins, take form in the visitor’s mind. Why then did the Euboeans choose this island as their first settlement? Why settle on this island to establish a center for molding metals if there were no metal ores there? Why settle on this island and not on one of the many others the Euboeans encountered on their route westward? Why did they not stop and settle in Sicily, for example, or on firmer ground, such as the tip of the Calabrian peninsula? Why, in a word, was Pythekoussai the first “Greek” colony? The answer to all of these questions is neither mysterious nor uncertain. Scholars have established that the Euboeans followed ancient Mycenaean routes across the Aegean Sea and founded their first emporion (trading settlement) on the island of Ischia because of what and whom they were searching for.3 Their goal was to settle at a safe distance from the metal-­ rich island of Elba, several miles to the north of Ischia, which was occupied by a people we now call Etruscans, but who were known at the time as Tyrrhenians—by the name of the sea they dominated—and were renowned for having first, and best, mastered the art of extracting and melting iron in the Mediterranean.4 Clearly, the Euboeans had traveled this far in order to gain direct access to Tyrrhenian iron and to trade with the islands 3  David Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and “Some Reflections on The Early Euboeans and Their Partners in the Central Mediterranean,” in Oropos and Euboea in the Early Iron Age. Acts of an International Round Table, University of Thessaly, June 18–20, 2004, ed. Alexander Mazarakis Ainian (Volos, Gr: University of Thessaly Press, 2007), 141–153. 4  Mario Torelli, “The Battle for the Sea Routes: 1000–300  BC,” in David Abulafia ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 99–126.

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controlled by the Tyrrhenians. The West, therefore, did not begin with “the Greeks,” but with the connections among three Mediterranean islands: Euboea, Ischia, and Elba. Twenty years after the founding of Pythekoussai, the Euboean–Ischian islanders crossed the narrow strait between Pythekoussai and the peninsular coast to found their first colony on the mainland: Kyme (later Cumae in Latin). A few decades later, and a few miles south of there, the Euboeans–Pythekoussians–Kymeans in turn founded Parthenope, the ancient Naples, thereby creating an integrated Phlegrean micro-region.5 In the meantime, news of the Euboeans’s success must have spread rapidly, and the Greek craze for Western settlements took off, alongside similar efforts by Phoenicians and Tyrrhenians. In the course of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, waves of Greek sailors left their islands or city-states to cross the Mediterranean westwards, dotting the shorelines of Sicily and the toe and heel of the Italian boot with their emporia and settlement colonies. Viewed from the vantage point of the waters they crossed, these Greeks positioned themselves as the go-betweens of the Mediterranean seascape, occupying its middle section, and in so doing connecting the Tyrrhenians to their north with the Phoenicians who dominated the southern and western shores of the sea from Lebanon through North Africa to Spain, having founded city-states such as Carthage, Barcelona, and Malaga. An interconnected Mediterranean of islands and mainland emporia was thus born from the interweaving of north–south and east–west trading routes, from the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules. This is the Archaic Mediterranean that has been described by Irad Malkin in his 2011 book, A Small Greek World.6 By adopting the perspective of network theory and adapting it to his historical purpose, Malkin has identified the Archaic Mediterranean as a “decentralized network” characterized by a “ship-to-shore” spatial orientation—like that of the Shipwreck Vase—that transformed the sea itself into an hinterland, and even coastal areas into “islands,” as Pythekoussai did with Kyme and Parthenope.7 Malkin is not the first scholar to have highlighted the web-like appearance of the ancient Mediterranean, of course. Both the two classics of modern Mediterranean studies, Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée, and Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s  Modern Naples has three ancestor cities: Paleopolis, Parthenope, and Neapolis.  Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). 7  Ibid., 3–62, especially 41–45. 5 6

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The Corrupting Sea, have insisted on the widespread conditions of connectivity in the Mediterranean.8 Malkin, however, focuses on the specific dynamics of connectivity and shows that the Archaic Mediterranean developed out of a “many-to-many” pattern of interaction and according to “syncretistic” dynamics of collective identity formation that created “middle grounds” in which not only were products, customs, and cults hybridized, but colonizers and local populations also achieved what postcolonial scholars call “creolization.”9 The result is what Malkin calls a “small world”: that is, a “multidirectional, decentralized, nonhierarchical, boundless and proliferating, accessible, expansive and interactive” system of “self-organization.”10 We find immediate confirmation of this Mediterranean Small World of emporia in the wide variety of artifacts in the remaining rooms of the Pythekoussai museum. Local late geometrical pottery stands next to scores of Corinthian vases in both the red-figure and black-figure Attic styles from Athens, along with Egyptian amulets, Phoenician-made oil containers and votive artifacts, and typical Tyrrhenian metal-look pottery. We learn that Pythekoussai thrived as an emporion well into the fourth century BCE, and that in all likelihood Phoenician and Etruscan traders also settled there, erecting small temples to their own gods, as was customary in most emporia. Seen from this “ship-to-shore” perspective, the Cup of Nestor no longer speaks to us in “Greek” dialect, but in a Mediterranean lingua franca of syncretism and multidirectionality.11 The longevity of what, to use Malkin’s concept, we might term the “Phlegrean middle ground” also confirms his observation that “historical networks rely on horizons of expectations that persist through time” and that the underlying logic of the Mediterranean network was fundamentally “fractal.”12 Every part of the Mediterranean network behaved in “network ways,” yielding a small world of small worlds, a web of networks, a sea in between lands that operated as one gigantic middle ground. 8  Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée Et Le Monde Méditerranéen À L’éPoque De Philippe II (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin: 1949), and Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000). 9  Malkin, A Small Greek World, 41. 10  Ibid., 25 11  For Nicholas Purcell, in fact, the Cup of Nestor is “a tracer of already old circuits.” Nicholas Purcell, “The Ancient Mediterranean,” in A Companion to Mediterranean History, Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita eds. (Glichester, UK: Wiley & Sons, 2014), 73. 12  Malkin, A Small Greek World, 34.

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In this respect, what Malkin describes is a proper Mediterranean matrix of identity that arranged practices and representations along a relational spectrum rather than rooting them in a territorializing logic.13 To put this in reverse order, the Mediterranean of emporia was established by islanders who projected their mentality on to the construction of a multicultural trading space that forged and simultaneously responded to promptings from a maritime matrix of belonging. This matrix operated outside the arborist logic of “rooted-ness” in territory, language, traditions, and self-­ sameness. If we consider the fractal nature of the system and the “overlap between actual networks and mental and symbolic ones,” we can liken the mental shape of this ancient Mediterranean matrix to the technology that has guaranteed the survival and prosperity of island communities everywhere: the fishing net.14 A crisscrossing of south to north and west to east sea routes connected over a thousand coastal colonies and city-states around the entire perimeter of the Mediterranean Sea.15 Rather than fish, however, the Mediterranean net caught islands. Large or small, entangled like prey, Mediterranean islands played the vital role of activating, tightening, promoting the sea routes that traversed them. They were the capitals of a blue continent without nations, one in which power was endemically liminal, as it literally resided at the continent’s boundaries, in the emporia that dotted its borders and separated it from the lands that surrounded it. Malkin focuses on three areas of Greek colonization—Sicily, Southern France, and Spain—arguing that by the early 500s BCE, the dynamics of the “many-to-many” had given way in some areas of the Mediterranean small world to those of “preferential attachment”, which led to the consolidation of cultural “clusters” and to the transformation of some nodes into “hubs.”16 Out of this homogenization process, Malkin sees the emergence of a distinctly “Greek” small world in place of the original, undifferentiated “Mediterranean Civilization.” This evolution from a single multidirectional fishing net to multiple decentralized networks was neither totalizing nor universal, however. True to the fractal nature of the fishing net system, the decentralized network was a layer that Malkin shows to have developed in certain areas under entirely “contingent”

 Ibid., 206.  Ibid., 50. 15  Ibid., 14. 16  Ibid., 39 and 46. 13 14

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conditions.17 His study demonstrates, in fact, that even in those areas in which a specific form of Greek identity had arisen, the dynamics of preferential attachment neither changed nor overpowered the syncretistic, fractal, and multidirectional foundations of the network.18 As visually documented by the museum in Pythekoussai, the Phlegrean middle ground never congealed into a small world, whether Greek, or Phoenician, or Etruscan, but maintained what David Ridgway calls its original character of “multinational entrepreneurial expansion.”19 Ridgway’s study of the central Mediterranean in the age of Pythekoussai demonstrates that unlike the areas studied by Malkin, the Phlegrean fishing net never underwent full-blown “Hellenization.”20 The resilience of the fishing net matrix in the Phlegrean middle ground assumes its greatest significance if it is looked at from the longue durée perspective developed by Horden and Purcell in their book The Corrupting Sea. At this analytical level, it is the fractal dynamics of the transformation between social practices and mental representations that take center stage. Freed from Malik’s concern with identifying only the “positive” aspects of identity formation, Horden and Purcell include the key element of violence in their vision of extensive Mediterranean connectivity. As Horden succinctly puts it, the ancient Mediterranean comprised all sort of “relations,” including “competition, mutual predation, parasitic violence, and subjugation […] alongside coexistence and peaceful economic 17  207. Malkin acknowledges, of course, that distinctly Etruscan and Phoenician small worlds may also have developed in this phase. He therefore sees the apparently “distributed” Mediterranean network, which corresponded to the period of Pythekoussai’s foundation (790–750  BCE), developing into distinct decentralized networks by the sixth century BCE.  Further stages in this sequence would take place in the fifth century, according to Malkin, with Athens’s failed attempt to replace the “Greek Wide Web” with a “thalassocracy,” and, two centuries later, with the establishment of the Hellenistic Empires (218). 18  Syncretism takes center stage in Malkin’s analysis of the relationship between the Greek and Phoenician god heroes Hercules and Malqant in sixth century Sicily. The fractal nature of all parts of the Mediterranean network is masterfully described by Malkin as marking the processes by which the unification of three distinct colonies into Rhodes took place at the same time as a “Greek identity” was forming at the beginning of the fifth century, and then again in the dynamics that led to the parallel rise of the regional (Sicilian) and “Panhellenic” ideas of a “Greek civilization.” More generally speaking, Malkin also recognizes the enduring multidirectionality of the Mediterranean network in the endemic reversibility between temporary emporia and permanent city-states (23). 19  Ridgway, “Some Reflections,” 144. 20  Ibid., 145.

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cooperation.”21 These relations continued, and still continue, to take contingent forms at the levels of both practices and imaginaries. It is therefore to the fractal transfigurations of the Phlegrean fishing net that we now turn our attention in order to appreciate the formation and enduring life of a southern Italian Mediterranean imaginary. The basic image conjured up by Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea is one of 4000 years of generalized connectivity in which the facility of island-to-island-to-shore communications in the Mediterranean also gave rise to tendencies to take advantage of these same conditions to bring part, or all, of the network under the control of a single player. The Corrupting Sea does not, however, attach either an evolutionary dynamic from decentralization to centralization or a positive value to one or the other. Side-­ by-­ side with trade and middle grounds, the most perfect and lasting incarnation of the fishing net matrix in the Archaic Mediterranean turns out to be piracy, which, in fractal terms, may be conceived as the continuation of fishing by other means.22 The persistence of piracy also leads us to fully appreciate the most important contribution of The Corrupting Sea: Horden and Purcell have documented the fact that true to its maritime matrix, Mediterranean connectivity did not respond to the law of dialectics, but to the experience of oscillation. Their study documents above all the endemic and enduring oscillation between centralized and decentralized forms of connectivity, exchange, and identity in the Mediterranean, from the Bronze Age to the putative cutoff date of 1869 CE, the year in which the Suez Canal opened, when they see the end of the Mediterranean Small World.23 My aim in the remainder of this chapter is to show that this oscillation may have nowhere been more structuring and long-lasting than in the Phlegrean Middle Ground.

The Roman Spider Web Despite its remarkable success at resisting full-blown  Hellenization for three centuries, the Phlegrean Middle Ground was transformed by the same centralizing force that territorialized the entire Mediterranean into a Mare Nostrum between the third century BCE and the first century  Ibid., 76.  How else should we speak of the wait for a prey concealed behind a promontory, the surprise attack, the chase, and the sense of trepidation about the nature and size of the booty? 23  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 339. 21 22

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CE. Rome did not build a new fishing net, however: it wove a spider web. “All roads lead to Rome” as the old Italian saying goes, but, from the island-to-shore perspective of the Mediterranean, all roads actually connected Rome to port cities on the Italian peninsula, and through them, led to other ports all around the Mediterranean.24 Sitting at the center of its web, Spider-Rome literally territorialized the Mediterranean Sea by replacing emporia with municipia, urban nodes that had the purpose of facilitating military control and communications between center and periphery, subordinating sea space to land power. It then built its Imperium by reducing the number of sea routes for commerce and casting a bundle of strands to connect its dual port of Puteoli (commercial) and Mysenum (military) with Alexandria (Egypt), Constantinople (Asia Minor), Marseille (Southern France), and Barcelona (Spain). In this way, Rome came to control trade by placing it under the protection of its navy and making it dependent on the needs of the Eternal City. Finally, the Roman fleet brought piracy to an end, turning islands into military bases. Rome named its creation “Our Sea” seemingly engulfing every vestige of the fishing net matrix within the spider web that replaced it. As scores of commentators have highlighted, Rome’s Imperium–spider web matrix of connectivity has proven to be the major attraction for all the thalassocracies that have attempted to recreate a Mare Nostrum over the centuries.25 Medieval Arabs, Byzantines, and Latin Christians pursued policies that were aimed at asserting control over large stretches of the Mediterranean, as did the Spanish and Ottoman Empires after them. Even for Horden and Purcell, the temptation to unify and control the Mediterranean region politically and/or militarily lies at the very heart of its corruptible matter,26 and yet Purcell has also reminded us that “tropes of Mediterranean integration, differing in their spatial configuration, scale and in the genesis, nature and mutation of the processes which identify them,” can be found throughout antiquity, even after the rise of Rome.27 He has also highlighted the key enduring roles played by “archipelagoes and island chains” in channeling connectivity.28 Similarly, Dominique Valérian has insisted that “exchange and conflict” between Christians and 24  See Marlene Suano, “The First Trading Empires: Prehistory to 1000  BC” in David Abulafia ed., The Mediterranean in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 67–98. 25  See Geoffrey Rickman, “The Creation of the Mare Nostrum” in ibid., 127–154. 26  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 28. 27  Purcell, “The Ancient Mediterranean,” 62. 28  Ibid., 68.

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Muslims “always coexisted, and the increase in maritime trade encouraged both competition for control of strategic ports and shipping routes, and the search for diplomatic agreements promoting trade,” despite the fact that Byzantines, Arabs, and Latin Christians competed for the creation of a medieval Mare Nostrum.29 Just as in antiquity, she adds, “dominating shipping routes” in the medieval Mediterranean “required the control of crossing points, straits and islands,” so that “changes over rule over islands corresponded to changes in the control of sea routes.”30 Her observations can easily be extended to every period of Mediterranean history to demonstrate that no matter how dominant it may have been at a level of political imaginary, the spider web never fully did away with the fishing net matrix of Mediterranean connectivity. From the Age of Empire to the present day, the Mediterranean fishing net has transformed itself into configurations that have marked every age of the Mediterranean and all attempts to impose unity in the Mediterranean.31 The history of Mediterranean fishing nets is, of course, subordinate, subaqueous, and often parasitic: at odds with the controlling mission of successive spider webs, not to mention the Atlantic currents of progress. It is a history that comprises the development of piracy and of slave-­ taking  and -trading as endemic parasites to the dominion over the Mediterranean space that was pursued by every Imperial ruler from Roman times through the early nineteenth century. But it also includes the spread of early Christianity from the heart of the Empire through major maritime communities (just think of the Pauline letters), the revival of trade in the early Middle Ages thanks to the Muslim conquest of Sicily, and the ascendency of Amalfi as the exclusive Latin Christian trading partner in the West for both Byzantines and Arabs.32 Significantly, it is a history that reaches its climax with the  Italian maritime republics of Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. From the 850s through at least the 1650s CE, these 29  Dominique Valérian, “The Medieval Mediterranean,” in Horden and Kinoshita eds., A Companion, 78. 30  Ibid., 80. From this perspective, one can see the failure of Latin Christian attempts at emulating Rome and building a new spider web through the Crusades, contributing to a re-weaving of the East–West strands that also produced trade benefits for Byzantines and Arabs. 31  For the distinction between history of and history in the Mediterranean, see the introduction by Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. 32  Armand Citarella, “Patterns in Medieval Trade: The Commerce of Amalfi before the Crusades,” The Journal of Economic History, 28, 4 (1968): 531–555.

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medieval and early modern emporia wove their fishing nets of commerce together and in sequence, cutting through the spider webs of Empire to connect first the Western and Eastern Mediterranean, and then the Mediterranean as a whole, with the Atlantic Ocean and the New World. In fact, recent scholarship has focused on the very fishing net-like qualities of the Ottoman Empire itself. Molly Greene, for example, has all but reversed long-held assumptions about the relative lack of interest of Ottoman merchants in sea trade, highlighting the very active trade carried on in the Black Sea as well as the Sultanate’s reliance on non-Muslims for trade with the Latin Christians, which she has proven “to be both long-lasting and consequential on many levels.”33 One of these levels was the challenge that Ottoman fleets consistently posed for the islands under Venetian control or hegemony: this minor war of attrition never produced a battle like that of Lepanto (1571), but it proves that the Ottomans were not content with their control of the Dardanelles, which had led to a rich trade with Asia and Northern Europe.34 They very well knew that control of trade routes depended on the occupation of islands, which were simultaneously capitals of and prey to the Mediterranean fishing net. On the other hand, the city of Venice itself, with its archipelago structure, its reliance on islands for its maritime trade, its perennial oscillation between commerce and military conflict with the Ottomans, and its tenuous ties to the land, represented the most faithful embodiment of the fishing net matrix in modern times. In fact, the very history of the early modern Mediterranean has virtually been identified with the rise and fall of the Venetian Republic. As  Faruk Tabak writes, with the decline of Venetian trade in the mideighteenth century, there began the fatal “decommercialization” of the Mediterranean that would come to definitive fruition in the course of the nineteenth century.35 Horden and Purcell have echoed Tabak’s conclusions by identifying the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 as the date of the end of their longue durée history of generalized connectivity in the Mediterranean. In their view, the opening of the Canal “decisively overturned the old 33  Molly Green, “The Early Modern Mediterranean,” in Horden and Kinoshita eds., A Companion, 94. 34  Oziem Caykent and Luca Zavagno eds., The Islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. A History of Cross-Cultural Encounters (London: I. B. Tauris & Co, 2014). 35  Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550–1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 307.

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bio-­geographical order” by signaling the “arrival of a qualitatively and quantitatively different epoch of Anthropocene impact.”36 Paradoxically, after two millennia of reconfigurations, transmutations, and transformations, the ancient matrix of the Mediterranean fishing net succumbed, according to Horden and Purcell, to “an exchange of waters between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.”37 Their announcement of the demise of the Mediterranean fishing net in The Corrupting Sea may have been premature, however, because their study focuses almost exclusively on the economic aspects of trade and the materiality of goods and their exchanges. But what about the cultural sediments of a maritime matrix of identity predicated for centuries on a “many-to-many” and “ship-to-shore” orientation? Scholars are still debating the existence of a Mediterranean code of honor and shame and a physical line of olive and grape that defined the ecological frontiers of the Mediterranean region, but these Mediterranean characteristics are anchored to the lands that surround the middle sea and the Braudelian model of history in the Mediterranean. As both Malik and Predrag Matvejević have reminded us, the Mediterranean is primarily “a cultural landscape” in which the island is the prototype of “terra firma” and the mainland acquires “island-like” features.38 Venice may have thus been the most fishing net-like harbor state in the modern Mediterranean, but it was not the last weaver of nets, nor was it the longest lasting. Notably absent from current discussions and reviews of Mediterranean trading practices is the Spanish Empire, which attracted the attention of the founding father of modern Mediterranean Studies, Fernand Braudel. Whether “in the age of Philip II,” or in earlier and later incarnations, the Spanish Empire continues to play the role of the quintessential Latin Christian spider web of the early modern period.39 Its function is still fundamentally tied to the double play that supposedly led to the end of Mediterranean unity in modern times. As even Horden and Purcell conclude, the establishment of Atlantic trade routes by Spain led first to the subordination of Mediterranean commerce to transcontinental trade, and then—as the latter passed into the hands of the “Northern invasion” of Portuguese, Dutch, and British ships in the late sixteenth century—to the  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 339.  Ibid. 38  Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 16 and 20. 39   See Valérian, “The Medieval Mediterranean,” and Green, “The Early Modern Mediterranean,” in Horden and Kinoshita, A Companion. 36 37

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replacement of a “Latin” with a non-Mediterranean “European” Imperium ruling over the Western Mediterranean.40 This way of looking at the Spanish Empire may have as much to do with the urgent need felt by recent scholarship to go beyond the Braudelian paradigm in Mediterranean Studies as it does with the lingering effects of Meridionism. The identification of Spain with Imperium tout court, and of Madrid with the spider at the center of a gigantic Atlantic-Mediterranean web that would soon be marginalized by more powerful Northern capitals, may be excessively indebted to considerations of trade volumes and geopolitical rearrangements. In fact, at the Eastern periphery of the Spanish Empire we find the Phlegrean  middle ground that had not only endured for centuries, but had also consolidated into a kingdom, known since the thirteenth century CE, intermittedly, as Kingdom of Naples or Kingdom of Sicily, or, more simply and metonymically as “Naples.”41 It is in this middle ground that we can observe not only a unique intermingling of fishing net and spider web features, but also their gradual separation in modern times along socioeconomic lines.

An Enduring Middle Ground Although Pythekoussai and Kyme were destined to disappear within the Roman spider web, other Phlegrean islands and emporia rose up in Roman times to play central roles in the transformation of the fishing net into the Imperial spider web. To begin with, the twin emporia of Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli) and Mysenum (modern Miseno), positioned halfway between Cumae and Neapolis, became the maritime centers of the Roman world until the foundation of Ostia in the second century CE.42 Ships of the Roman State left from Puteoli for Alexandria in Egypt to load the cargoes of wheat that guaranteed free bread for all Roman citizens. A significant amount of sea commerce and human travel also tagged along behind these State convoys on the Puteoli–Alexandria route in Roman times, escorted by the Roman naval fleet. Any subject of the Roman Empire was more likely to arrive in Italy from the sea at Puteoli than anywhere else, and to encounter the Empire in the Bay of Naples rather than in Rome. In fact,  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 615–642.  The reference to Las Indias de por acá is in Moe, The View, 50. 42  Geoffrey Richman, “The Creation of the Mare Nostrum: 300 BC–500 AD,” in Abulafia, The Mediterranean, 127–154. 40 41

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in 29 BCE, the future first Emperor of Rome, Octavian Augustus, acquired the island of Capri from Neapolis (Naples in Latin) in exchange for Pythekoussai—which from then on would become, and remain, a maritime extension of Naples—and declared Capri to be the property of the Roman State. Emperor Tiberius famously resided there for ten years without setting foot in Rome, and Caligula also spent long periods of time on the island and in Neapolis. With its 12 villas—one of which, Villa Jovis, was six stories high and towered over the strait between the island and the mainland—Capri made the Empire visible in all its Imperial splendor and exclusiveness to any ship approaching from the west, north, or south. It thus positioned the entire Phlegrean area at the symbolic center of the Roman spider web. Here, Rome was Hellenized through its contacts with, and conquests of, Greek emporia, which it territorialized by turning them into municipia. As a case in point, when the Romans transformed Kyme into Cumae, they turned around the altar of the city’s principal temple— which had previously looked westward toward the sea and the island of Pythekoussai—to face south toward the Arco Felice, a customs gate on the Domitian road that joined Puteoli-Mysenum and Rome. Below Cumae they built Baia, which became famous for its thermal baths, using the sulfur-rich waters of this volcanic area. All around, on the coast stretching from Baia to Salernum, the Roman patriciate built their splendid seaside villas, with their fish ponds and grape vines, to support and cultivate the prime Imperial virtue of otium: leisure time spent enjoying eating, drinking, and conversing on political and philosophical affairs. Unlike Pythekoussai and Kyme, the ancient emporion on the micro-­ island of Megaris, which bore the name Parthenope, did not thrive immediately. It was re-founded and renamed Neapolis in the sixth century BCE, but as a settlement colony where Athenians and local Campani joined the Kymean-Euboeans to form an immediately multicultural town. Lying between two rivers, Neapolis relied more heavily than other coastal emporia on communication with its highly fertile hinterland, and its harbor was not initially the heart of its life and commerce.43 In Roman times, however, Neapolis grew to become a key center of Hellenization in the West, 43  Lorenzo Miletti, “Setting the Agenda: The Image of Classical Naples in Strabo’s Geography and Other Ancient Literary Sources,” in Jessica Hughes and Claudio Bongiovanni eds., Remembering Parthenope. The Reception of Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2015): 19–38; and Luigi De Rosa, “Naples: A Maritime Port,” The Journal of European Economic History 31, 3 (2002): 513–558.

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even maintaining use of the Greek language in its administrative affairs after it became a Roman colony, and electing Greek-type magistrates as late as 194 CE.44 After the fall of the Roman Empire, Neapolis fell back on the relationship with its agricultural basin for several centuries, and developed into a Byzantine Duchy, until becoming part of the Kingdom of Sicily, first under German-Swevian rule (1130–1266 CE) and then under the French Angevins (1266–1282). In 1282 CE, following the so-called Revolt of the Vespers, Sicily seceded from the Kingdom of Naples and passed under the control of the Spanish House of Aragon. With its independence from Sicily and the Angevins in power, Naples finally rose to become a maritime power and a proper città-porto (port city) for the first time in the late Middle Ages.45 By the time the separate Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were reunited under Spanish-Aragon rule in 1442, Naples had, in the words of a Florentine merchant, become the most “convenient” center for trade between “the Levant, Africa, and the West” because it was “located almost in the middle of those places.”46 It was very much the goal of the Aragonese sovereigns of Naples to assume this centrality in Mediterranean commerce, as was made clear by the iconic Tavola Strozzi (1472), which while depicting the triumphal return of the victorious Aragonese fleet after its defeat of John of Anjou in 1465, unequivocally highlighted the centrality of the harbor to the new capital of the Spanish Mediterranean (Fig. 3.2). Equally indicative was the presence of the three figures of Muslim ambassadors from the Levant and North Africa on the bas-relief of the triumphal arch built by Alfonso of Aragon on the imposing Castel Nuovo (New Castle) that overlooked the new Neapolitan harbor (Fig. 3.3), and the huge fresco representing the Plaça Reial in Barcelona positioned right above the entrance gates to the castle. As highlighted by David Abulafia, Aragonese Naples was the expression of a truly “Mediterranean” dynasty that with the acquisition of Cataluña, Maiorca, and the Balearic Islands and 44  Mauro de Nardis “Greek Magistrates in Roman Naples? Law and Memory from the Fourth Century BC to the Fourth Century AD,” in Hughes and Bongiovanni, Remembering Parthenope, 93. 45  Peter J. A. N. Rietbergen, “Porto e città o città-porto? Qualche riflessione generale sul problema del rapporto fra porto e contesto urbano,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi ed., I porti come impresa economica. Atti della “Diciannovesima Settimana di Studi,” 2–6 maggio 1987 (Prato: Datini, 1988): 615–624. 46  According to a Florentine merchant, cited in De Rosa, “Naples,” 518; see also Horden & Purcell, 167.

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Fig. 3.2  Francesco Rosselli (attr.), Tavola Strozzi (1472). Certosa e Museo di San Martino (Naples, Italy). (Courtesy of Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e del turismo—Fototeca del Polo Museale della Campania)

Fig. 3.3  Muslim ambassadors to the coronation of Alphonse I King of Naples. Detail of the entrance gate to Castel Nuovo (Naples, Italy). (Photographed by the author)

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Sicily—and now Naples—had built a “ruta de las islas” (island route) to connect with the Islamic “ruta de las especias” (spice route) in North Africa and Turkey.47 As we know, however, this early modern revival of the Mediterranean fishing net was not destined to last. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) first, and the landing of Spanish explorers in the Americas soon thereafter (1492), changed forever the early modern “Mediterranean world” as immortalized in Braudel’s classic, reducing Naples to playing second fiddle, at best, to the port cities of Barcelona, Genoa, Venice, Constantinople, and Alexandria. These cities became the nodal points of the new intercontinental routes that extended Mediterranean trade eastward to the Black Sea and westward to the New Indies across the Atlantic.48 The ensuing decline of maritime Naples after two centuries of continuous rise was matched by its loss of political independence and the demotion of the Kingdom to a Vice-Royalty, or “las Indias de por acá” (the Indies on this side), as it came to be called at the Spanish Court. Over the course of the following two centuries (the sixteenth and the seventeenth), Naples was effectively territorialized both by being subjected to political control from Madrid, and by the stranglehold the Catholic Church and the landed aristocracy held over its economy and culture. The Mediterranean of Baroque Naples ended up by being a “sea without ships,” while the city itself went from being the center of the early modern Mediterranean to the easternmost periphery of the Spanish Empire.49 Yet, not even this reduction to an Imperial appendage destroyed the continuity that stretched back through medieval Naples to the ancient Parthenope-Neapolis. In fact, the very peripheral position of the Neapolitan Kingdom within a new geopolitical configuration that deepened the divide between a Western-Christian Mediterranean and Eastern-Ottoman Mediterranean may have contributed toward making Naples and its Phlegrean islands the site of the greatest endurance of the archaic fishing net matrix and of its reemergence in modern times.

 Abulafia, “Thalassocracies,” in Purcell and Kinoshita, A Companion, 143.  De Rosa, “Naples,” 519. 49  Vittorio Tino, Saggio marinaro sulla ‘questione meridionale’ (Catania: Giuseppe Maimone Editore, 2002), 17. 47 48

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Procida: An Early Modern Pythekoussai The small island of Procida is the closest to the coast but also the last of the three Phlegrean islands (the other two being Ischia and Capri) to be annexed by Naples in medieval times. Unlike Ischia and Capri, which played key roles in connecting Neapolis to both the fishing net and spider web models of Mediterranean connectivity, Procida seems to have been quite marginal in antiquity, despite having been inhabited since Mycenean times. Today, the island is best known to most travelers as the first stop on the way to tourist-friendly Ischia, or for having provided the film industry with a quintessential “Mediterranean” location.50 It is no wonder that no tourists and even few Procidans know what to make of two marble busts above the doorway of 11 Salita di San Rocco (Fig. 3.4). One depicts the face of a woman, but the other is more surprising. It is a double-faced bust showing two youths with very similar North African features, but one with darker skin than the other. The two sculptures were made during the Bourbon reign, but no one knows the exact date when they were sculpted, who commissioned them, or the name of their author. These factors,

Fig. 3.4  The two busts positioned above the entrance of n. 11 Salita di San Leonardo, Procida (Naples). (Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi) 50  The Oscar-winning film The Postman (Robert Redford, 1996) was partially filmed in Procida, as was The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999).

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however, would be of little importance. The significance of these two high cultural products rests entirely in their registering a very significant tale that has remained alive and recorded in oral history. According to Captain Vincenzo Di Liello—who found the busts and positioned them where they still are more than 30 years ago—the two sculptures commemorate a “real” episode that allegedly took place in the times “quando l’isola era caduta in mano ai Mori” (when the island had fallen in the hands of the Saracens), probably sometime between 900 and 1200 CE. The Saracens’s “califfo” (Caliph) was replenishing his harem with local women. During the selection process, the pre-adolescent son of one of these women—“la più bella e orgogliosa” (the most beautiful and proudest)—began to play with the only son of the Caliph who, much afflicted by his mother’s death, had never smiled since that day, and had been inconsolable and in poor health. Suddenly, the Caliph’s son burst out laughing, and his father, overjoyed by the event, decided to grant the beautiful Procidan mother her request not to join his harem, but to let her son live at court and allow her to serve as governess to both children. As the years passed, the two youths grew inseparable, even resembling one another “come due gocce d’acqua” (like two drops of water) until the day “le navi dei Borboni” (the Bourbon warships) suddenly appeared on the horizon and the Saracens scrambled to leave the island at once. In their rush, however, the Caliph’s guards mistook the “nobile” (noble) Procidan woman’s son for the Caliph’s legitimate heir, and left the island with one and not the other. The years went by, during which the Procidan woman mourned the loss of her child but hid and cared for the Caliph’s son as if he were her own, while Procidan fishermen sought desperately to make contact with Saracen ships. At last, one day “a più di quaranta miglia a sud di Procida” (more than 40 miles south of Procida), the Procidans overtook a Saracen convoy and arranged for an exchange of the two youths, which took place at sea soon after. The two busts were commissioned by the Procidan youth, “ora diciottenne” (who was now 18 years old), who had returned to his mother bearing large amounts of gold from the Caliph.51 I have selected a few words (in italics) from the account by Captain Di Liello in order to highlight some aspects of the tale, to which I will return in a moment.52 Before I do so, however, let us pause for a moment at the chronological sleight of hand of putting Mori—tenth- to thirteenth-century  E-mail from Captain Vincenzo Di Liello to the author dated July 12, 2015.  Ibid.

51 52

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CE Saracens, or Muslim pirates, or slave traders—on the same temporal plane as eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Bourbons.53 Since the story commemorates a medieval event—whether fictional or real—the Christians reconquering the island would have been Byzantines, or Swevians, or even Angevins, but surely not Bourbons. The fact that the Bourbons are referred to in every version of the story as recapturing the island highlights an oral tradition that ignores the differences among Muslims, Ottomans, Moors, Saracens, and Turks. In this respect, it speaks to a deeply rooted perception of cultural continuity beneath the fragmented political history of the Kingdom of Naples. What is more, this perception is clearly not solely a contemporary phenomenon: what we can establish with relative certainty— given their stylistic features—is that the two busts were indeed carved during the Bourbon reign, which tells us that someone on this island during the Bourbon Kingdom took the time and spent the money to commission two statues, one of which represents two faces with North African features. This Janus-like bust could not have encapsulated the idea of Mediterranean be-longing as a relationship of one-another-ness any more clearly. Whether real or imagined, the story attached to the two busts celebrated a continuity with a late medieval fishing net of contacts, exchanges, and friendships among Procidans and Arabs, Christians and Muslims in Bourbon times that is foregrounded in other aspects of the story as well as inscribed in the very architectural and cultural fabric of the island. The character of the “nobile” Procidan woman who maintains her independence and offers her motherly love in exchange for being permitted not to enter the Caliph’s harem captures the unremarkable self-­presentation of Procida as a proud, generous place, but also refers to a peculiarly strong matriarchal island tradition. Especially in Procidan families with connections to maritime trade, women were the legal owners of the family business and property. This was reflected in the uniquely rich and elaborate clothing worn by Procidan women (Fig. 3.5). The “Procidan costume” consisted of a scarf wound around the head in the form of a turban, a long white shirt, and a skirt attached to a corset embroidered in real gold thread with a blend of commercial and maritime motifs such as amphorae, waves, 53  I heard the tale of the two busts from several islanders during my research, and some retellings refer to “Turks” rather than “Saracens,” thereby connecting the era of the tale to Bourbon times. However, the main elements of the tale (conquest of the island, rapid departure, exchange far at sea, etc.) evoke the medieval times of the guerra di corsa (corsair wars) rather than the eighteenth century of the Grand Tour.

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Fig. 3.5  Donna procidana (Procidan Woman), colored lithograph, Gatti & Dura (1835). Private collection. (Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi)

coral, and shells (Fig.  3.6a, b). In the colder months, the costume was completed by an embroidered overcoat cut exactly like those worn by wealthy Arab and Ottoman merchants, red for young unmarried women, and green for married women. Although it is now called a “costume,” it

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Fig. 3.6  (a) The embroidered vest of the Procidan Costume. Photographed by Antonio Nasca. (b) Particulars of the vest of the Procidan costume. Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi. (Courtesy of Elisabetta Montaldo)

was not a ritual outfit but the everyday clothing of merchant-class Procidan women, at least in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attesting to the commercial importance of this densely populated four-square-mile island in Bourbon times.54 Its uniqueness was not merely because it was worn by women rather than men; it was also due to the fact that the gold embroidery technique for the decorative motifs on the vest and coat was not local—it was neither Neapolitan nor European—but Arabic-North African. Although none have survived from earlier times, the Bourbon-era Procidan costume, just like the tale of the Janus-faced bust, was a nod to the centuries-old continuity of commercial contacts between Procidans and Muslims. To invert the direction of the story, however, the costume also succeeded in communicating the dark side of the early modern fishing net, with its implicit reference to the painful experience of slavery suffered by Procidan women during the many centuries of guerra di corsa (corsair wars) that pitted Christian and Muslim slave capturers and slave traders against each other.55 It was in the harems of North African commanders and Sultans that Procidan women captives likely observed the shapes of 54  Elisabetta Montaldo, L’oro del mare. L’antico costume delle donne di Procida (Naples: Dante & Descartes, 2009). 55  Salvatore Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), and Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean and the Barbary Coast (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

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vestments and learned the technique of gold thread embroidery that after the women had been ransomed by their families would be embroidered into the costume that would make them uniquely famous.56 One of the few variables in the oral retellings of the story of the noble Procidan woman and her son is the distance covered by the Procidan fishermen to make contact with the Arabs: in most versions it is 40 miles but I have heard it being extended to 100 or even 200 miles. Whatever the number may be, 40 or 200 are far too many miles to be covered by medieval or early modern “fishermen” on the open sea in their oar-powered fishing boats. These numbers are most likely to be the offspring of the contemporary imagination of Procidan captains who are accustomed to commanding transoceanic cargo, passenger, and tanker ships, and whose fathers’ cianciole (large fishing boats) may have traveled south all the way to Tunisian waters. They are therefore indicative of the general maritime projection of the island, which was consolidated through trade with the Arabs in medieval and early modern times, extended to the entire Mediterranean under the Bourbons, and developed to a global scale in the 1970s. This projection is recorded not only in oral tradition, dress, and marble, but also in the tufa stone, mortar, and stucco of the island’s fishermen’s harbor: the Corricella (Fig. 3.7). The renowned architecture and urban design of Corricella has been defined as quintessentially “Mediterranean” because of its difference from, rather than its similarity to, that of its sister islands.57 Unlike the white and rather square buildings we find in Ischia and Capri—as well as on most other European Mediterranean islands—Procidan architecture in general, and that of Corricella in particular, is inspired by specifically Arab architectural elements, such as the domed roofs to collect water and vivacious colors for the exteriors of the houses, which are common in North African maritime communities. This direct Arab influence is unique in itself, but it is all the more remarkable if we consider that this colorful harbor was developed throughout the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the height of the military conflict between the Spanish and Ottoman Empires, when the island was still the target of Muslim corsair attacks, and even occupations. Furthermore, the urban fabric of the harbor included

 Montaldo, L’oro, 27.  Giancarlo Cosenza and Mimmo Jodice, Procida. Un’architettura del Mediterraneo (Naples: Clean, 2016), 9. 56 57

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Fig. 3.7  The Corricella harbor in Procida (Naples). (Photographed by Donatella Pandolfi)

many elements of naval rather than civil engineering.58 Most prominently, the houses in Corricella were all built on barrel-vaulted ground floors, where fishing boats and nets were stored, with upper floors reached by stairways that resemble those of a galley deck (Fig. 3.8a, b). With their elaborate, ever-changing designs, these stairways have for centuries been considered to be the aesthetic signature of the island. They have contributed to the creation of archways with a wide range of different angles, from the narrowest “giraffe-neck” acute arches created by the highest stairways to the deep, wide arches that are still known as “a la procidana” (in the Procidan style), and which give the viewer the impression that Procidan houses are more sculpted than they are built. This impression could not be further from the truth, however. In Procidan architecture, the length and shape of the external stairway respond to a unique structural need. Built by people who were more accustomed to ship-building than house-building, houses in Corricella were stuck one on top of the  Ibid., 68.

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Fig. 3.8  (a) Details of Corricella stairways. Photographed by the author; (b) Stairway on the deck of the Neptune, a reconstructed seventeenth-century galleon anchored in the harbor of Genoa. (Photographed by the author)

other, connected by narrow stairways, and built at different times with no consistent plan, with the result that the façade of the first houses built at harbor level bore the weight of the dwellings that were added higher up at a later stage. The external stairways were thus designed to allow excess weight to be discharged to the ground and to hold up not just a façade or a single house, but an entire row of houses. The mutual dependency of its single-family dwellings has led one critic to define the harbor of Corricella as a quintessential example of the “collective dwelling […] that originated in the Near East and on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.”59 In fact, besides the extremely high population density and the structural interdependence of each house on those below and above, the “collective” status of this maritime conglomerate was also recorded in law. For centuries, there was only one public stairway leading in and out of the harbor. All the others were built on private property, and inhabitants of the upper houses had the right to pass through the property of their neighbors below. Even when someone built a new room and moved the stairway left or right, the right of way through the newly built room remained in place. The collective texture, maritime style, and Arabic inspiration of Corricella’s architecture suggest that the Bourbon tale of the two boys actually served to preserve the memory of a symbiotic relationship between this Christian island and the southern Muslim shore of the Mediterranean that was established in medieval times and  Ibid., 7.

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continued in the early modern period beneath the political weight of the Spanish Viceroyalty. This weight was anything but symbolic on the island: it was present in the architectural features of a menacing, newly fortified ensemble of dwellings that was appropriately renamed Terra Murata (walled land). This fortress-acropolis was also built in the course of the sixteenth century and towered right above Corricella, offering a dominating 360-degree view over the Gulf of Naples (Fig. 3.9a, b). It was designed to function both as a fortress to project the military might of the Spanish Empire and as a refuge for the entire population of Procida in the event of a Turkish attack like the one in 1535, which is remembered to this day for the miraculous intervention by the island’s Patron Saint St. Michael.60 Built almost at the same time, Terra Murata and Corricella embodied the spider web and fishing net matrixes of Mediterranean interaction respectively, taking them into a space of coexistence and social differentiation, with the former firmly identified with political power (both secular and Catholic) and the latter with the social world of fishing, seafaring, and sea trading, and the wider popular culture that spread from this world.61 The Bourbons inherited and exalted both aspects, but it was clearly the latter that they placed at the heart of their revitalization of the “Neapolitan

Fig. 3.9  (a) Aerial view of Terra Murata, Procida. Photographed by the author; (b) Corricella (left) and Terra Murata (right). (Photographed by the author)

60  According to one version of the legend, upon being summoned by the prayers of the island faithful, Saint Michael appeared in the sky and set the Turkish ships ablaze. In another version, upon seeing the Turkish ships approach the island, Saint Michael set its coastline on fire, scaring the invaders off. 61  In Bourbon times, a prison was added to the existing fortress, thereby making the architectural contrast between Terra Murata and Corricella all the clearer and sharper.

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nation.”62 Side-by-side with building a prison on the Terra and designating much of the island as a private hunting ground for the Royal Family, the Bourbons also chose Procida as the site for the construction of the Kingdom’s main dockyard and shipyard.63 Under the Bourbons, Procida came to play a role akin to that of Ischia-Pythekoussai in antiquity, sustaining a new reconfiguration of the fishing net matrix of Mediterranean exchanges and extending it to all sectors of the Kingdom’s life through a mixture of state policies and private initiatives.

Naples as a Fishing Net Although Giacomo Leopardi may have written the most poetic pièce de résistance against Meridionism, he also famously believed that the sea and sea life were uninspiring and hard for Italian writers to put into poetry or prose.64 In Zibaldone, he wrote that “ideas relating to the sea are not particularly frequent in our literature” because “they lack two essential qualities: variety and being part of the daily lives, surroundings, habits, and memories of those who are not professional sailors.”65 The post-­unification “Italian” literature we looked at in the first chapter undoubtedly demonstrated the truth of Leopardi’s words, but, pace Leopardi, this was not at all the case with the literary production of his beloved Naples, not only because the sea was a part of everyone’s life, but also because literature was turned into music there. The canzone napoletana (Neapolitan folk song), which had been well known internationally and widely translated since the early sixteenth century, and had accompanied the ascendency of Naples as the uncontested capital of Italian opera during the eighteenth century,66 was born in the three maritime quarters of Naples: Santa Lucia, San Leonardo, and Mergellina.67 Although only a fraction of the inhabitants of 62  Antonio Spagnoletti, “Le identità subnazionali nel primo ottocento. Il caso napoletano,” in L’identità nazionale. Miti e paradigmi storiografici ottocenteschi, Amedeo Quondam and Gino Rizzo eds. (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005). 63  By the mid-nineteenth century, Procidan shipowners owned 702 ships, between tartanas and brigantines. 64  I am referring here to The Broom discussed in Chap. 2. 65  Giacomo Leopadi, Zibaldone (New York: Ferrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2013), 237. 66  Key elements in this ascendency were the brand new San Carlo Theatre (1737), which was attached to the Bourbon Royal Palace, and the invention of Opera Buffa, a comic form of music, dance, and song in dialect, which took characters and situations from the Commedia dell’arte tradition and was played everywhere in the Kingdom. 67  Lo Guappo, ed., Li cante antiche de lo popolo napoletano (Naples: Canesi, 1961), 30.

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the Kingdom worked at sea or lived on it, Neapolitan songs were redolent with maritime themes and motives from the outset, and continued to be so.68 And when it comes to variety, Leopardi may never have said what he did had he paid attention to the queen of all Neapolitan maritime songs, ‘O guarracino (The Damselfish). This anonymous late-eighteenth-century song included the names of 75 different species of Tyrrhenian fish in bouncy rhymes and rhythms to tell a tale of love, courtship, and jealousy that ended in open warfare.69 While providing a bombastic response to Leopardi’s all-too-literary-minded assessment, The Damselfish also offered an undersea image of the Mediterranean as the “corrupting sea” described by Horden and Purcell. We do not know the precise origins of the song, but we do know that its maritime poetic center was shared by many others that have survived and still top the charts of the most listened-to Neapolitan songs on contemporary Italian radio.70 We also know that the heyday of the Neapolitan maritime song was between the mid-eighteenth century, when La Procidana celebrated the new Pythekoussai, Michelemmà recalled the long-gone times of the Turkish threat, and Cicerenella brought the theme of the sea to the inland areas of the Neapolitan Kingdom with its irresistable tarantella beat, and the mid-nineteenth century, when melodic classics such as Santa Lucia, Addio a Napule, Canzone Marenara, and Voca Voca immortalized Naples’s identification with its sea. The ascendency of the Neapolitan song as the heart of eighteenth-­ century Neapolitan cultural life was also secured by the key role it played in the debate that pitted two champions of Enlightenment against one another on the question of the Neapolitan language. In 1779, Abbot Ferdinando Galiani published Del dialetto napoletano. This was a pamphlet written in “Italian”—that is, the written volgare of Dante and Petrarch, which had been codified as Italian and overseen by the Roman Academy of the Crusca since the early sixteenth century. Galiani argued that Neapolitans—just as the Venetians already had—should have made their dialect the “lingua nazionale” (national language) of their Kingdom, and not limit its scope to official administrative and legal acts—as it was the case in Venice—but rather extended it to all cultural forms, from 68  The Archivo storico della canzone napoletana lists 42,000 titles of Neapolitan songs http://www.comune.napoli.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/6763. 69  Gordon M. Poole, “A Neapolitan Mock Epic: Lo Guarracino (The Damselfish)” Napoli Nobilissima 7, 1 (2015). 70  See http://www.radio.rai.it/canzonenapoletana/new_classifica.cfm.

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everyday speech to poetry, theater, and prose.71 Galiani’s goal was not to replace Tuscan vernacular, which had been codified as the official Italian “literary” language in the early sixteenth century, and had been spreading as the legal-administrative language throughout the peninsula north of the Garigliano River (the northern border between the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States).72 Rather, he sought to challenge Italian’s hegemonic claims south of the Garigliano River. To begin with, Galiani argued, Neapolitan was the first and longest-­ standing form of vulgar Italian; it was rooted in Greek structure and lexicon rather than Latin, and having emerged in its current form at the time of the Lombard occupation of Puglia and Campania in the ninth century CE, it had been written and spoken uninterruptedly for centuries in the same culturally homogeneous area.73 Over time, however, spoken and written Neapolitan had been greatly corrupted because it was not only one of the languages spoken at Court and by the Neapolitan elites—along with French, Spanish, and Italian—but also the only language spoken by the “lazzari,” the Neapolitan popular classes and urban poor who were a picturesque Neapolitan attraction for Grand Tourists, but a walking nightmare for the Neapolitan upper classes. To Galiani’s mind, the principal culprit in the “corruption” of the Neapolitan dialect was the most famous and beloved of all writers in Neapolitan, Gianbattista Basile, author of the Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (1634 and 1636), one of the earliest known collections of folk tales. Galiani accused Basile of having put the language of the “infima plebe” (worthless proletariat) in writing, and for  having fished “schifezze stomacose” (revolting rubbish) from the muddy waters of Neapolitan popular culture, thereby contributing to the “deturpamento” (uglification) of both the Neapolitan dialect and costumes during the Viceroyalty.74 Premised on the Montesquieuan principle that not only the form of politics and society but also the “sound” of a language is determined by geography and climate, and in line with the Enlightenment precept of purging high culture of all superstitious elements, Galiani’s proposal was to clean up the Neapolitan language of all popular cultural incrustations. In this respect, the proposal was highly representative of a Neapolitan “subnational consciousness”  Ferdinando Galiani, Del dialetto napoletano (Naples: Giuseppe-Maria Porcelli, 1779), 7.  Luca Serianni, Saggi di storia linguistica italiana (Naples: Morano, 1989), 87. 73  Galiani, Del dialetto, 37. 74  Ibid., 133–134. 71 72

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that Ettore Spagnoletti has found to be uniquely strong in the panorama of pre-­national identities on the Italian peninsula.75 It was in fact widely debated and favorably endorsed not only in the 1780s but also during the Neapolitan Revolutionary Republic of 1799, when even Vincenzo Cuoco would suggest it as a revolutionary project to be realized. The response to Galiani by the younger Neapolitan intellectual, Luigi Serio, was even more famous and widely reprinted, however.76 Serio’s Lo vernacchio. Resposta a lo dialetto napoletano was not a learned polemic typical of the enlightened republic of letters: it was written in both letter and spirit in the same plebian Neapolitan that Galiani had condemned in his book. It addressed Galiani as “abate strunzillo” (little shit abbot) and used farce, grotesque, and satire to show the Abbot’s ignorance of both spoken and written Neapolitan, especially insofar as it related to his attack on Basile.77 In Serio’s opinion, Basile’s most distinctive and praiseworthy contribution was precisely that of having been the first courtier—in Naples and throughout Europe—to dive head-on into plebeian popular culture and to raise spoken Neapolitan, with all its color and polysemic resonance, to a written form that was to inspire many others after him, and also to prevent any fixing of Neapolitan into a national form.78 Contrary to Galiani’s learned metaphor characterizing Neapolitan as “the Italian Doric” due its more ancient and large-vowel pedigree than the Ionic Tuscan and Corinthian Florentine,79 Serio agreed with all those foreign visitors to Naples who reported at the time that Neapolitan was “a language with dozens of dialects, one for every quarter of Naples.”80 To reduce this heteroglossia to a purified, official, national language with a fixed grammar was to betray exactly what was unique about the Neapolitan ensemble of dialects: the fact that it was founded on a “relationship between reality and imaginary, life and fable,” and totally different from the Neapolitan spoken by the upper classes.81 Anticipating Bakhtin’s famous reflections on Rabelais, Serio identified the essence of this relationship in the “comic” register of plebian Neapolitan, more specifically in the  Spagnoletti, “Le identità,” 32.  Luigi Serio, Lo vernacchio. Risposta al dialetto napoletano dell’abate Galiani (1780), Davide Scarfoglio and G. A. Arena eds. (Naples: Colonnese, 1982). 77  Ibid. 78  Ibid., 77–78. 79  Galiani, Del dialetto, 7. 80  Serianni, Saggi, 87. 81  Serio, Lo vernacchio, 18. 75 76

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fact that all Neapolitans are “by nature so many Pulcinellas.”82 Far from being merely a casual reference to the famous mask of Pulcinella as a metonymy for buffoonery, Serio’s argument introduced an explicit parallel between Neapolitan as a polyvalent language and the most widespread form of theater in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean: Commedia dell’arte. In so doing, his argument implicated a parallel between Neapolitan and Italian heteroglossia. Born in fifteenth-century Venice from the encounter of humanist (rediscovery of Greek and Latin comedy; use of masks) and popular cultural elements (carnival; jesters; street performers), Commedia all’Italiana (only later renamed dell’Arte) may be considered among the most successful and long-lasting cultural hybridizations of high and law of all times. It may also have been a formidable contender with civiltà Italiana for the expression and signification of Italian-ness. According to Kenneth and Laura Richards, with its dozens of masks representing specific Italian cities and dialects, its lack of written texts, and its emphasis on lazzi—that is, gestural and physical comicality that interrupted the plots, causing laughter and guaranteeing communication (and comical miscommunication) among the characters—Commedia dell’arte may have been the vehicle for the very first idea of an “Italian national character.”83 In the eyes of both foreigners and inhabitants of the peninsula watching masked Italian comedies in urban market squares, at peasant carnivals, or at courts, irrespective of the specific comedy being put on, Commedia dell’arte identified Italian-ness itself with linguistic diversity and gestural communication compensating for the absence of a unifying language. Serio’s conception of Neapolitan language was therefore a metonymy for a popular-cultural idea of Italianness that had always rejected the territorializing logic of a national language in favor of a fishing net of dialectal inflections coalesced from local combinations of regional variations of vulgar Latin, Greek, Arabic, and northern European imports. Serio did not merely dispute Galiani’s principles for elevating Neapolitan to a national language of the Kingdom; he also challenged the social and territorial logic of his tragic and purified notion of language by invoking the combinatory register of the comic and connecting it through Pulcinella to Commedia dell’arte, which stood

 Ibid., 59.  Kenneth and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte. A Documentary History (London: Blackwell, 1990), 9. 82 83

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not only for a different idea of Neapolitan-ness and Italian-ness but very specifically for one that was coextensive with that of Mediterranean-ness. As Erith Jaffe-Berg argues, the longevity, geographical spread, and structural characteristics of Commedia dell’arte can in no way be identified with a purely Italian peninsular perspective, but reflect a “broader Mediterranean context including the exchanges among cultural and language communities in the Mediterranean.”84 In the first place, Commedia dell’arte “provided a platform for intercultural contact within the peninsula” and “within Europe” for minority non-Christian populations such as Jews and Muslims, “often inspiring theatrical original works.”85 Secondly, the nomadic lifestyle required of its troupes meant that these companies of comic actors and actresses did not simply reflect, but increasingly enriched, the “multilingual composition of their performances” through their encounter with a Mediterranean palette of tongues that also included non-­ European languages.86 Alongside “Italian” masks, therefore, Romani, Jewish, Armenian, Turkish, and Arab characters quickly developed; and next to Naples, Venice, and Rome, the action in Commedia dell’arte included Mediterranean locales such as Constantinople, Mallorca, and Cyprus. Jaffe-Berg further argues that Commedia dell’arte used female characters as a means of staging “a Mediterranean cartography […] by foregrounding the female body as a symbolic canvas through which the audience was invited to imagine Mediterranean geography.”87 Similarly, male characters were often either returning from or preparing for travels in the Mediterranean, making a journey an essential element of most Commedia dell’arte plots.88 Rejecting the suggestion that Neapolitan should be elevated to national status, and identifying it with the mask of Pulcinella and the comic register, Serio’s discussion elicited the same Mediterranean referent that Jaffe-­ Berg finds in her contextualization of Commedia dell’arte. The analogy is important not only because it highlights the continuities between a certain high Neapolitan culture (from Basile to Serio), popular cultural forms 84  Erith Jaffe-Berg, Commedia dell’Arte and the Mediterranean (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 4. On the Mediterranean settings of early Baroque theatre, see Jon Snyder, “Bodies of Water: The Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Theater,” California Italian Studies, 1, 1 (2010). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dv7n1dk. 85  Ibid. 86  Ibid., 6. 87  Ibid. 88  Ibid., 11.

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rooted in comedy (Pulcinella), Neapolitan language (as spoken by the lazzari) and the fishing net matrix of Mediterranean-ness, but also because it also includes the very notion of Italian-ness within this matrix. In an age when what we now call the “Italian” Renaissance was conceived as a contest for cultural hegemony between “Venetian” and “Florentine” (rather than “Italian”) painters in a fragmented and contentious court society; when the term “natio” was used by Italian merchants who established commercial bases across the Mediterranean to refer only to their cities of origin; and when the most widespread saying among them was “tutto il mondo è paese” (the world is the same wherever you go), the symbolic pull of Commedia dell’arte toward the signification of a multilinguistic, and multicultural image of Italian-ness, may have been far greater than that of its unitary contender, Civiltà italiana. And in this respect, the early modern notion of “Italian-ness” may be seen as virtually metonymic with that of “Mediterranean-ness.”89 In fact, this metonymy was serendipitously inscribed in the contribution of Italian languages to the construction of a proper Mediterranean language called lingua franca. From the fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, a pidgin of mostly Italian words along with Spanish terms, Gallicisms, and Latinisms of every sort came to be spoken in vast stretches of the North African shore of the Mediterranean.90 Despite the survival of a mere few dozen written documents dating from the late thirteenth century to the 1830s (when lingua franca was first analyzed as a language that was about to become extinct), the attraction that the mere existence of this language has exercised on contemporary scholars  of Mediterranean-ness cannot be overemphasized.91 For Jocelyne Dakhlia,  for example, lingua franca is quintessentially Mediterranean because it eschewed a “national” referent, epitomizes a culture of “permanent interaction” rather than “contact,” and challenges the identification of language with “identity” and “territorialization.”92 It was, Dakhlia concludes, the anti-“langue à soi” (pure language) that on the one hand “teaches us that not all relations with the language of the other are relations of expropriation of self and dispossession,” and on the other hand that “corruption is the universal  Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000), 22–34.  See Guido Cifoletti, La lingua franca mediterranea (Padua: Unipress, 1969) and Jocelyne Dakhlia, Lingua franca. Histoire d’une langue en Méditerranée (Paris: Actes Sud, 2008). 91  Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 92  Dakhlia, Lingua franca, 69, 90, and 475. 89 90

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law of all languages.”93 Lingua franca presents a “natural” fit with postcolonial notions of nomadism, metissage, creolization, and, particularly— although it is never mentioned in his book—Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation.” There is no question about the fit between lingua franca and postcolonial notions of language, identity, and nationality, including that of the Mediterranean fishing net matrix I am proposing here, but it is not a perfect or natural fit precisely because corruption is also the law of the Mediterranean. A corrupting national referent—or better still, two national referents both white and European, namely, Italy and France—do in fact complicate the history and theory of this elusive linguistic phenomenon. The French referent is strongest through the term lingua franca itself. Contemporary scholars understand “franca” as deriving from “Franc” or “Frank”—that is, French—rather than “free,” as in the Italian “franco,” as some earlier commentators had supposed. However, in the Arab world where lingua franca was spoken, the term “Frank” did not specifically mean French, but stood metonymically for Christian, Latin, or European; instead, the more seriously corrupting reference to France and French resides in the tale of the conquest and discovery of lingua franca itself. This was in 1830, when an anonymous dictionary was published in Marseille to instruct the French expeditionary force that had been dispatched to occupy Algeria on the most common language spoken in Algiers.94 Quite predictably, the Dictionnaire turned out to represent both an act of discovery of, and a swan song for lingua franca. Within a few years, it was “subjugated by French, seeing most of its words in Italian and Spanish replaced by French ones,” and the new term “Sabir,” replaced that of lingua franca in a direct reference to a verse in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme in which a character was supposed to be speaking that language. Lingua franca was thus buried beneath Sabir and until the early 1970s, only French, English, and German—but no Italian or Spanish—scholars would pay any attention to either its early modern or nineteenth-century version.95 Looking instead at lingua franca from the other direction of time—that is, from the middle ages toward the present—recent scholars, both French  Ibid., 427 and 480.  Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque, suivi de quelques dialogues familiers et d’un vocabulaire des mots les plus usuels; à l’usage des Francais en Afrique (Marseille: Typographie de Feissat ainé et Demonchy, 1830). 95  Cifoletti, La lingua franca, 20–21. 93 94

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and Italian, have argued that it likely originated from the preeminent role played by Venetian and Genoese traders in the Mediterranean Basin in late medieval times, and may initially have reflected the establishment and continued presence of European enclaves in Berber lands.96 Its original lexicon was made up prevalently of maritime terms of Venetian-Genoese origin, but over time it ended up containing words from virtually every area of the Mediterranean, including Portuguese, Spanish, Neapolitan, and even Turkish and Arabic.97 Even for Dakhlia, however, its syntax remained that of a “rudimental Italian” and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it assumed a “proto-national conventionality,” so much so that in this period Venetians would refer to Dalmatians speaking in lingua franca as speaking in “lingua italiana” (Italian language).98 And of course, lingua franca also showed up in Commedia dell’arte.99 For over four centuries, therefore, lingua franca functioned as the Mediterranean language of trade, which further testified to the key role merchants from the port cities of the Italian peninsula played in commercial exchanges. Its spread and persistence did not depend on commercial trade, however; rather, it was tied to the slave trade and the abundance of Christian slaves in the bagni of Tunis, and especially Algiers, which hosted around 25,000 slaves and 25,000 Christian renegades in 1630, and a total population of European origin of approximately 60,000, a majority in a city of around 110,000 inhabitants.100 Lingua franca became the primary language of communication between Muslim slave owners and Christian slaves: in other words, in the Mediterranean, it was the masters who adopted the language of their slaves! As Cifoletti argues, this highly unusual configuration of forces did not reflect the “prestige” of literary Italian in European circles, but rather a centuries-long hegemony of Italian sailors and shipowners in maritime trade and commerce, as witnessed by the first written document we have in lingua franca, a commercial contract from the island of Gerba, which was under Sicilian occupation between 1284 and 1334.101 Given the presence of slaves in virtually every home of well-to-do Muslims, lingua franca may have well been the most  Ibid., 10.  Ibid. Cifoletti counts 723 maritime terms of Italian origin. 98  Ibid., 29. 99  Ibid., 16. 100  Ibid., 18. 101  Ibid., 19. 96 97

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widespread everyday language spoken on the Eastern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean basin between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.102 Far from being just a literary language stuck in thirteenth- and fourteenth-­century Florence, with Dante and Petrarch, and destined to be solely written by learned elites, “Italian” emerged as a spoken language from the waters of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean lingua franca was the clearest sign that the emporion matrix did not only impact the “two Sicilies”: in the age of the Maritime Republics and slavery, it overlapped with the entire peninsula. In this respect, Serio’s diatribe on Neapolitan as a national language implicitly extended to Italian, as conceived in territorial terms. Against both of them, Serio placed the language of the sea urchin fisherman whose fictional persona he had impersonated in his scurrilous and insulting response to Abbot Galiani. In fact, Serio’s choice of persona for his narrator was not incidental; it dovetailed with his affirmation that Neapolitan was not the language of “li mercante, li dotture, li prevete, li miedece, li notare, e mmanco l’artesciane” (merchants, lawyers, priests, doctors, notaries, and not even artisans) but primarily of “piscivinole” (fish street sellers).103 In fact, Serio’s rebuttal of Galiani rested on the identification of the Neapolitan language with the Neapolitan “canzona” (song), which, as we have seen, encapsulated the maritime projection of Neapolitan culture as a whole, even more than it did on Basile’s defense against his detractor’s accusations.104 Correcting Galiani’s attribution of a famous “Capo d’Anno” (New Year’s Eve) song to the fifteenth-­ century poet Jacopo Sannazzaro, Serio argued that this—and most—Neapolitan songs were older than the “cippo di Forcella” (time immemorial), and any spurious attribution of origin to literary figures only indicated the fatal attraction Neapolitan popular culture had always exercised on learned Neapolitans.105 To confirm his main theory that high Neapolitan culture—whether written in Neapolitan or vulgar Italian—owed all its vitality to its contamination and hybridization with popular cultural forms such as folk tales and songs in dialect, Serio showed that Galiani had attempted to minimize the  Ibid., 20.  Serio, Lo vernacchio, 18. 104  Ibid., 80. 105  Ibid., 83. See also Gennaro Maria Monti, Le villanelle alla napoletana e l’antica lirica dialettale a Napoli (Città di Castello: Il Solco, 1923). 102 103

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contribution of song by underscoring its ancillary role to the famous dance that had originated in Puglia, the tarantella. Galiani had mistaken the word “scarola” (curly haired woman) for “carola” (the Neapolitan version of the tarantella) in the text of one of the most popular maritime songs, which would reappear in 1840 with the title Michelammà.106 For Serio, then, the language of the “piscivinnole” was that of Neapolitan songs, and, on this score, they—the Neapolitan fish vendors—not only agreed with him, but also anticipated Serio’s argument in song, and by a decade, at the Carnival celebrations of 1770. In that year, this song could be heard from the fish vendors’ carts: Let me complain because I am dead! Why? Because I have to see Our language come after all the others, People appreciate the burps of foreign tongues And this poor language of ours Is considered to be goofy, Nobody reads it, and nobody appreciates it. But where do you find a more robust, Beautiful, and abundant language? Where a more metaphorical way of speaking? Now go and take the language of Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch And see if you can compare theirs to ours: You will conclude that there is No richer or more robust Language than ours.107

Although maritime life was by no means the sole subject-matter of the melodic tradition of Neapolitan songs, a further clue to the privileged and centuries-long connection between this form of folk culture and the Mediterranean Sea can be found in its institutionalization in 1835, the year in which the popular celebration of the Madonna di Piedigrotta (September 8) was transformed into an occasion for a competitive festival of popular Neapolitan songs that would be known thereafter as the Festa

 Ibid., 84.  Fernando Scarfoglio, I carri del sole (my translation). Transcribed in Monti, Le villanelle, 26. 106 107

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di Piedigrotta.108 The sanctuary of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta, where the festival took place, was dedicated to the Virgin Hodegetria, the patron and protector of all sailors, and was located right next to the Neapolitan Crypta, the mythical site of Virgil’s burial, where scholars have found traces of the Oriental cult of Mitra, of  Greek bacchanalia (rituals dedicated to the god Dionysus), the veneration of Venus, and other priapic rituals. According to Helga Sanità, this contiguity suggests that the cult of the Virgin Hodegetria—which started in Constantinople—may represent a real link between Christianity and an ancient “Mediterranean paradigm of fertility” that revolved around procreation as the principal mystery of life.109 Although far from the orgiastic practices that are assumed to have taken place in the Crypta, the Festa di Piedigrotta effectively replaced Carnival as the most important popular feast in Naples, so much so that even the conqueror Giuseppe Garibaldi chose to enter Naples on the day before the Piedigrotta feast in 1860 so as to be able to take part in the celebrations.110 In fact, the memory of the multisecular continuity between modern Naples and the ancient Mediterranean civilization has outlasted the demise of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and can be still found inscribed in popular songs such as Marechiaro, Torna a Surriento, ‘O Paese d’o sole, composed after unification by the Neapolitan poets Salvatore Di Giacomo and Raffaele Viviani. The extent to which the ancient fishing net matrix was inscribed in the heart of Neapolitan cultural life between the eighteenth and mid-­ nineteenth centuries is remarkable in itself, but what is even more so is that a Mediterranean sense of belonging extended to all sectors of the capital’s life, and in some crucial respects to the entire Kingdom, including its inland agricultural areas through a mixture of state policies and private initiative. In 1871, ten years after unification, the total number of Italians living in coastal towns and cities was a mere 3 million, only 12% of the total population; 63% of this 12% lived in the territories of the ex-­ Neapolitan Kingdom, however, and of this 63%, 84% lived on the Tyrrhenian side. In addition, Naples was still the most populous of all Italian cities, with almost 450,000 inhabitants (twice the number of Milan

108  Helga Sanità, La festa di Piedigrotta. Il mito di un ritorno (Naples: L’ancora del mediterraneo, 2010). 109  Ibid., 18. 110  Ibid., 34

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and Turin).111 There were no other cities in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with a population of more than 50,000. Quite clearly, even when the name of Il Regno (The Kingdom) was changed from “of Naples” to “of the Two Sicilies” in 1820, Naples lost nothing of the hegemonic position it had acquired and maintained as belonging to a vital and enduring Phlegrean middle ground, and a the capital of a territory that had changed its name and rulers several times, but not its “national” boundaries. Also, as we have seen, it was only between the mid-eighteenth and mid-­ nineteenth centuries that Naples matured into a full-fledged maritime metropolis. The story of Naples’s maritime ascendency under Bourbon leadership begins with the spectacular expansion of its port between 1736 and 1746, continues with the promulgation of the first code of maritime laws by Michele De Jorio (1781), the establishment of new arsenals on Procida and in Castellammare di Stabia in the late eighteenth century, the building of the first steamship in the Mediterranean (1818), and reaches climax in 1855 when Naples’ commercial fleet becomes the third, behind England and France, for tonnage and number of ships operating in the Mediterranean.112 Bourbon Naples, therefore, all but reversed the image of a “sea without ships” that had been acquired during the Viceroyalty.113 Yet, despite a long list of primati in the mid-nineteenth century, Neapolitan maritime commerce overall remained a fraction of British and French volumes in the Mediterranean, and the sea routes of the Neapolitan fleet “failed to intersect those of intercontinental trade.”114 For Vittorio Tino, the failure of Bourbon Naples to insert itself into the flow of transcontinental commerce demonstrates that “fleeing from the sea is a constant of the southern mentality,” and that the Napoleonic interruption between the first Bourbon Kingdom (1734–1806) and the 111  Idamaria Fusco, “The Unification of Italy, Territorial Imbalances. Some Data and Remarks on Southern Italian Population in the Italian Context (1760–1880),” http:// www4.fe.uc.pt/aphes31/papers/sessao_4d/idamaria_fusco_paper.pdf. Retrieved on July 1, 2018. 112  Maria Sirago, Le città e il mare. Economia, politica portuale, identità culturale dei centri costieri del Mezzogiorno moderno (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2004), 58. According to Sirago’s data, the Neapolitan fleet numbered 9847 ships in 1860, with a total tonnage of 258,971 tons. 113  Biagio Salvemini, “The Arrogance of the Market,” in Naples in the Eighteenth Century. The Birth and Death of a Nation State, Gerolamo Imbruglia ed. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48. 114  Ibid.

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second (1816–1860) “buried once and for all the improbable projects and dreams of a [Neapolitan] maritime sovereignty that had nothing to do with the coastline of the meridione, which had always been all sea, without ports, ships, or sailors.”115 However, one should read this history of “transcontinental” failure against the grain of a maritime vocation that not only emerged through song and dance, but can also be traced in the patterns established by the Neapolitan sea trade between the second half of the eighteenth century and unification (1860), irrespective of the reigning dynasty. As Biagio Salvemini defines them, these patterns privileged “exchange” over production, and relied firstly on the integration of inland micro-regions with ports that took into account the ability of peasants to become sailors during periods of agricultural stasis, and secondly on the ability of sailors and ship’s captains to act as merchants themselves, taking advantage of the endemic volatility of supply and demand in the Mediterranean. In this way, according to Salvemini, Neapolitan commerce configured itself based on “traditional ‘Mediterranean’ features.”116 In fact, under Bourbon leadership, Naples rebuilt its geographical centrality by becoming a nodal point of passage for north-south and east-west trade between Marseille (Southern France), Alexandria (Egypt), and Odessa (Crimea).117 The story of Odessa’s relationship with Naples is a particularly instructive one. Modern Odessa in Crimea was founded by a Tzarist fiat of Catherine the Great in 1768, when she instructed the Neapolitan Giuseppe de Ribas to design and begin construction of a porto franco (free port) on the site of the ancient Greek colony of the same name.118 By 1794, the project had become reality, and De Ribas was appointed Governor of the “New Carthage” or the “Naples of the Black Sea.”119 Odessa was built entirely by Italian architects as a hybrid of neoclassical Genoa and Baroque Naples, and remained an Italian cultural colony until the Crimean War. People there spoke a pidgin Italian that functioned as lingua franca of the Black

 Tino, Saggio marinaro, 141.  Ibid., 50. 117  Olga Tamburini, “Rotte del Commercio, vie di emigrazione nel Mediterraneo” (PhD dissertation, L’Orientale University, Naples, 2005). 118  Anna Makolkin History of Odessa. The last Italian Black Sea Colony (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 9. 119  Anna Makolkin, The Nineteenth Century in Odessa. One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794–1894) (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), 5. 115 116

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Sea until the end of the nineteenth century.120 Odessa was not merely the most spectacular example of a commercial Italian colony in modern times, however; it also functioned as a key element in the revitalization of a Mediterranean small world that, having lost its western side (Gibraltar, Barcelona, Marseille, and Genoa) to the intercontinental “Atlantic world,” was able to reconsolidate eastward by reconnecting with the Black Sea, from which Genoese and Venetian traders had been expelled in 1474. Odessa joined Messina (1695), Leghorn (1732), and Genoa (1751) on the Tyrrhenian Sea and Trieste (1719), and Ancona (1754) on the Adriatic, to form a modern fishing net of “free ports” that not only recalled the emporia of antiquity but also offered a direct symbolic challenge to the mercantilist orthodoxy of European nation-states in the eighteenth century. Odessa was also a unique type of porto franco. Generally speaking, a modern free port was a section of a larger port that was secluded from the rest of the port and the surrounding city, contained only commercial establishments, and had no dwellings.121 Odessa, on the other hand, was far closer to the original model of the archaic emporion. It was designed and built to host an entire colony of traders, three-quarters of whom were Italians, and it absorbed 90% of all trade between the Mediterranean and the Levant in the first half of the nineteenth century. Having played a key role in its foundation, and thanks to a 1784 commercial treaty, Naples’s relationship with Odessa strengthened during the second Bourbon era. Naples inserted itself into a rotta del grano (wheat route) connecting Odessa with Alexandria (Egypt) and Marseille.122 Excluded from participating directly in intercontinental trade, Naples provided a purely “Mediterranean” service to the route by using its cabotage fleet of faster ships to distribute grain to the smaller ports across the entire Mediterranean basin.123 Along these same fishing net lines, the Neapolitan fleet also specialized in offering its ships for rent to trading partners and rivals, thereby entering many more ports than was actually recorded because it did so under a different flag. The tendency of Neapolitan ship owners to rent their vessels to non-Neapolitan traders rather than engage in trade themselves or under the Bourbon flag may be partially responsible  Makolkin, History of Odessa, 255.  R. S. Thomas, Free Ports and Foreign Free Zones (Cambridge, MA: Cornell Maritime Press, 1956). 122  Tamburini, “Rotte,” 10. 123  Ibid., 30 120 121

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for misjudgments, such as those of Nitti or Tino, that Naples played a very marginal role in nineteenth-century maritime commerce. Considering instead the 28,678 Neapolitans (almost 10% of its entire population) who were directly involved in seafaring of one sort or another in 1833, the second Bourbon Naples was anything but a kingdom “without ports, ships, or sailors,” and appears to have revived—and even expanded—the dreams of Mediterranean hegemony harbored by the dynasty in the eighteenth century.124 While three-quarters of all trade in the Kingdom continued to pass through Naples and its satellite ports, the centrality of the Kingdom of Naples to Mediterranean trade itself was augmented in the first half of the nineteenth century by the strengthening of the port city of Bari on the Adriatic. Just like Naples with Odessa, Bari became the privileged partner of the “free port” of Trieste, thereby marginalizing Venice in Adriatic trade. Similarly to the former’s role in the “wheat trade,” Bari also became the key port of distribution for the “olive oil route,” with 40% of all Mediterranean output of this quintessential Mediterranean product passing through the harbor on its way to Europe and the United States.125 The role of Mediterranean trade in the Neapolitan economy was not just a key reality: it was also the element that inspired the idea of the “civil economy” in the works of the Neapolitan economist Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769).126 Genovesi rejected Smith’s idea of a market regulated by self-interest and the invisible hand, and built his idea of the market on the centrality he attributed to “philia,” civil friendship, in human sociality. Philia consisted in the balance between the “diffusive force” of “love for spices” and the “concentrative force of self-love” that human beings brought with them to the “market place.”127 Genovesi’s market was therefore regulated by the “civil” laws of “reciprocity, mutual assistance, and fraternity,” rather than mere exchange. He saw these laws as being inscribed in trade practices that had long preceded the creation and theorization of the marketplace.128 Following Montesquieu, he considered trade to be the most important “civilizing factor,” indispensable for building “public trust in and through the market,” and increasing “public  Tino, Saggio marinaro, 141, and Tamburini, “Rotte,” 31–32.  Tamburini, “Rotte,” 36 and 37. 126  See Luigino Bruni, The Genesis and Ethos of the Market (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 120–154. 127  Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Agenda, 2016), 22. 128  Ibid. 124 125

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happiness.”129 As Luigino Bruni remarks, Genovesi’s idea of civil economy was “anchored in virtue, ethics, and the concept of the common good,” rather than the “wealth of nations.”130 Along the same lines, Genovesi’s pupil Giacinto Dragonetti developed his reflections on the virtues of trade in his Delle virtù e dei premi (1766, Of Virtues and Awards).131 In Dragonetti’s opinion, commerce stimulated the development of civil virtues and should therefore involve public awards given for the exercise of reciprocity. He drew a sharp distinction between “incentives […] designed around private self-interest,” and “awards […] given when someone has intentionally performed an action for the public good.”132 As Bruni notes, Dragonetti’s idea of public awards for commerce sought to keep the market within the sphere of a “gift” economy, and to reject both the mercantilist “zero-sum game” and the Smithian theory in which “stakeholders” had a far greater role in the market than “those in need.”133 The sea trade-driven theory of what Bruni calls the “Neapolitan school of Civil Economy” did not spare criticism of the overabundance of relations dominated by feudal “private trust,” and wealth derived from “rents” in the Bourbon Kingdom.134 However, the innumerable references—and entire chapters—in the works of Genovesi and Dragonetti dedicated to sea trade and seafaring leave no doubt as to the maritime imaginary that nourished them, and which they nurtured in turn. Their civil economy transformed the Mediterranean fishing net into a space of reciprocal relations that they viewed as being akin to Newton’s law of gravity, and which in this respect should be understood as a mutual attraction and not altruism, because it never excluded the possibility that there might be clashes and crushes.135 The persistence of the fishing net matrix in the economic theory and practice of Bourbon Naples may thus have condemned the Kingdom to missing the train of industrial production and being perceived as a “colony” of Northern Europe that sold agricultural products in exchange for finished products, but it also allowed it to reverse its imbalance of trade with France, and proved more flexible and adaptable to the  Bruni and Zamagni, Civil Economy, 24.  Ibid., 29. 131  Bruni rightly translates premi as “awards” rather than “rewards” in order to stress their “public or civil” nature; The Genesis, 145. 132  Ibid. 133  Ibid., 128. 134  Bruni and Zamagni, Civil Economy, 25. 135  Ibid., 23. 129 130

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specifically Mediterranean conditions of exchange than the almighty British commercial fleet.136 Furthermore, neither the court nor Neapolitan merchants saw themselves as a “colony” because the port-driven economy of trade did not invite a preoccupation with balances of trade or a direct correlation between a healthy economy and exports: the health of the system was judged in terms of volumes of exchange. This meant that the Bourbon fleet’s propensity for commerce using small to medium cabotage, and an economy based on adaptability, risk-taking, and exchange— rather than production, added value, and the maximization of profits—not only guaranteed a marginal breathing space for the survival of an archaic matrix of Mediterranean-ness, but also allowed it to percolate into other areas of the Neapolitan economy.137 When Charles Dickens visited Naples in 1845 and reported his impressions in Pictures from Italy (1846), he was confounded by the corrupting effects of the lotto (Neapolitan lottery) on the city’s society and government, and saw it as an “irrefutable sign of its decadence and backwardness.”138 The lotto was the institution most beloved by Neapolitans—including the thousands of lazzari (paupers) with no stable employment who made up the city’s pervasive underclass, even though it offered comparatively lower returns to players than in any other European nation.139 Introduced in 1682, it consistently registered a number of weekly bets two to four times the number of the capital’s inhabitants, irrespective of economic hardship, from the beginning all the way to its demise on Garibaldi’s arrival in the city in 1860.140 In actuality, and from a welfare economy perspective, it represented a voluntary and unfair form of taxation, since over 50% of the bets consistently ended up in the government’s coffers, and it weighed disproportionately heavily on the poorest. According to Paolo Macry, however, the lotto cannot be isolated from the context of the economy of “circulation” that was a feature of Naples as “a universal emporion for the 8 million inhabitants of the Kingdom.”141 The principal lotto players  Tamburini, “Rotte,” 37  Salvemini, “The Arrogance,” 52. 138  Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846), 231. 139  Paolo Macry, I giochi dell’incertezza. Napoli nell’ottocento (Naples: L’ancora del mediterraneo, 2002). 140  Ibid., 37. 141  Paolo Macry, “The Southern Metropolis,” in The New History of the Italian South. The Mezzogiorno Revisited, Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris eds. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 60. 136 137

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comprised the 15,000 servants and 20,000 public employees who made up the city’s enormous service sector, and it was integrated in a unique “network of street vendors who traveled back and forth between the city and its nearby agricultural centers.”142 In this way the “countryside literally entered the city,” and every day, through this network, the sea also reached into the countryside with the products of the petty trade carried on by sailors and captains.143 Finally, this economy of circulation was not limited to the bottom level of the commercial scale: in a fractal fashion, it characterized the whole economy of Naples and the Kingdom. Naples’s entrepreneurial class was one of “mediatori” (middle men) rather than producers, a bourgeoisie with a “tertiary vocation” who enjoyed the support of the mercantilist policies of the Bourbon monarchy and reinvested their profits in real estate to be rented out in the city, and/ or in lending money.144 As Macry makes clear, however, the principal raison d’etre for this entrepreneurial class was to guarantee and maintain continuity between maritime trade, commercial and financial speculation, and renting property, in what he calls a “redistribution economy.”145 In this respect, it mirrored the lower level of street mediators—the vendors—and was joined by another class of “administrative service” mediators of all kinds, who turned rights into privileges by facilitating all sorts of dealings with the authorities.146 To complete this “zero-sum” redistribution circuit that went from the Lotto to the exchange of “counterfeit goods” and favors, Macry also lists the “usury banks” that lent small sums, especially to lotto players, at an interest rate of over 30%, and, of course, the camorra (the Neapolitan organized crime syndicate), which not only controlled illegal activities such as prostitution and gambling, but also had a monopoly of the food market, the beginning and end of the redistribution chain that tied Neapolitan maritime commerce to the Kingdom’s agricultural hinterland.147 Just like that of piracy for earlier times, the inclusion of the lotto, usury, and the camorra among the permutations of the fishing net matrix reaffirms that what is being discussed here is not the moral superiority of network dynamics over the centralizing forces of modernity: the central  Ibid., 64.  Ibid. 144  Ibid. 145  Ibid., 63. 146  Ibid., 71. 147  Ibid., 75–80. 142 143

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concern of this chapter remains that of illustrating forms of cultural, social, and economic expression that counteracted the territorializing logics of coloniality and Meridionism in the Phlegrean middle ground. When the lotto is considered in isolation from its fractal relationship with the entire economic structure of the Kingdom, one cannot but wholeheartedly agree with Dickens’s socio-moral indignation. Yet, one must also recognize—as many officers of the British crown routinely noted—that it was the fishing net quality of the Neapolitan economy that was the greatest annoyance for British national-imperial interests, because it prevented the stabilization of prices in the area, and undercut disciplined trading through black marketeering, thereby threatening British commercial hegemony over internal trade throughout the Mediterranean.148 Britain’s rapid change of heart, from firm opposition to Italian unification in the early nineteenth century to open support for a unification process led by the Piedmontese Kingdom of Savoy, made clear that the elimination of the Bourbon State from the Mediterranean was its primary objective. More generally, from the longue durée and maritime spatial perspective developed here, the territorialization of the Italian peninsula resulted in the suppression of a maritime power and a collective sense of belonging that for centuries had positioned the Kingdom of Naples rather than in the south of the Italian peninsula at the “bio-geographical” center of the modern Mediterranean region.149 In fact, the reciprocal centrality between “the Mediterranean” and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had not inhabited solely the collective unconscious of its subjects, or remained implicit in the relationship between Naples and its Phlegrean islands, the ubiquity of maritime themes in Neapolitan popular culture, and the maritime character of its redistribution economy. It had also come to the surface of the administrative and political imaginary of the Bourbon court itself.

The Second Sicily On February 25, 1820, Neapolitan mineralogist Carlo Lippi presented a project to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples for joining the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas through a network of subterranean tunnels and canals that would take advantage of the existing system of small rivers and creeks that traversed the region from Pescara to Terracina, passing across Lake  Salvemini, “The Arrogance,” 67.  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 687.

148 149

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Fig. 3.10  Map of the Fucino Lake. In Carlo Lippi, Programma per l’unione dell’Adriatico col Mediterraneo. Letto nella sessione della Reale Accademia delle Scienze del 25 febbraio 1820 (Naples: 1820)

Fucino (Fig. 3.10).150 The idea was to make use of the waters of the lake to fill the artificial canals that needed to be excavated in order to create, in Lippi’s words, “a one hundred twenty mile long waterway that transformed the whole Kingdom into an island and connected all its seas.”151 Detailing the economic advantages of the plan, Lippi put the speed with which the Kingdom would be able to receive and distribute “the enormous quantity of iron, steel, lead, and copper” that was necessary for its industrialization at the top of his list, and immediately thereafter cited the possibility of utilizing this unique waterway for the establishment of “water mills, fulling mills, cotton and silk spinning mills, iron foundries, and cylindrical tin presses, wherever falling water would enable them to be installed.”152 These economic gains paled in comparison with the symbolic return the Kingdom would receive from the project, however. For Lippi, 150  Carlo Lippi, Programma per l’unione dell’Adriatico col Mediterraneo. Letto nella sessione della Reale Accademia delle Scienze del 25 febbraio 1820 (Naples: n. a., 1820). 151  Ibid., 21. 152  Ibid.

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this engineering feat would be on a par with, if not superior to, the canal Mohamed Ali Pasha was building between the Nile and Alexandria, and thus provided a model for all the canals that were being planned everywhere in Europe and again in Egypt in the area of Suez.153 As we know, the Suez Canal was built between 1859 and 1869, and its 102 miles in length made it the most admired feat of engineering of the nineteenth century until the Eiffel Tower announced the new modernist passion for the skies. Had it been built, the Fucino Canal might have at least shared the classification as “the epochal event” of the modern Mediterranean with Suez. We can only speculate that this project inspired the Crown’s decision to rename the Neapolitan Kingdom “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies” in the same year in which Lippi’s project to transform the peninsular south into an island was made public (1820). But we can be sure that for both its proponent and its backers the Fucino Canal was meant to detach the kingdom from the European terra ferma both physically and symbolically and to create an enormous artificial island projected toward the Mediterranean region. The Italian peninsula would have thus geographically ended at the Fucino canal rather than ending figuratively at the Garigliano River, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies would have unequivocally signaled its Mediterranean vocation, making its disdain for providing heel and toe to the territorializing image of the Italian boot very clear indeed. What is more, it came very, very close to doing so. Lippi’s presentation was attended by the powerful Superintendent of Bridges, Streets, Waters, Forests, and Game for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Carlo Alfan de Rivera, who lent his support to Lippi’s project, but with a key variant: there would be no subterranean tunnels, and the entire 120 miles had to be made navigable in order to constitute the Kingdom’s “fourth sea,” and thereby separate it completely from the rest of the peninsula.154 Work began in 1825, and quickly led to the completion of the first iron suspension bridge in continental Europe over the Garigliano River (1832), but it gradually slowed to a halt due to unforeseen engineering problems. Construction of the main canal itself resumed in 1838 but again proceeded very slowly, so that when the Risorgimento arrived and  Ibid., 27–29.  Carlo Alfan de Rivera, Considerazioni sul progetto di prosciugare il Lago Fucino, e di congiungere il mar Tirreno all’Adriatico con un canale di navigazione (Naples: Reale Tipografia della Guerra, 1823), 8–10. 153 154

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swept away the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the project was not just killed by the Piedmontese administration, it was turned on its head. Rather than extend its waters to connect Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas, in 1875 Lake Fucino was drained and its waters used to produce electricity exclusively for the center-northern regions of the new nation-state.155 The dream of an industrializing “North” situated at the center of the modern Mediterranean was thus suppressed with the territorialization of the Italian Kingdom, along with the Mediterranean imaginary that had produced it. For millennia, the system of “far-flung connectivity” that led all the Mediterranean micro-regions to be perennially involved “in a much wider world, through the movement of people as well as goods,” had been the kernel of “their identity, not a threat to it,” but, according to Horden and Purcell, it began to decline rapidly after the Napoleonic Wars.156 Between 1820 and 1860, however, taking up the thread that had been broken by the Napoleonic adventure, the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies may have represented the most fully integrated example of a Mediterranean micro-region in modern times, developing a highly self-conscious Mediterranean imaginary that rejected the logic of territorial rootedness and identity for one of infinite mediation and relationality at every level of social interaction. Horden and Purcell attribute the demise of the multi-­ millenary system they describe to the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), which they see as signaling the arrival of a “qualitatively and quantitatively different epoch of Anthropocene impact,” from the one that had marked 4000 years of “history of the Mediterranean.”157 The contemporaneous process of territorialization that transformed the Neapolitan Kingdom from a vital center of Mediterranean cultural production into a backward agricultural South played an equally essential role in the fateful demise of “the Mediterranean” as a unique entity marked by “micro-regional mutability” and “generalized connectivity.”158 As we are about to see in the next chapter, Naples was just one of the many constructed “Souths” of the age—the other most prominent one being the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War. Its constitution mirrored a division between a 155  Roberto Parisi and Adriana Pica, L’impresa del Fucino. Architettura delle Acque e trasformazione ambientale nell’età dell’industria (Rome: Edizioni Athena, 1996): 95–137. 156  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 464. 157  Ibid., 339. 158  Ibid., 464.

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southern (African) and northern (European) Mediterranean that was soon to be activated in the racialization of the “Southern Question.” Once again, the fishing net matrix of Mediterranean-ness was suppressed by a new process of Imperialist territorialization: the constitution of the Italian nation state. Not for too long, however. By the last decade of the nineteenth century it would begin to reappear in many cultural forms as an “Italian” brand of Mediterranean imaginary.

CHAPTER 4

Homo Mediterraneus

In 1911, on the solemn occasion of the commemoration of the cinquantenario (50th anniversary) of Italian Unification, the Italian community in Buenos Aires offered to pay for an altar to be placed at the symbolic fulcrum of the celebration, on the right side of the monument to King Victor Emmanuel II, which was to be inaugurated in Rome’s central Piazza Venezia.1 For the proponents, this would be an altar “in the tradition of the ancient colonies of Magna Graecia which sent offerings to the Acropolis,” with the aim of highlighting the direct filiation between the ancient Mediterranean and “la più grande Italia” (The Far Greater Italy) that was being built across the Atlantic Ocean.2 Construction of the altar was not approved by the organizing committee of the cinquantenario, however, and in its stead, the Argentinian community was asked to pay for a lighthouse to be positioned in the Risorgimento remembrance park on the Janiculum Hill (Rome), amidst over 200 busts of patriots and a few yards from the equestrian statue of the “Hero of the Two Worlds,” Giuseppe Garibaldi (Fig.  4.1). Thus situated, the Faro della Patria (Lighthouse of the Fatherland) suppressed the explicit intention of the 1  The monument, known as Altare della patria, was inaugurated in 1911 but construction continued until 1916. See Marc Choate, Emigrant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad (Boston: Harvard UP, 2008), 218–234. 2  Ibid., 218. I translate la più grande Italia as “The Far Greater Italy” in order to distinguish this phrase from the more iconic mytheme of la grande Italia, which is customarily translated as “Greater Italy.”

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_4

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Fig. 4.1  The lighthouse of the Fatherland, Rome (1911). (Photographed by Oscar Canham)

altar to highlight the connection between contemporary migration and the ancient Mediterrnanean. Instead, it absorbed Italian emigration in the epic metanarrative of national resurgence, and signaled at the same time that the body of water that had marked the growth of the Italian nation was not the Mediterranean from which it had physically emerged,

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but the Atlantic Ocean, which seven million Italians had crossed in the first five decades of the nation’s life.3 Furthermore, the construction of the Faro in 1911 also made it, and the community it represented, a part of the celebration of the imperial maturity of a nation that was finally close to clinching its “Greater Nation” status with the conquest of Libya. The Lighthouse of the Fatherland thus also symbolized the sudden reemergence of the Mediterranean Sea as Mare Nostrum in the Italian imaginary, the promise of an Empire State inspired by the historical example of Ancient Rome. The replacement of the Mediterranean altar by an Oceanic lighthouse was no mere symbolic substitution of one body of water (the Mediterranean Sea) for another (the Atlantic Ocean). It highlighted both the stakes and role that—reversing their Risorgimental repression—Mediterranean ­imaginaries had come to play in the arena of making Italians at home and abroad, from the last decade of the nineteenth century onwards.4

The Far Greater Italy However one looks at the data, the Atlantic Ocean participated far more directly in the making of Italians than did the Mediterranean Sea, and in ways that still need to be fully integrated into the mainstream narrative of the resurgent nation.5 In the 1871 census, only half a million Italians were recorded as moving abroad, but between 1870 and 1921, 16.6 million Italians (out of a total population of 36 million in 1921) voluntarily left the newly formed fatherland, making this movement not only the most impressive ever recorded in modern history in terms of its absolute and relative numbers (10% of all migrants in the world between 1814 and 1914), but also unique among comparable movements such as that of Irish and Chinese migrants in terms of the “many directions it took,” the “firm attachment” to hometowns and regions of origin on the part of those who left, and most importantly, the “high proportion of returns.”6 Since the Middle Ages, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula had been  Ibid.  Ibid., 21–56. 5  Ibid., 1–20. 6  Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 58 and 60. 3 4

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“among the most migratory people on Earth.”7 Initially, they spread throughout the Mediterranean basin, and later, from the sixteenth century onward, they increasingly migrated toward Northern Europe. Since the early nineteenth century, middle-class political exiles and thousands of agricultural and manual laborers had begun crossing the Atlantic Ocean for the newly independent nations of Latin America, where they could either fight for liberal-nationalist causes (as typified by the example of Giuseppe Garibaldi) or seek their fortunes by cultivating the lands that were given freely to European immigrants by the governments of Argentina and Brazil. The bulk of this modern, but pre-unification, transatlantic migration was from the Northern Italian regions of Veneto—which was still under Austrian control—and Liguria—which was part of the Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia—with Genoese sailors being by far the most migratory of all pre-unification Italians. After unification, emigration from southern regions grew rapidly to equal and then consistently and persistently exceed the number of migrants from the northern regions from the late 1880s onward.8 Even though this substantial migratory flux was directed much further than the shores of the Mediterranean, both pre-­ unification and post-unification migration in the nineteenth century was characterized by an extremely high rate of returning migrants: over 50%.9 Between the 1840s and 1860s the patriotic call to fight for the “liberation” and unification of the fatherland can be credited with providing the principal motive for the return of many expatriates. But when we turn to the en masse post-1880s transatlantic emigration, even accounting for the many who returned to fight in World War I, we see that politics cannot account for the same extraordinary rate of return of Italian emigrants. Something much less contingent must have been at play. We know that mass migration did not start immediately after unification, but although we do not have reliable numbers for the decade between 1861 and 1871, according to the first scholar of Italian emigration, Giuseppe Florenzano, the number of newly made Italians who expatriated

 Ibid., 1.  Ibid., 68. 9  Ibid., 7. 7 8

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every year began to rise shortly thereafter.10 Initially, this was plausibly due to individuals who rejected national unification by choosing voluntary exile, but ten years after unification, both the numbers and the characteristics of Italian emigration were showing such significant changes from both those of the past and the migratory patterns of other Europeans during the same period that Florenzano considered it to be the “most significant social fact of the new Italy,” and the one that had been most “ignored” by lawmakers and opinion-makers.11 First, the majority of migrants were no longer political and middle class: over 90% of Italian emigrants were now, and would continue to be, laborers, especially agricultural workers. Second, both elite and working-class emigrants had begun migrating toward South America in numbers that dwarfed the previous 100 years of transatlantic emigration.12 Finally, according to Florenzano, by 1871, transatlantic emigration to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay had surpassed traditional emigration into Europe and the Mediterranean and, he predicted, “would continue to do so in the future.”13 His prediction was more than correct: in fact, he underestimated the exponential rate of growth in transatlantic emigration, which doubled between 1878 and 1881, doubled again by 1886, again by 1891, and yet again by 1904, and only abated with the outbreak of the Great War.14 The second series of dramatic changes in Italian migratory patterns took place around the end of the nineteenth century, when Italian emigration to North America overtook—and would continue to overtake thereafter—that to Latin America (1898), and the total number of Southern Italian emigrants surpassed that of Northern Italians (after 1890), especially to the United States.15 As most major commentators of the time 10  Giovanni Florenzano, Della emigrazione italiana in America comparata alle altre emigrazioni europee (Napoli: Francesco Giannini, 1874), 120. 11  Ibid., 121. For comparisons between Italian emigration and that of other groups see also Irial Glynn, “Emigration Across the Atlantic: Irish, Italians and Swedes compared, 1800–1950,” European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz. http://www.ieg-ego.eu/glynni-2011-en. Last accessed on May 25, 2018. 12  Thanks also to the fact that the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay had begun to pay their fares. 13  Florenzano, Della emigrazione, 111. 14  Choate, Emigrant Nation, 3. 15  Gabaccia, Italy’s Many DIasporas, 68.

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remarked, the “emigration question” in the 1890s substantially merged with the “Southern Question” to produce a remarkable shift in the way not only the latter, but also the entire issue of making Italians was debated on the pages of major national journals like Nuova Antologia.16 Transatlantic emigration was creating the possibility of a “transnational” form of Italian identity, one that resembled neither the “cosmopolitanism of civiltà italiana” so cherished by the mercantile class of early modern times, nor pre-unitarian “diaspora nationalism,”17 but was referred to by its most enthusiastic supporters as “la più grande Italia,” and has been aptly labeled “emigrant colonialism” by Marc Choate.18 According to Choate, Italian mass emigration countered the imperialist colonialism of Northern European nations, building “italianità abroad, based on cultural traditions and commerce rather than imperial control and territorial jurisdiction.”19 Predictably, the historical sources of discursive inspiration for this Far Greater Italy were the Greater Greece of ancient times and the trading empires of the medieval maritime republics, especially Genoa and Venice.20 In fact, many supporters of emigrant colonialism gathered around the monthly L’Italia Coloniale, which, in the words of its editor Giacomo Gobbi Belcredi, equated expansion with “exports,” and defined as a “colony” any “organized group of Italian settlers abroad” living in close proximity and “marking a separation” between themselves and the 16  Antonino di San Giuliani, “L’emigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti,” Nuova Antologia (July 1905): 88–104; Pasquale Villari, “L’emigrazione e le sue conseguenze in Italia,” Nuova Antologia (January 1907): 3–8; and “Le conseguenze dell’emigrazione in Italia giudicate da un cittadino americano,” Nuova Antologia (September 1907): 33–56. I focus in this section on the Nuova Antologia because it was the most general and also the most widely read of all the high-brow periodicals in Italy during the Liberal period. Compared with topical and small-circulation reviews like L’Italia coloniale, the Nuova Antologia is more representative of the space that the debate on emigration took up during the Liberal era, precisely because the theme of emigration had to contend with all other public interest debates in the nation at any one time. 17  Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, 81. The debate on emigration developed especially between 1900 and 1907 on the pages of the Nuova Antologia, with interventions by Luigi Einaudi (1900), Pasquale Villari (1902, 1907), Angelo Mosso (1905), and Antonino San Giuliano (1905). 18  Choate, Emigrant Nation, 3. 19  Ibid. 20   Alessandro Rossi, “Dell’odierna crisi della marina mercantile,” Nuova Antologia (1879): 369.

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“natives” by “not participating in local politics, not joining in local militia, and having their own hospitals and banks, and mutual aid societies and schools.”21 The goal, in Belcredi’s view, was for Italians abroad to maintain their cultural and commercial traditions as far as possible within their communities so as to stimulate a desire for their products among the local inhabitants. In this way, emigration would become not only a source of precious remittances, but also a key economic engine for the fatherland, a panacea for Italy’s industrial lateness and commercial decline.22 Support for “Far Greater Italy” colonialism also, and most enthusiastically, came from the community of economists and commentators who had been denouncing the drastic decline of Italy’s commercial fleet since the early 1880s. This decline had symmetrically parallelled the repression of Mediterranean imaginaries during the Risorgimento and the first three decades of national history. Despite its 108 ports and 31 maritime districts, and a number of sailors just below that of Britain, between 1860 and 1896 post-unification Italy had fallen from third to sixth place in all statistics on maritime commerce, but most significantly from fifth to sixth place in only ten years, between 1886 and 1896.23 In other words, Italy continued to lose commercial maritime ground in the very years in which it was experiencing a major acceleration in transatlantic emigration. According to most commentators, this decline was almost entirely due to extreme delays in investment on the part of the Italian State in the conversion of the Italian commercial fleet from sail and wood to steam and iron.24 In 1896, Italy was the only European nation (not counting Russia) still to have 69% of its total fleet under sail. Since unification, it had lost almost two-thirds of its shipyards and seen the tonnage of the total number of ships built reduced by almost 90%, from 90,600 tons in 1860 to 6600 in 1896.25 The territorializing logic that had characterized the disappearance of the Mediterranean Sea from the horizon of the Italian political elites 21   Giacomo Gobbi Belcredi, “Che cosa è una colonia,” L’italia coloniale 1/2, (1900): 50–51. 22  Choate, Emigrant Nation, 53. 23  Daniel J. Grange, L’Italie et la Méditerranée (1896–1911). Les Fondements d’une Politique Étrangère, Vol. 1 (Rome: École Francais de Rome, 1995), 24. All translations from this book are mine. 24  Rossi, “Dell’odierna,” 338; Giuseppe Boccardo, “Il problema della marina mercantile italiana,” Nuova Antologia 50 (March 5, 1880): 219. 25  Grange, L’Italie, 23.

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also seemed to have affected the oceans, leaving even Genoa to suffer the consequences of this mismanagement of resources.26 The tragedy—and irony—of this situation was not lost on commentators who since the early 1880s had pointed at the construction of steamships to carry Italian emigrants to the Americas as the best way to ignite a virtuous circle of technological renewal and commerce that would  drag Italy out of its economic slump.27 Plagued by a chronic lack of capital, coal, and iron, Italy had no internal resources for making up an ever-­widening industrial gap with the Northern European nations. The increasing demand for passenger transport to the Americas, these commentators argued, was the best and only resource it could use to finance a rapid industrialization of its maritime sector, leading to the substitution of ­modern passenger steamers for the obsolete sailing ships. In turn, the growth of its “spontaneous American colonies” would lead to the development of active colonial commerce, which would further stimulate the construction of commercial steamships, and hence the development of a true “maritime industry.”28 For some, transatlantic emigration promised to turn the entire commercial projection of Italy away from Europe and toward the Americas, thereby creating a “colonial market,” with all the advantages, but none of the disadvantages and costs, of imperialist colonies.29 No one proved to be a more enthusiastic supporter of emigrant colonialism than the young liberal economist Luigi Einaudi, whose Il principe mercante (The Merchant Prince), published in 1900, wove all the threads of the “making Italians” discourse into the warp of la più grande Italia. Inspiration for the book had come to Einaudi from the “Italians abroad” section of the 1898 National Exhibition in Turin, where he had had access to documents and reports from every major Italian settlement abroad. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who focused on the quantitative aspects of emigration, Einaudi’s book honed in on what he had no 26  Rossi, “Dell’odierna,” 356, and Maria Elisabetta Tonizzi, “S’éloigner de la Méditerranée: stratégies de développement des élites économiques de Gênes, de l’Unification à la Grande Guerre 1861–1914,” in P.  Aubert, G.  Chastagnaret, and O.  Raveux eds., Construire des mondes: Élites et espaces en Méditerranée XVIe–XXe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2005), 5–15. 27  Rossi, “Dell’odierna,” 374; Boccardo, “Il problema,” 227; Leopoldo Franchetti, “La nuova legge sulla marina,” Nuova Antologia (2010): 327. 28  Antonio Gallenga, “Italia, commercio, e colonie,” Nuova Antologia (1883): 680–702. 29  Antonio Annino, “Espansionismo ed. emigrazione verso l’American Latina (L’Italia Coloniale 1900–1904),” Clio XII, 1/2 (1976): 124.

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hesitation in calling the “new Italy,” which was being built in Argentina by a select number of “self-made men” who had emerged from the mass of illiterate emigrants and could now lead the emigrant nation toward “a future far greater Italy.”30 The hero and ideal type of self-made Italian in Einaudi’s book was the Milanese textile entrepreneur Enrico Dell’Acqua, a “merchant prince” turned “captain of industry,” whose “business decisions became an epic tale” of how “Made in Italy” could beat “Made in Germany” in Latin America.31 More than a captain, Einaudi portrays Dell’Acqua as a general in Italy’ s “national struggle for economic survival” who turns masses of illiterate immigrants into “a disciplined army that moves as one” to “attack Britain and Germany’s domination of foreign markets.”32 Despite the belligerent tone of the narrative, however, Einaudi’s message is quintessentially antimilitaristic. From his perspective, the Italian model of “free and independent colonization” proved that “trade” should not “follow the flag” but rather “emigration currents.” Only in this way would it “preserve the fundamental characteristics of the Italian people,” while at the same time producing a new type of imperialism that would be “more evolved than the Angle-Saxon type” and antithetical to the “pernicious reveries of Mediterranean colonies” that were still being voiced by Italian supporters of imperialism.33 As Marc Choate has argued, Einaudi’s book “was cited by virtually every Italian writer or politician who addressed emigration,” and it helped keep the idea of a transnational Far Greater Italy alive in the first decade of the century; however, any hopes that a commercial style of imperialism might emerge from emigrant colonies in Latin America or elsewhere were crushed by the same lack of technological conversion that had earlier dashed aspirations of a “maritime industry” that would be fueled by the emigration business. As a visionary text on political economics, Il principe mercante failed to have the desired impact, but its fortunes and prolonged effect on other commentators may have had something to do with another aspect highlighted by Einaudi. Besides glorifying the production of “Made in Italy” captains of commerce, Einaudi found that the structural strength of the Italian community in Argentina lay with the “first type of 30  Luigi Einaudi, Un principe mercante. Studio sull’espansione coloniale italiana (Turin: F. lli Bocca Editori, 1900), 12. 31  Choate, Emigrant Nation, 50. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid.

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immigrants” who had arrived there: real captains and sailors—mostly from Genoa—who had left Italy due to the protracted crisis in the maritime sector and had been responsible for “building the port of Buenos Aires,” and manning “two-thirds of the Argentine commercial fleet.”34 Einaudi’s analysis was corroborated by the Neapolitan economist Enrico Barone, who supported his colleague’s vision of a “New Italy on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, larger and greater than the one our fathers left us.”35 Barone, however, focused very specifically on Italian sailors “who are solely responsible for the entire river-borne cabotage in Argentina,” and singled out  an unnamed “armatore colosso” (colossal shipowner), whose 125 ships and 2500 men under his command had provided “merchant princes” like Dell’Aquila with the necessary infrastructure to build their businesses.36 Like other experts, Barone highlighted the fact that sailors were disproportionately represented among Italian emigrants: even though the numbers of migrant farmhands dwarfed those of sailors, a far higher percentage––between 20% and 30%––of all Italian seamen had left for the free colonies across the Atlantic by 1900.37 In this maritime community of emigrants, Barone also found traces of an extraordinary phenomenon: the overcoming of regional differences between northerners and southerners.38 Einaudi not only agreed, but also argued that this was true at all levels of the Argentine-Italian community. In the new “Latin American Italy,” he argued, “northern journeymen and southern agricultural laborers revealed the energy and industry of the Italian race in equal measure,” because an “inhospitable nature awakened their courage.”39 Here Einaudi echoed the old Montesquieuian argument—also widespread in the literature on the Southern Question—that the character of northern Italians differed from that of southern Italians because the former had had to struggle against an inhospitable natural environment, while the latter had

 Einaudi, Un principe mercante, 37.   Enrico Barone, “L’espansione coloniale in America Latina,” Nuova Antologia (September 1899): 281. 36  Ibid., 283. 37  Tonizzi, “S’éloigner,” 6; Luigi Villari, Gl’Italiani negli Stati Uniti (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1912), 214. 38  Ibid., 284. 39  Ibid., 160. 34 35

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been (all too) blessed by a bountiful nature.40 In Argentina, therefore, southern Italians had finally found the right conditions for the struggle and effort needed to develop into northerners of character. In making a case for a transnational Far Greater Italy, Il principe mercante thus merged the Smilian theory of “self-helpism” in character-building, which had marked the first phase of the “making Italians” discourse (1860s to 1875), with the implicit goal of making southerners into northerners that had characterized its second phase (1875–1900s).41 In the process, however, it inserted a new twist in the imaginary narrative of making Italians. As Piero Barbera wrote in his enthusiastic review of the second exhibition of “Italians Abroad” at the 1906 International Exhibition in Milan, the most significant effect of emigration was that it had “revitalized” the “weakened qualities” of the Italian race by exposing them to new “environments,” and thereby highlighting a unique quality of “adaptability” shared by all Italians.42 All that Italians abroad had to do in order to remain Italian, Barbera concluded, was to “resemble the mainland Italian type as little as possible.”43 Along with many others, Barone, Barbera, and Einaudi articulated, therefore, a vision of transatlantic emigration as a tool for re-making Italians as Italians who were different from the ones they knew at home. At the same time, the twin images of mobility and adaptability associated with the new Italians abroad not only contrasted with the territorializing logic of making Italians, but conjured up the repressed image of Italy’s forgotten sea. Emigration seemed to be paving the way for “re-making” Italians according to coordinates that were southern, maritime, and quintessentially Mediterranean.

Re-Making Italians into Mediterraneans Barone’s enthusiasm for the benefits that Italian maritime culture had brought to the construction of the Far Greater Italy and could bring to the economy of the Italian South was shared by most southern participants in the discourse on the “Southern Question.” These hopes had been 40  Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 23–27. 41  Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices. Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51–78. 42  Piero Barbera, “Gli italiani all’estero all’esposizione di Milano,” Nuova Antologia (December 1906): 443. 43  Ibid., 450.

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initially connected to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Although it was built and owned by the British, the opening of the canal had raised hopes that it would offer an opportunity for Italy to recapture its medieval maritime primacy in the Mediterranean by exploiting its central geographical position between the entrance gates of Gibraltar and the new exit gates of Suez. Nowhere were these hopes higher or expressed more loudly than in Naples, which some commentators openly referred to as the new “Mediterranean port for the Orient.”44 Their hopes were corroborated by surprising commercial data on the first decade after unification. Notwithstanding the dire economic costs of unification for the ex-capital of the Bourbon Kingdom, and in counter tendency with the rest of coastal Italy, the Port of Naples saw its imports double and its exports triple between 1861 and 1871.45 Despite the subsidies the Italian State reserved exclusively for companies involved in transoceanic commerce, most of which were located in Genoa and Livorno,46 by 1879, Naples had surpassed Genoa in terms of the number and total tonnage of steamships entering its port that year, and ships flying the Neapolitan flag continued to handle 90% of cabotage between all Italian ports.47 The Suez Canal thus rekindled the Neapolitan Mediterranean imaginary despite unification, just as the Fucino Canal had in the 1820s. Yet, this initial picture of commercial health was both illusory and short-lived, not only because the draft of most Neapolitan sailing ships was too deep to go through a canal that had been built for modern steamships, but also because the post-Suez Mediterranean Sea had become even more of a (British) “river” than a (French) “lake”: steam-propelled ships could traverse it without having to make a single stop, irrespective of weather conditions. The Neapolitan seafaring imaginary, instead, was inextricably tied to cabotage. As Daniel Grange suggests, “Southern Italian ports such as Naples had an entirely different physiognomy” from those of the north, because “for them, the sea determined a way of life and not a precise economic activity.”48 “The toing and froing of ships, and the succession of 44  Francesco Saverio Nitti, “Napoli e la questione meridionale,” (1903) (Napoli: Guida, 2004), 101. See also, Nitti, “Il bilancio dell’emigrazione,” La riforma sociale XII (1905): 544–563. 45  Antonio Scialoia, “La città di Napoli. Il suo passato ed. il suo presente,” Nuova Antologia 14 (July 1870): 457–463. 46  Grange, L’Italie, 130. 47  Rossi, “Dell’odierna,” 333 and 339. 48  Grange, L’Italie, 131.

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piers” he adds, “represented more of a decoration for the city than an economic activity proper,” to the point that “there was an enormous disproportion [in all southern Italian ports] between the hectic movement of ships and the actual merchandise loaded and unloaded.”49 The inability of seafaring Naples to take advantage of the enormous boost it had enjoyed between 1860 and 1879 may have thus been primarily due to the reluctance of Neapolitans to endorse the transfiguration of the Mediterranean Sea from a fishing net of interconnected ports and islands to a waterway between one ocean (the Atlantic) and another (the Indian) to be traversed as fast as possible. Yet, this failure of the Neapolitan maritime imagination did not foreclose the reemergence of the Mediterranean imaginary of emporia in the “emigrant nation,” in fact, it may have facilitated it. Observers of sea commerce and commentators on the Southern Question were quick in identifying the transoceanic “white trade”—as emigration had begun to be called in the 1880s—as the greatest hope for turning the fortunes of the South around and making it central to the construction of the Far Greater Italy.50 Most significantly, transoceanic emigration revealed uncanny continuities with the Mediterranean imaginary it seemed to have submerged. To begin with, departures for the Americas by Southern Italians had grown at the same pace as those for North African destinations in the Mediterranean. Second, even though Italy had not yet occupied any territory in Mediterranean North Africa, Italians continued to be the most numerous European settlers across the non-European Mediterranean in the nineteenth century. Even in the hotbed of Imperialism, Italian emigrant colonialism seemed to be alive and kicking. In fact, despite the occupation of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt by Germany, France, and Britain, Italian settlements had continued to grow in size relative to those of all other European nations. By the early 1900s, approximately 900,000 Italians were living around the Mediterranean. Of these, fewer than 300,000 were in the Balkans or Southern European countries: the rest had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire or North Africa.51 Between 18,000 and 20,000 Italians had settled or were residing part-time in European Turkey, 12,000–14,000 of whom were in Istanbul.52 Another 10,000 to 15,000 lived in other provinces of  Ibid.  Boccardo, “Il problema,” 632. 51  According to Grange, they numbered approximately 250,000 in the Balkans (p. 425) and 12,000–14,000 in Greece (p. 447). 52  Grange, L’Italie, 1, 473 and 484. 49 50

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the Empire.53 The bulk of Mediterranean Italians resided therefore in North Africa. They formed the second largest European colony in Egypt, and their numbers grew even more after the British had established their Protectorate there, from 16,000  in 1881 to around 45,000  in 1907.54 Even more spectacular was the growth of Italian colonies in the French colonial possessions: from 11,000 at the time of unification to 45,000 in 1886 in Algeria; and from 7000 in 1870 to 30,000 in 1890, to 80,000 in 1903, and to 109,000 in 1911 in Tunisia.55 In both these French colonies there were more than twice as many Italians as there were French ­settlers.56 The only North African area where Italians were almost entirely absent was Libya, the very territory that the Italian state decided to invade and occupy in 1911, where a mere 650 Italians were registered on the eve of the invasion.57 As Donna Gabaccia writes, most Italians—especially illiterate southerners—did not distinguish between the specific countries to which they emigrated. They only distinguished between transmontane “migrations across the Alps to Europe,” and emigration oltremare––that is, “beyond the sea.”58 The former journey was almost exclusively made by Northern Italians from Veneto, Lombardy, and Piedmont, whereas the latter was by both northerners and southerners, but while northerners—especially Genoese—moved prevalently to South America, often making their way up to the West Coast of the United States from there, southern Italians emigrated en masse to the north-eastern coast of the United States and throughout the Mediterranean, with Sicilians and Sardinians providing the bulk of emigrants to North Africa. For these people, the difference between “La Merica” (the Americas) and “‘Laffrica,” (Mediterranean Africa) was mostly one of journey length and time, but it was not as significant as that between either of them and the transmontana destinations. Even “the special lure of the U.S.—said to motivate many European migrations” adds Gabaccia, “scarcely surfaced in the world view of Italian emigrants.”59 Much more important than the destination, Gabaccia  Ibid., 473.  Ibid., 507. 55  Ibid., 541 and 536. 56  Ibid., 538. 57  Ibid., 501. 58  Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, 70. 59  Ibid. 53 54

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argues, was the organization of emigration at a village level in Italy. Most villages established specific enclaves in specific oltremare or transmontana localities, sometimes—as was famously the case in New York—by occupying specific streets or neighborhoods, but they often also planned and diversified their migratory flows in equal proportions among oltremare and transmontana destinations, depending on job availability, crises, or any number of other contingent and localized aspects that defy any attempt at generalization.60 There was, however, one unifying factor that connected oltremare emigration to the idea of re-making Italians cultivated by the proponents of a Far Greater Italy. In his 1912 book Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti (Italians in the United States), Pasquale Villari’s son, the historian and diplomat Luigi Villari confirmed for North America the significance of the maritime component of Italian emigration that Einaudi, Barone, and Barbera had highlighted for Argentina. He rejected, however, Einaudi’s predictions of the role “merchant princes” had played or might have played in the growth of a self-­ consciously transnational community of Italians. For the younger Villari, sedentary Italians in America (both Northern and Southern) had formed “an amorphous, incomplete collectivity lacking most of the elements necessary for a well-functioning society”—by which he meant bankers, traders, industrialists, and intellectuals. They were “an army with no generals, commanded instead by sergeants and corporals”—by which he meant, banchisti (money-lending middlemen) and prominenti (people who profited directly from organizing immigrant labor for both economic and political exploitation by non-Italians)—and left at the mercy of foreign “captains.”61 His pessimism was shared by many who had asked for, or had applauded policies directed toward the formation or reinforcement of an “Italian identity” among Italians abroad. Giving precedence to jus sanguinis over jus soli, Italian law was unique among European nations in seeking to bind Italian emigrants to their Italian citizenship and in creating obstacles to assimilation in their host countries, but Italian emigrants, especially in the Americas, did not yield to these legal ties and generally speaking hastened to acquire foreign citizenship.62 Legalization did not foster  Ibid., 71.  L. Villari, Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti, 217. 62  Barbera, “Gl’Italiani,” 449; Ausonio Franzoni, “Il progetto di legge di cittadinanza all’estero,” Nuova Antologia (1910): 108. 60 61

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assimilation, however: in fact, according to Romolo Murri, Italians abroad—especially in Latin America—had developed a love of their “patria” (fatherland) “for the first time by virtue of being abroad.”63 On the other hand, this feeling of Italian-ness was contradicted by strong evidence that despite the considerable efforts of the Dante Alighieri Society— the nongovernmental agency that had been handed a mandate to create Italian schools abroad—Italian emigrants everywhere resisted becoming literate in their national language, and continued to speak only in their local dialects, while their sons and daughters preferred to become literate in the language of their host country.64 In short, vis-à-vis the host culture, emigrants tended to experience and profess a certain feeling of “Italian-­ ness,” but when it came to internal organization, traditional socio-­ geographical divisions reasserted themselves. They not only inhabited neighborhoods, and even streets, that were subdivided according to their home towns of origin and spoke only in local dialects, but also organized “mutual aid societies” based on their regions of origin.65 To summarize, irrespective of their geographical provenance, oltremare Italian settlers on the whole developed a weak form of “Italian” ethnic belonging, resisted assimilation, and clung to their regional (or even more local) forms of identity. What they shared the most, however, was the fact that they were hardly “settlers” at all. Impermanence, nomadism, and movement from one country to another were the core characteristics of oltremare Italian emigration. As Angelo Mosso argued in 1905, all Italian emigration was “temporary,” and all scholarly divisions between “permanent and periodic,” or “Mediterranean and transoceanic” emigration were inappropriate.66 Statistics only captured the rates of Italians leaving and returning, but after 1901 there began to be more returners—especially from North America—than leavers, proving that every year not only Italians who had left earlier that year, but also others who had left years before, were returning home. Quite often, Italians who had returned would stay in Italy for one or more years and then emigrate again, and might do so up to four or five times in their lifetimes. For Mosso—who  Romolo Murri, “Gli Italiani nell’America Latina,” Nuova Antologia (2013): 437.  L. Villari, Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti, 281–2. In addition to the work of the Dante Alighieri Society, the Italian government offered sons of emigrants the option to return and do their K-12 studies in Italy free of charge. 65  Anonymous, “Per l’italianità all’estero,” Nuova Antologia (1908): 443; Pasquale Villari, “L’emigrazione e le sue conseguenze,” Nuova Antologia (1907): 34. 66  Angelo Mosso, “Gli emigrati,” Nuova Antologia (1905): 204. 63 64

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was a physiologist by profession—emigration was part of the “Italian fiber,” and should be viewed as a “febbre di crescenza” (growing pains). More soberly, but along similar lines, Luigi Villari observed that the ideal-­ type of the Italian emigrant in the United States was not to be found in New York, Chicago, or Philadelphia, but everywhere because he was the “bracciante nomade” (nomadic laborer). “Hundreds of thousands” of them moved every month from one state of the Union to another like a “band of medieval soldiers of fortune.”67 For Villari, they were “the best part of the American Italians” because they lived off their “work rather than off exploitation” of others or by others.68 Not only had “all of them returned to Italy,” Villari concluded, but they were also responsible for “the highest proportion of the remittances” that enabled the economic recovery of Italy’s south. Considering now the unique rate of return of all Italian emigrants (over 50%), irrespective of where they had emigrated to, together with the 90% rate of oltremare (vs. transmontana) emigration by former residents of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the extensive spread of emigration in villages and towns all across the southern regions and islands, there emerges an unmistakable common trait. This trait, of course, is that of a  Mediterranean imaginary, modeled after archaic practices that central Mediterraneans/southern Italians, that had expanded to unify the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in one single oltremare, and to include both Italy’s North and the  inland South into the same form of be-­longing that had developed in maritime communities for centuries. We find no more eloquent symbol of the uncanny nationalization of this Mediterranean imaginary than in the “altar” that the Argentinian-Italian community had intended to offer to the homeland in 1911. But equally significant, and uncanny, was the nationalization of a preeminently “southern” image of Italian-ness that emerged from the Far Greater Italy. The “emigrant nation” seemed to have decided that the Atlantic Ocean was the “Far West” of an extended Mediterranean, and in the process, it also colored Italian-ness with unmistakably southern Mediterranean hues. Through the nomadic lines of emigration there also moved a host of Southern Italian cultural brokers, especially musicians and theater actors who belonged to the many traditions of southern popular entertainment, from sceneggiate (a Neapolitan form of sketches that mixed acting and  L. Villari, Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti, 232.  Ibid., 230.

67 68

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singing) to the varietà (variety theater), in which Neapolitan singers and sciantose (from the French word for a female singer “chanteuse”) had become internationally renowned figures.69 Among them were hundreds whose names have been forgotten, but there were also personalities like the tenor Enrico Caruso, who may have been the first global star of the new (twentieth) century, and who was also the first artist ever to be recorded on a phonographic record. Caruso’s career in music and film greatly influenced the construction of what Giuliana Muscio appropriately calls the “Neapolitan-American” image of Italian-ness.70 His voice brought not only famous operatic arias to America, but also popular maritime tunes sung in Neapolitan rather than Italian. Thanks to Caruso, a lasting positive image of Italian-ness in the United States was drawn from the Mediterranean Neapolitan culture to counteract the negative association of “all” Italian immigrants with mafia and organized crime in general. The Neapolitan-ness of this image would be enshrined in the over 300 films with Neapolitan dialogue that were produced in the United States in the 1930s,71 and would also resist the more troubling associations with Las Vegas and Frank Sinatra, as Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti of a southern Italian immigrant family) reminded us in his 1953 hit That’s Amore.72 Stimulated by the movement of emigration, the Mediterranean imaginary of Southern Italians reemerged from its suppression in the making of Italy/Italians to participate in the re-making of Italians and the Far Greater Italy. The tropic image of the Mediterranean fishing net marked oltremare emigration just as much as the southern image of Italian-ness in which emigrant Italian culture recognized itself. These imaginary connections cannot but remain conjectural, relying as they do on traces that were never explicitly articulated as a coherent whole. There is, however, a discursive field in which they all came together, as Mediterranean-ness finally emerged in all of its polysemic forms in the most important social-­scientific discourse of the age: racial theory.73

69  Giuliana Muscio, Napoli/New York/Hollywood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 70  Ibid., 7. 71  Ibid. 72  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnFlx2Lnr9Q. 73  Aliza Wong, Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911. Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora (New York: Palgrave, 2006).

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Homo Mediterraneus As discussed in Chap. 2, the racialization of southern Italians was there from the beginning of their Meridionist creation in the aftermath of the Risorgimento. Unsurprisingly, the spectacular rise of racial concerns at the discursive center of the Italian public sphere came from the intersection of the “Southern Question” with the discurse on “making Italians” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.74 Published in the same year as FranchettiSonnino’s Inchiesta on conditions in Sicily, Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man, 1876) concluded, on the basis of a study that was significantly based on the skull of a Calabrian brigante (bandit / freedom fighter), that criminal tendencies in individuals and people were racially determined.75 Specifically, Lombroso proposed that the high degree of criminal behavior identified in southern regions such as Calabria was caused by what he called atavismo: that is, the arrested “moral and social” development of the “Calabrian race,” or better—as he would correct himself and explain in the introduction to the second edition of his book, in an explicit reference to Franchetti-Sonnino’s Inchiesta (1876)—of the entire “Southern Italian stock.”76 Although Lombroso was also a fierce anti-imperialist, and would later tone down some of his racial determinism, during the 1880s and 1890s his concept of atavism became the single most debated causal factor for the Southern Question, directly inspiring the most influential work of the age, Alfredo Niceforo’s L’Italia barbara contemporanea (1898). Based on the same morphological methodology of cranial-shape classification utilized by Lombroso, Niceforo’s study of Sardinian crime finally reified the image of “two Italies,”—one southern-barbaric-atavistic, and the other northern-civilized-­progressive—that had been implicit all along in the entire debate on the Southern Question.77 Less than a year after the publication of Italia barbara, the sociologist Antonio Renda placed Niceforo’s thesis of the “two Italies” to the test by inviting several authoritative racial scientists, including Lombroso, and the most prominent meridionalisti of the day, including Nicola Colajanni and Giustino 74  Along with Wong’s Race and the Nation, see Rhiannon Noel Welch, Vital Subjects. Race and Biopolitics in Italy (Liverpool, Eng.: Liverpool University Press, 2016). 75  Ibid., 47. 76  Claudia Petraccone, Le due italie. La questione meridionale tra realtà e rappresentazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), 80. 77  Alfredo Niceforo, Italia barbara e contemporanea. Studi ed appunti (Milan-Palermo: Remo Sandron, 1898), 285–300.

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Fortunato, to support or confute Niceforo’s most controversial arguments.78 While the latter two, along with a majority of responders, predictably rejected the racialization of southerners proposed by Niceforo, others ultimately agreed with him that racial characteristics had played a major—if not determining—role in reifying and defining the socio-moral divide between Northern and Southern Italy around the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, Niceforo’s study and all those who supported it also referred to a racial classification that did not appear in Lombroso’s works, but had instead been developed by the father of Italian anthropology, Giuseppe Sergi. According to Niceforo, Sardinians, like all southerners, belonged to the “Mediterranean” race, while central and northern Italians were essentially “Aryans.”79 Niceforo’s provocative, polemical, and apparently self-­ deprecating (he was Sicilian) anthropo-criminological study of Sardinians thus simply identified Mediterranean-ness with southern-ness, atavism, criminality, and savagery. On this score, however, Niceforo’s Mediterraneans hardly squared with those of Sergi, for whom the defining characteristic of the Mediterranean race was the exact opposite of Niceforo’s barbarism: Sergi’s Mediterraneans were the foremost “creators of civilization.”80 How and why, then, did Homo Mediterraneus come to be theorized in such opposing terms by two Italian racial scientists who were both Sicilian, and both members of the same circles? Even before unification, racial discourse in Italy was marked by the image of the Mediterranean in a debate that saw Mediterraneanists and Orientalists argue over the question of the “origins of European civilization” in the first half of the nineteenth century.81 More specifically, the idea of a Mediterranean race arose in 1880, when Nicola Marselli published two articles entitled “I mediterranei” (The Mediterraneans) in Nuova Antologia.82 Marselli proposed the term razza mediterranea to 78  Antonio Renda, La questione meridionale, Inchiesta (Milan-Palermo: Remo Sandron, 1900). 79  Niceforo, Italia barbara, 285–300. 80  Giuseppe Sergi, The Mediterranean Race. A Study of the Origins of European People (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1901), 176–180. 81  Fabrizio De Donno, “Routes to Modernity: Orientalism and Mediterraneanism in Italian Culture, 1810–1910,” CIS 1, 1 (2010). Permalink http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/920809th. 82  Nicola Marselli, “I mediterranei. I,” Nuova Antologia (1880): 690–713.

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refer to one of the four “Great Races” of humans—the other three being “Africans, Asians, and Americans”—who comprised three “pure” groups, “Semites and Aryans, Caucasians and Basques, and Hamites,” and some “combinations of them with Asians.”83 Marselli, however, published his racial theory of Mediterraneans as part of a Hegelian philosophy of history project, La scienza della storia (1880), without referring to any archeological, linguistic, or anthropological evidence to support his classification. The fate and resonance of the writings on the “Mediterranean race” of Sergi, who was both a pioneer in experimental psychology and among the founders of the positivist school of anthropology in Italy, would be quite different. His dual background made his writings both highly influential among his scientific peers and compelling for a more general audience because they connected scientific-sounding discussions of the morphologies of skulls with daring conclusions about the cultural-psychological characteristics of different races. Convinced by Lombroso’s methodology of cranial morphology, Sergi made it the foundation of his anthropological conception of race, which stood in contrast to the prevalent linguistic theories that since the mid-­ nineteenth century had identified white-skinned people with a so-called Aryan race, whose original language was called Indo-European, and whose archeological hallmark was the practice of burning their dead. In a series of books and essays published between 1894 and 1901, Sergi contested not only the linguistic-archeological methodology of Aryanism, but also its most culturally codified corollaries, arguing that skin color had nothing to do with race, that race was not a superior biological determinant to history and culture, and that racial purity was neither a scientific concept nor a desirable goal for eugenic practices.84 Measuring and comparing the shapes of skulls from contemporary, historical, and prehistorical times dug up all over Europe and the Mediterranean basin, Sergi argued that the European race had originated in East Africa, specifically in the “Hamitic cradle,” and thus named it “Eurafrican,” as opposed to Indo-European.85 He further contended that the Eurafrican race had separated into three branches: the first, or “Hamitic,” had spread into Saharan and Maghrebian  Ibid., 691.  Luca Tedesco, “For a healthy, peace-loving and hardworking race: anthropology and eugenics in the writings of Giuseppe Sergi,” Modern Italy 16:1 (2011): 51–65. 85  Giuseppe Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, 41. 83 84

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North Africa; the “Mediterranean” branch had settled throughout the Turkish peninsula and Southern Europe; and the “Nordic” arm had settled in Central and Northern Europe. These three branches had then intermingled both with each other and with Aryans arriving from Asia, thereby generating the 12 varieties of skulls that Sergi identified as Eurafrican. Racial mixing was therefore present within each branch of the stock, was traceable in morphological variations, and was the condition for racial evolution, not its demise. As for skin color, that depended exclusively on climactic conditions. By the end of the century, Sergi’s findings and arguments had been widely echoed both within Italy and abroad, and were supported by prominent anthropologists who agreed with his Eurafrican hypothesis.86 His ideas were printed most clearly and for his widest audience in The Mediterranean Race, which was published in English in 1901 and reprinted four times in the first two decades of the century. Here, Sergi specified that the original Mediterranean “race” (or “family” or “stock”) was subdivided into four branches—Iberian, Ligurian, Pelasgian, and Libyan—but that “as the stock became more mixed” over the course of time, it also remained unchanged in its racial composition; new and foreign elements were indeed added, but these never disturbed, nor do they now disturb, the primitive character of the Mediterranean race, which constitutes a distinct stock in itself with its own very marked characters, not to be confounded with those of any other European or Asiatic stock.87

The Mediterranean stock, he concluded, was “morphologically the finest brunet race which has appeared in Europe, and it derived neither from the black nor the white people, but constituted an autonomous stock in the human family.”88 This formulation allowed him to play both the tune of a Latin eugenicist who rejected any theory based on the idea of purity of 86  Barbara Sorgoni, “Italian Anthropology and the Africans. The Early Colonial Period,” in Pagtrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun. Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from PostUnification to the Present (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press), 62–80; see also Andrea Orsucci, “Ariani, indogermani, stirpi mediterranee: aspetti del dibattito sulle razze europee (1870–1914),” Chromos 3 (1998): 1–9. 87  Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, 34. 88  Ibid.

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blood in favor of a theory of “racial evolution,” relying on racial “mixing” and “promoting socio-cultural behavior,” and that of a cultural anthropologist, who identified race with distinct and marked characters of a cultural-­psychological nature, irrespective of any type or amount of racial mixing.89 That Sergi would further propose that the Mediterranean race was the finest brunet race and not the result of black and white combinations was no mere lapse into aesthetic discourse. It self-reflexively instantiated the very conclusion Sergi would reach a few pages later when he identified the primitive, distinct, and marked character of the Mediterranean race with its “persistent artistic tendency.”90 It also signaled the fact that Sergi’s 100-page discussion of the 12 variations of cranial morphology constituting the “Mediterranean family,” was not important per se—as an empirically based rejection of any skin- or blood-based definition of race— but was aimed at gaining international support for his discursive racialization of Italians as the most original and evolved Mediterraneans. Sergi’s initial formulation of his Mediterranean theory of “Italics” had been published in the pages of the Nuova Antologia in an 1895 article entitled “Chi erano gli ‘italici’?” (Who Were the Italics?),91 where he first proposed his thesis that the first populations to inhabit the Italian peninsula had come from Asia Minor through Africa, and were of “Mediterranean” and not “Indogermanic” origins, as was their language.92 There was no “archeological element or civilizational trait to suggest the presence of a people from the north” in Neolithic Italy, and, for Sergi, “Italic and Greek languages” referred unequivocally to a common Mediterranean, albeit distant, linguistic “core.”93 At the same time, Sergi proposed a rather anti-­ deterministic view of both race and culture in this article. “Different peoples and races” he wrote, “can create similar and uniform civilizations,” and conversely, “people who converge in the fundamental characteristics of their civilization” can do so “without necessarily having the same anthropological origin”94; only three years later, however, in his full-length treatment of the same topic in Arii e italici (1898), Sergi’s pitch was  Ibid.  Ibid., 275. 91  Giuseppe Sergi, “Chi erano gli ‘italici’?” Nuova Antologia (1895): 94–109. 92  Ibid., 108. 93  Ibid., 109. 94  Ibid., 97. 89 90

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notably different from that of his 1895 article: while restating that the original Italics were Mediterraneans, he now conceded that there had been an “Aryan invasion in the 10th century EBC” in Central and Northern Italy, and that these Aryans (called Umbrians) had imposed their language and cremation practices on the Mediterranean inhabitants of the peninsula. He also hastened to add, however, that in spite of their military domination, it was the conquerors (i.e., the Aryans) “who had acquired civilization from the Mediterraneans”—rather than vice versa— and, conversely, “Mediterranean Civilization as a whole had regressed” in the areas in which it had been subjected to Aryan domination.95 As he would put it starkly three years later in The Mediterranean Race (1901), the “Aryans had contributed nothing” to Mediterranean civilization.96 In fact, Sergi maintained, Aryan domination had never even reached the south of the Italian peninsula, and had lasted at most for two centuries until a new Mediterranean invasion from the East in the eighth century BCE by the people we call the Etruscans put an end to Aryan influence and became the basis for the resurgence and apex of Mediterranean civilization, namely, Rome.97 With Arii and Italici, Sergi abandoned the realm of pure physical-­ anthropological inquiry to create a connection between prehistorical Mediterraneans and the “Latin civilization” that the Romans built on the shoulders of previous Mediterranean civilizations and made truly “national” by “destroying all other coeval civilizations in Italy.”98 Compared with his 1895 article, Sergi’s 1898 book turned anti-Aryan rhetoric into a full-blown dichotomy between Italian Mediterraneans and Northern European Aryans, and relied on a much more deterministic notion of race aimed at presenting the ancient Romans as the ultimate expression of the Mediterranean race and the apex of Mediterranean civilization. Neither of these two conclusions was based on new findings by Sergi or on references to texts that had not been available to him in 1895. Sergi’s abandonment of inductive caution in Arii e italici in favor of a racial theory of Italic civilization signals an acute awareness that the stakes of anthropo-racial discourse had changed, and cannot be understood in

 Ibid., 211.  Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, 295. 97  Giuseppe Sergi, Arii e italici. Intorno all’Italia preistorica (Turin: F.lli Bocca, 1898), 215. 98  Ibid., 226–227. 95 96

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any way other than in the context of what had occurred in Italian life and politics between 1895 and 1898. The military defeat of the Italian army by the Ethiopian army at the battle of Adwa in 1896 had sent a cultural shock of seismic proportions not only through the bones of the Italian Greater-Nation-building process, but also through those of imperializing Europe. For the first time, a European army had been defeated by an army of Africans. Nobody could doubt the “blackness” of the latter, but as far as the “whiteness” of Italians was concerned, that was another matter. The Montesquieuian ghost of Italy as Europe’s “liminal south,” the hybrid combination of “Europe, Asia, and Africa,” was instantly resurrected by commentators both throughout Europe and in Italy itself, but the climatological argument that had sustained it in the eighteenth century was now racialized based on eugenics, the orthodoxy of Aryanism, and, naturally, Meridionist logic.99 Italians at home and abroad were simultaneously racialized and southernized as the “blacks” of Europe. In this respect, Niceforo’s Italia barbara e contemporanea, which was published the same year as Arii e italici, was just as much marked by the ghost of Adwa as Sergi’s book, except that Niceforo had reacted to the threat of Africanized Italians by using Sergi’s terminology to separate Northern-Aryan-white “Italians” from Southern-African-black “Mediterraneans.” The latter, however, were not the same Mediterraneans Sergi had written about. Sergi’s Arii e italici not only counteracted accusations and fears of racial inferiority with a vision of a racially bound civilizing mission ascribed specifically to the Mediterraneans who had inhabited the Italian peninsula since time immemorial, but it also turned the tables on Northern European detractors of Italian-ness. It turned out that the racial roots of all European whites were in black Africa, and that Aryans had brought nothing to Mediterranean Europe. On the contrary, they had first absorbed Mediterranean civilization and had then been definitively Mediterraneanized by the Romans, who had conquered all of Europe and reunited it with the original African cradle of the Mediterranean race in one single Latin civilization. Arii e italici therefore represented the most explicit, sophisticated, and scientifically backed rejection of the demeaning racialization of all Italians as “non-whites,” refusing to displace non-Aryan-ness on to  Moe, The View, 23–27.

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Southern Italians, as Niceforo had. In one crucial section, however, Sergi’s book revealed itself to be as affected by concerns with the Southern Question as Niceforo’s. Halfway through his ethnological treatise, Sergi abruptly shifted from his discussion of cranial morphologies to that of the enduring “psychological” differences he had personally observed between the Northern Aryans and the Southern Mediterraneans who inhabited contemporary Europe since his “first visits to Central Europe.”100 To the former, he ascribed a dominant “feeling for social organization” deriving from their “antagonistic relationship with nature” that made them “more conservative, and more attracted by order, discipline, and education”; to the latter, he attributed a feeling “for the individual” that made Mediterraneans “more undisciplined, rebellious, and often resistant to education,” as well as “less solicitous and active” than Aryans, because they lacked the “stimulus of a hostile nature.”101 The fact that these psychological annotations had been the stock and trade of a Europe-wide discourse on the differences between Northern and Southern Europeans since the eighteenth century takes nothing away from the significance of their appearance in Sergi’s book.102 As we have seen, Einaudi would make use of the same argument 12 years later to praise the positive stimulation Italian emigrants experienced when they encountered the challenging nature of Argentina. In Sergi’s work, however, the attribution of a feeling for social organization to contemporary Northern Europeans was quite at odds with the denial of any civilizing traits to their Aryan ancestors he proposed in the first part of the book. Conversely, the stress on the role played by hostile nature in making contemporary Aryans more socially organized than Mediterraneans downplayed the deterministic view of race and civilization Sergi had sponsored in his discussion of ancient Mediterraneans. Sergi’s reasoning seems to have been pulled in two opposite directions: one aimed at emphasizing the Mediterranean origins of both the Italic and European civilizations in order to turn the accusation of racial inferiority levied against Italians on its head; and the other seeking to explain the contemporary superiority of Northern-Aryan European Italians vis-à-vis Southern Mediterranean Italians by basing it on geographical rather than  Sergi, Arii e italici, 190.  Ibid. 102  Moe, The View, 13–36. 100 101

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racial conditions. It is fairly evident that the long shadow of the Southern Question imposed itself on Sergi’s thinking at least as much as that of the African military debacle, just as both had on Niceforo. Sergi’s sudden redefinition of contemporary Mediterraneans as undisciplined, rebellious, resistant to education, and blessed by an all-too-nourishing nature did not square with Niceforo’s definition of atavism, and yet it could not fail to conjure up the well-established stereotype of the Southern Italian, to the exclusion of the Northern Italian. In fact, within the space of two years, in his response to Renda’s inquiry into the Southern Question we have referred to above, Sergi was declaring that he was in complete agreement with Niceforo regarding both the “inferiority” of contemporary Italian Southerners and the key role of race in producing it. The solution Sergi proposed to the “Question” in his response, however, also demonstrated that he had now developed a clear distinction between the ideas of Mediterranean “race” and Mediterranean “civilization,” which was intended to offer a way out of atavism and racial overdetermination.103 Sergi conceded not only that southern society was in a state of “arrested development,” as Niceforo had concluded, but also that of the many causes that had contributed to this “decadence,” race was the “deepest and most organic.”104 This was because, in Sergi’s opinion, southerners were not just “African” like all other Mediterranean populations, but had remained more African than any other group, and therefore indifferent and inert before those who would bring to them new elements of civilization, despite the fact that they still contained within themselves the faculties of assimilation typical of their stock, which would allow them to lift themselves up and join the others.105

Clearly, by 1900, the pull exerted on Sergi by the racialization of the Southern Question was too strong to allow him to hold on to his initial anti-Aryanism, and he ended up placing his theory in the service of the racial explanation of southern atavism proposed by Niceforo. However, Sergi also took a very different direction from Niceforo, who had concluded that Southerners could only be forced into progress by violent  Renda, Inchiesta, 137.  Ibid., 142. 105  Ibid. 103 104

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means. Sergi’s answer to the Southern Question was biopolitics at its purest, as it literally entailed the organized “immigration” of Northern Italians to the South and sexual intermixing with southerners. As “common observation proves,” he argued, it is “foreigners” who often accomplish the task of “awaken[ing] latent energies” in a race, and “transform them in a natural manner into works of civilization,” thereby also “making the work of transformation take root and become habitual.”106 In the case of Southern Italy, these foreigners were not to come from abroad but from that other Italy, the more developed “provinces of the North,”107 hence Sergi’s astonishing proposal that the Italian government should promote a campaign of “internal migration” from North to South aimed at promoting the sexual and social intermixing of Northern and Southern Italian stock. It was in this way, and only in this way, Sergi concluded, that the “two Italies” would be unified at last, the “Southern Question” would finally be solved, and “Italians […] made”—that is, literally birthed.108 It is likely that not even Sergi believed in the possibility of such an astonishingly radical feat of biopolitical engineering. Certainly, none of the commentators in Renda’s collection picked it up, and no contemporary newspapers offered a commentary on his proposal. Not even Sergi returned to it in his later writings, in fact. This silence, however, is an indication that the concessions Sergi made to racial-biological determinism, the absence of any expression of anti-Aryanism, and the support he lent to Niceforo’s racialization of the Southern Question was not the central component of his response: it was the “Mediterranean question” that was. Significantly, in fact, Sergi never once mentioned the word “Mediterranean” in connection with race in this article. Moreover, the entire first part of his response was predicated on developing the point he had made previously in 1895 and 1898 that historical circumstances act on “populations” belonging to the same race in ways that lead some not only to develop much faster and further than others, but also to acquire “habits” that in time become so “strong and resistant” as to appear racially determined, even though they are not.109 Similarly, he wrote, some populations of the same race remain “at the initial state of civic development”  Ibid.  Ibid. 108  Ibid., 143. 109  Ibid., 137. 106 107

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due to a combination of factors, all of which are historical in nature.110 As a telling example of his reasoning, Sergi even referred to the contemporary region of “Lazio,” which gave rise to Rome and “Latin civilization” in antiquity, while in his time, he argued, it was in the same state as the “southern regions.”111 That Sergi could reconcile these culturalist premises with his conclusion that race was the most profound factor in the decadence of Italian southerners is an indication of how deeply imbricated in each other racial discourse, Southern Question, and “making Italians” had become by the turn of the century. Equally significant, however, is the fact that while Sergi used the words  “race” and “stock,”  throughout the article, whenever he spoke of southern and northern Italian populations, he attached  the term “Mediterranean” exclusively to that of “civilization” and never to that of “race.” While race could be the causal factor in the rise, decadence, or fall of a  (Mediterranean) civilization—depending on circumstances—what interested Sergi the most was the mobility of any (Mediterranean) civilization. I have put “Mediterranean” in brackets because even where Sergi speaks of civilization in general, all the examples he gives are of Mediterranean civilizations (Athens, Egypt, and Rome), while the theory of (Mediterranean) civilization he expounds seeks to detach it from both race and geography.112 The proposition he took the most care to highlight in this piece was that of the “migratory movement of civilization” itself “from East to West in the ancient Mediterranean, and, from there towards the center and north of Europe.”113 The decline of “Lazio” and of the “Southern Provinces” was therefore at least as much a consequence of the movement of (Mediterranean) civilization away from the Mediterranean as it was of racial atavism, but most importantly, Sergi believed that the solution for both the Southern “Italian” Question and the more general question of the observable discrepancy between biological characters and cultural/behavioral characteristics in any population lay in the mobility of a civilization and its agent: migration. The key point in Sergi’s response to Niceforo was not the affirmation of racial determinism, but rather the complete detachment of “Mediterranean civilization” from “Mediterranean race,” and the  Ibid., 139.  Ibid. 112  Ibid., 139. 113  Ibid. 110 111

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isolation of migration as the historical agent in the transformation of race into civilization. This transformation of Homo Mediterraneus into Civis Mediterraneus can be found in Sergi’s La decadenza delle nazioni latine, which was published in the same year (1900), and in which Sergi even sacrificed his unabashed glorification of “Roman Civilization” as the singular achievement of the Mediterranean race, as he had argued in Arii e italici, to the altar of migration. At last, the Mediterranean imaginary that had animated his whole discourse revealed its ancient roots and contemporary stimuli in his positing of “transmigration” as the very essence of Mediterranean civilization, and “immobility” as its perversion.114 For Sergi, immobility had taken the form of what he called “Latinism,” that is, the glorification of the ancient Roman past as a basis for both the formation of an Italian national identity and the projection of a Mediterranean “imperial” destiny. For Sergi, “political, cultural, and social Latinism,” was the most perverse “illness” and the leading cause of Italian “decadence.”115 Very much to the contrary, the migratory movement of Mediterranean civilization had reached its political apex in the “federations of Switzerland and North America” where “nationality” was not subject to an ideal of “absolute unity” and no “city” existed that was the “absolute head of the State.”116 It must have therefore come as no surprise to Sergi that by the year 1900, millions of Southern Italians had left their provinces, which were particularly subject to the “immobilizing forces” of Latinism, to follow the movement of their Mediterranean civilization all the way to the United States of North America. Similarly, Sergi’s answer to the “Southern Question” with a call for northern Italians to migrate south and mix with Southerners supported the same identification of Mediterranean civilization with migratory mobility. Most significantly, the fact that he sacrificed years of painstaking research into the theorization of the Mediterranean race for a far more elusive identification of Mediterranean-ness itself with transmigratory movement is worthy of note not solely for its constituting a most explicit discursive transfiguration of the fishing net matrix, but also for its signaling a dramatic swing of the Mediterranean pendulum towards  Giuseppe Sergi, La decadenza delle nazioni latine (Turin: F.lli Bocca, 1900), 38 and 22.  Ibid., 65. 116  Ibid., 45. 114 115

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Imperium. Sergi’s anti-Latinist conception of Mediterranean-ness anticipated and sternly opposed the winds of Italian nationalism that sought to conjoin the words “Mediterranean” and “Empire” in the first decades of the new century, and the storm of cultural Latin-lovers who turned Mediterranean-ness into a foil for tying the “making of Italians” to fulfilling their “Roman” destiny.

CHAPTER 5

Epiphanic Mediterraneanism

While the theorization of the Mediterranean race by Giuseppe Sergi and its widespread echo in Italian intellectual circles was unique, ideas of a Mediterranean form of identity (Mediterranean-ness, mediterraneità, identidad mediterránea, identité méditerranéenne) that connected the various coasts and peoples of the Mediterranean basin were not limited to Italy, and by the turn of the twentieth century they were circulating widely in a number of European—and some non-European—contexts. This discourse on Mediterranean-ness was largely predicated on the geographicalization of Europe into North and South that we have seen taking place in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and on the corollary adage that climate determined human character.1 The idea of Southern Italy as a quintessential liminal space between Europe, Africa, and Asia had become the stock and trade of Grand Tour travelers, and was spelled out in many of their travelogues.2 By and large, however, the early-nineteenth-century discourse on southern European-ness did not mobilize the Mediterranean Sea as a vehicle for the formation of a cultural identity, and it was not based on any form of direct interaction with non-European shores, to which it made only vague reference. Popular novels like Mme De Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne or Italy, 1824) and the voluminous literature  See my discussion of this topic in Chap. 2.  Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). 1 2

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_5

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that began to distinguish between The Man of the North and the Man of the South (Pierre de Bonstetten, 1825) from the early nineteenth century on, made it clear that the discursive target was the construction of Europeanness rather than Mediterranean-ness. Even in the literary disquisitions of the influential Coppet Group, whose members highlighted the “Mediterranean” virtues of the literature du midi (of the south), the term “midi” meant Italy exclusively,3 and in the travelogue by François-­René de Chateaubriand, the first prominent Frenchman to circumnavigate the Mediterranean in 1806–1807, “the Mediterranean as such was almost completely absent from the narrative.”4 His voyage was one into the “living memory of the ages of Europe,” but it did not conjure up a common Mediterranean space.5 The first properly Mediterranean encounter with the Ottoman shore only came about in 1832 with the Système de la Méditerranée, published by the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier. “Maritime concerns” were prominent in his grand technocratic scheme for restructuring transport and communications in the Ottoman Empire, and his offer of “reciprocal regeneration” was genuine and cosmopolitan;6 however, Chevalier’s position was still clearly identified with a North looking south, even though the writer was a Frenchman.7 Early to mid-nineteenth-century discourse was always on rather than of the Mediterranean, and it always originated with travelers who arrived from the European North, or who identified with it from a cultural-rhetorical standpoint. Instead, the ideas of Mediterranean-­ ness that began to circulate in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were predicated on the rise of Southern European empire states: that is, they developed in connection with, and as a reaction to, the colonial enterprises planned or initiated by France, Spain, and Italy in North Africa, and/or the wars these states waged against the Ottoman Empire. During this period, Mediterranean-ness was formulated as a cultural form of identity built on history or geography that was supposed to unite (some of) the peoples who inhabited (some of) “les pays” (the territories) bordering the “liquid continent”—as Gabriel Audisio famously referred to the 3  Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin, ed., L’Invention littéraire de la Méditerranée dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris/Montpellier: Geuthner, 2012), 87–108. 4  François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811), cited in L’invention litteraire, 30. 5  Ibid. 11. 6  Ibid. 14. 7  Ibid. 13.

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Mediterranean region—despite the fact that they were divided into different “nations.”8 The first key feature of this discourse was therefore that it started out as a discourse from the south––the European South, that is––independently of, and often in marked contrast to, what John Pemble has aptly defined as the “Mediterranean Passion” of Victorian and Edwardian travelers during the same period.9 By the early 1870s, Thomas Cook & Co. had made the aristocratic Grand Tour available to thousands of Northern European middle-class imitators of Goethe and Standhal,10 and by 1880, Cook’s travel agency included both Turkey and the Middle East in its offerings of Mediterranean Southern-ness. Yet, as scores of diaries, published travelogues, and guide books show, the discourse emerging from this first mass wave of Northern European contacts with the Mediterranean world increased, rather than diminished, the human distance between the two. In contrast with the “urbanity” of eighteenth-century “travelers,” the modern tourist cherished “the ethnic, the local, and the homespun,” did not mingle with the local population except for “shopkeepers and servants,” and consistently stressed the incommensurable distance between the “record of ancient vitality” disclosed by the monuments and sites they visited, and the inauthentic and aberrant state of contemporary Mediterraneans, be they Italians, Greeks, or Arabs.11 Although Pemble does not find any major differences in the “motivation, attitude, and experience,” or the specific stereotypes of Southern-ness as articulated by late nineteenth-century tourists compared with those of eighteenth-century travelers, he still found the separation between places and people to be so sharp and consistent across this literature as to project a uniform image of the Mediterranean as “immensely old, inert, [and] somnolent.”12 On this score, the Mediterranean Passion of Victorians and Edwardians could not have been more distinct from, or even contrary to, Southern European

8  Gabriel Audisio, La Mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 273–276, cited in Luisa Passerini, Women and Men in Love: European Identities in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 153. 9  John Pemble, Mediterranean Passion. Victorians and Edwardians in the South (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 2009). 10  Stephanie Malia Hom, The Beautiful Country. Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, Ca: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 83–104. 11  Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, 265, 260, 267. 12  Ibid., 267.

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articulations of Mediterranean-ness, which, as we shall shortly see, addressed the vitality of the Mediterranean in modernity head-on. The second characteristic of the Mediterranean-ness discourse that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century is that it was a Southern European discourse through and through, in which non-­ European or Mediterranean-area intellectuals played no role, and the non-­ European shores of the Mediterranean were the necessary, but inert, object of Southern Euro-Mediterranean desires and identity projections. The French journalist Pierre Loti unceasingly exalted the Mediterranean-­ ness of his beloved Ottoman Turkey, and even pleaded for France to oppose the aggression of Italy—a sister romance-language nation—against Turkey in 1911–1912, and yet the Mediterranean as such, or Mediterranean-­ ness as its imaginary projection at an identity-formation level, was almost entirely absent from the Ottoman imaginary itself.13 Despite centuries of rivalries and wars fought against Christian powers, corsair warfare, slave-­ taking, and slave-trading, Ottoman writers avoided any reference to a Turkish Mediterranean heredity or identity, and viewed that sea as entirely European.14 The Turks’s “Mediterranean” was the “Black Sea,” and for Ottomans what Europeans called “the Mediterranean” was just “the White Sea.”15 By the same token, the first properly discursive construction of Mediterranean-ness in the Arab world took place after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 with the formation of Greater Lebanon under a French Protectorate. The exaltation of Lebanese “Phoenician-ness” became a key component in the construction of a Lebanese identity, and assumed the contours of a proper Mediterraneanist “ideology,” with three journals published in Beirut dedicated to its articulation.16 But until that time, Ahmad Beydoun tells us, the “graphic transliteration” of the term “Phoenicia” in Arabic was itself “hesitant.”17 Even when ideas of Mediterranean-ness were raised by non-European writers in a colonial context, no widespread discourse was then created around them. The famous account by the Egyptian scholar Rifāa Rāfi Al-Ṭ ahṭāwı̄ on his five years in France (1826–1831) (An Imam in Paris, 1832) 13  Feride Çiçekoglu and Edhem Eldem, Rappresentare il mediterraneo. Lo sguardo turco (Messina: Mesogea, 2001), 39. 14  Ibid., 43. 15  Ibid., 48. 16  Elias Khuri and Ahmad Beydoun, Rappresentare il mediterraneo. Lo sguardo libanese (Messina: Mesogea, 2002), 48. 17  Ibid., 44.

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contains the first known translation of the term “Mediterranean” into Arabic, and a description of Alexandria of Egypt as a “quasi-European” city with similarities to Paris. But as Alexis Wick argues, this was evidence of Al-Ṭ aht ̣āwı̄ having absorbed the Mediterranean discourse in Paris rather than his having given birth to an autochthonous Ottoman Mediterranean discourse.18 Until Taha Hussein’s The Future of Culture in Egypt (1939) —which, according to Mohamed Afifi, expounded an idea of “Mediterraneanism” aimed at contrasting “fascist imperialism”—the Mediterranean was not a source of self-identification for Egyptians (or most Muslim Arabs): it remained the “sea of the Roum,” that is, of the Christian other.19 Today, it is hard to imagine the Mediterranean Sea without thinking of Greece, both Ancient and Modern, but this idea is itself characteristic of a mid-twentieth-century view from the North, and the product of, rather than the premise for, the development of a Mediterranean discourse in the earlier part of that century. For nineteenth-century writers and poets from Greece and of Greek origin, the center of attention and inspiration was not the imaginary Thalassa—the Greek name for the Mediterranean Sea— but the much more “real” Ionian and Aegean “seas.”20 These two seas had nourished a “maritime life” that was put into poetry and song by Romantic Greek poets and later became an element that connected the Greek people to their newly reborn nation, as in Kostis Palamas’s sonnets Songs of My Fatherland (1896).21 The Mediterranean as such, and as a source of non-­ nationalist identity, would not become a focus of interest until the early 1920s, when figures such as Nikos Kazantzakis incarnated the desire to syncretize primitive (Crete), modern (Nietzsche, Bergson, and Lenin), and spiritual Mediterraneans (St. Francis) in life and literature into characters like Zorba or the updated Ulysses he brought to life in his Odyssey 18  Alexis Wick, “Sailing the Modern Episteme: Al-Ṭ ahṭāwı̄ on the Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 2 (2014): 415. His reportage is remarkable as a unique reversal of gaze, and as a masterful ethnography of modern Europe. 19  Edouard al-Kharrat and Mohamed Afifi, Rappresentare il Mediterraneo. Lo sguardo egiziano, Messina: Mesogea, 2003), 49. 20  Rania Polycandrioti, Rappresentare il mediterraneo. Lo sguardo Greco (Messina: Mesogea, 2004); Helena González Vaquerizo, “La Odissea Cretese y Modernista de Nikos Kazanzakis” (PhD Dissertation, Autònoma University of Madrid, 2012). See also Kostantina Zanou, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean. 1800–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 21  Ibid.

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composed between 1924 and 1938.22 It was primarily in Spain, France, and Italy that a transnational discourse arose in the decades between 1870 and the Great War that articulated and intersected somewhat interchangeable concepts of Mediterranean-ness. Notwithstanding its historical importance for the many centuries of Spanish dominance over the Catholic World, the Mediterranean Sea played no role in the construction of Spanish national identity for most of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, it constituted what Eduardo González Calleja calls “the incarnation of a transcendental negative alterity,” and was identified with the vital space for the expansion of al-­Andalus, the Medieval and Early Modern Caliphate of Cordoba.23 Not even the invasion of Northern Morocco in 1859–1860 entirely dispelled this negative prejudice and fostered a positive idea of Spanish Mediterranean-ness beyond the exoticism and vitality associated with all the colonialist movements of the nineteenth century.24 A colonial myth of “brotherhood” between Spaniards and North Africans did spring up after 1860 in direct opposition to French claims of a “civilizing mission,”25 but as Calderwood writes, “it did not engage the Mediterranean as a key symbol of identity or as a unit of analysis.”26 The first strongly identitarian consolidation of Mediterranean-ness would take place on Spanish national territory, but it would be in the país known as Cataluña, and in the name of an alternative nationalism. The 1888 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona simultaneously gave birth to the independentist aspirations of Cataluña and two consecutive cultural movements that supported it: Modernisme (1888–1905) and Neucentisme (1906–1914). Both created identitarian images of the Mediterranean, albeit profoundly different from one other: “exuberant and sensuous those of the former, measured and rational those of Neucentisme.”27 Catalan Modernisme was almost exclusively identified with the “Moorish” architectural forms of the Exhibition itself, and with the world-renowned architecture of Antoni Gaudì. Both purposely violated the transcendental  Morton P. Levitt, The Cretan Glance.   Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, Rappresentare il Mediterraneo. Lo sguardo spagnolo (Messina: Mesogea, 2002), 53. 24  Ibid. 67. 25  Eric Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus. Spain and the Making of Modern Maroccan Culture (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 22. 26  Ibid., 24. 27  Vásquez Montalbán, Lo sguardo spagnolo, 75. 22 23

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negative that had plagued the Spanish refusal to develop positive identitarian images of the Mediterranean by explicitly or metaphorically evoking al-Andalus. Gaudì played on this theme by positioning Barcelona as a literal “Mediterranean Capital,” which he identified with the “in-between-­ ness” of the “sea between lands,” due to the fact that it fell midway between the northern populations, who filled their heads with ideas, suppressed sentiment, and produced ghosts due to a lack of light, and those of the south, who downplayed rationality and produced monsters due to an excess of light.28

“Our plastic force” he continued “resides in the equilibrium of light,” which is also the “equilibrium between logic and sentiment.”29 Playing with the theme of in-between-ness and light, Gaudì articulated the self-­ referential Mediterranean mytheme of middle-ness as equilibrium, which had already been circulating in artistic milieus for centuries, and would find many future discursive incarnations, but the forms of his architecture went far beyond this notion of equilibrium.30 They instantiated an idea of Mediterranean-ness as a transfigurational relationship between nature and culture that formed a paradoxical bridge between Gaudi’s architecturalization of Mediterranean-ness and the Neucentisme movement, which developed at the beginning of the twentieth century as an explicit reaction to (and rejection of) his Modernisme.31 The founding father and main propagandist of Neucentisme was the essayist Eugenio D’Ors (aka Xènius). D’Ors’s interpretation was that Cataluña’s path toward cultural and political independence necessarily passed through an appropriation of the transcendental form from the negative alterity with which official Spanish culture had conceptualized the Mediterranean, while at the same time rejecting the Modernist Catalan appropriation of the Moresque and the subjectivism of Gaudì’s architecture. As Calleja puts it, D’Ors’s Neucentisme absolutely identified Mediterranean-ness with the “revitalization of the classical Greco-Roman

 Ibid., 76  Ibid. 30  See Franco Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, translated by Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). 31  Joan Ramon Resina, Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity. Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2008). 28 29

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spirit in the civic, artistic, and literary world.”32 It contrasted the “figurative and sensuous reason” of Mediterraneans with the “introspective individualism” of Northerners, thereby rejecting the movement of modernity toward the autonomy of art in the name of an “ethical superstructure that needed to dominate the merely stylistic concerns of modernism.”33 D’Ors was not alone in articulating a Neucentiste amalgam of ethics and aesthetics. Painter Joaquím Torres-García supported the critic, arguing in favor of an art that: would not just imitate or bring back to life old formulas, but rather revitalize the spirit they contain: serenity, light, color, a refined sense of proportion and its plasticity; in a word, Classicism.34

Similarly, the historian Josep Pella i Forgas used examples of contemporary Italian and French architecture in La catalunya grega (1906) to argue that the same Mediterranean Sea that had connected Ancient Cataluña and Ancient Greece still united them in a common cultural front of Classicism that stood opposed to the “impressionism, decadentism, and symbolism,” that had temporarily distracted Mediterranean artists from their heritage.35 At bottom, however, what connected Neucentisme to the despised Modernisme of Gaudì was the same ontologization of a unique Mediterranean union of nature and culture, which in one case was expressed in architectural forms and in the other projected as an eternal “golden age.” In both cases, however, it excluded any contribution from the African and Islamic shores of the Mediterranean.36 “An Arab,” declared D’Ors: may be right, but cannot be completely “right” in the sense we attribute to that word. He cannot be rational because he is an Arab. And with this I simply mean to say that he is isolated and distant from the center of culture. He does not have access to the Great Work of Culture: that is, the human sciences that have been formed by the secular collaboration of all the forces of History; of Greece and Rome, of Calatuña, of the Renaissance, and all other vital manifestations of the occidental spirit […] To “be right” and to  Vásquez Montalbán, Lo sguardo spagnolo, 78.  Ibid. 34  Ibid., 79. 35  Ibid., 81. 36  Ibid., 82. 32 33

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be completely rational means, in other words, to have participated in the coming into being of Reason: that is to say, to have been a subject of Culture or a protagonist in bringing forward the essential Greek tradition.37

As the most mature and diffused cultural articulation of Mediterranean-­ ness in Spain, Catalan Neucentisme gave expression to a number of mythemes—equilibrium, measure, and sensuous reason—that resonated with those developed in other Southern European contexts during the same period, but it explicitly excluded any forms of non-European heritage. What made it unique was its nostalgic attitude of a return to a common Greco-Roman home that allowed Catalans to share the idea of a Southern European Mare Nostrum with the French and Italians (there was no mention of modern Greeks in D’Ors), and on this basis, to construct a claim to nationhood for Cataluña. The discursive elaboration of Mediterranean-ness in France paralleled Catalan developments and themes in certain important respects, but its genealogy, its cultural purchase among scientists, writers, and artists, and its national(ist) spread were far more extensive than they were in Spain. Alain Corbin dates the first cultural signs of a close relationship between Frenchmen and “the sea” to the beginning of the nineteenth century, instantiated by the invention of steamboats. No longer identified as a “territoire du vide” (a territory of emptiness) to be feared for its power to overpower, the sea began to be associated with a “desire for the shore,” in the Romantic era, as was the case with Lamartine’s autobiographical novel Graziella, which was set on Procida (see Chap. 3).38 At first, however, it was an indistinct shore: maritime landscapes had become ubiquitous in French painting long before Gustave Courbet’s celebrated images of Normandy beaches (1870s), but neither audiences nor painters differentiated much between Mediterranean and Oceanic shores, as illustrated by Louis Garneray’s Views of French Coasts on the Ocean and the Mediterranean (1823).39 Just as with Victorian and Edwardian tourists, it was the petit tour—which was enthusiastically embraced by the French bourgeoisie in the second half of the century—that began to construct a different image of the Mediterranean landscape. Yet unlike its British counterpart, French  Ibid.  Alain Corbin, Le Territoire du Vide. L’Occident et le désir de Rivage 1750–1840 (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), cited in Jean-Claude Izzo and Thierry Fabre, Rappresentare il Mediterraneo. Lo sguardo francese (Messina: Mesogea, 2000), 58. 39  Ibid., 59. 37 38

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travel literature insisted specifically on the differences between the Mediterranean “sea” and the “ocean” by focusing on the Mediterranean shore as a unique combination of “sky, sea, and land,” and depicting the Mediterranean as a “lake dotted with archipelagos,” thereby emphasizing the absence of danger and ease of communication.40 And while French artists, writers, and scholars explicitly contrasted the evocative “past” associated with the sea with the “absence of a past” in the ocean, they did not pin the glorious historicity of ruins and landscape against the moral degradation of the current inhabitants of the Mediterranean.41 This same focus, by tourists, on rooting contemporary inhabitants in both their territory and history can be traced to the French passion for “the Mediterranean” as an object of both scientific and literary discourse in the post-Napoleonic era. The three expeditions that led French scientists first to Egypt (1798–1801), then to a region of the Peloponnesus called Morée (1829–1831), and finally to Algeria (1839–1842) have rightly been viewed as being central to the “scientific invention of the Mediterranean.”42 They marked a momentous reorientation of the French imaginary from the view of the Mediterranean in picturesque and Orientalist terms as belonging to Le Levant (the East) to an object of knowledge and self-recognition.43 Although botany was the first discipline to offer a definition of the “Mediterranean region,” based on Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s observation of a “unity of climate encompassing both shores,” it was in the voluminous writings of geographer Bory de Saint-Vincent—who led both the Morée and Algerian expeditions—that the notion of Mediterranean-ness began to acquire both physical and human characteristics.44 Bringing together findings from smaller expeditions in Spain and the Canary Islands, Saint-Vincent proposed that the Mediterranean shores of the Maghreb, Spain, and France were part of the ancient, vanished continent of Atlantis. According to Saint-Vincent’s theory, the Atlantic Continent had been separated from the rest of Africa by a sea. A geological cataclysm later transformed this sea into a desert (the Sahara), while the plains that had once connected the shores of Southern  Ibid.  Ibid., 61. 42  Maroula Sinarellis Bourguet, Marie-Noelle, Bernard Lepetit, Daniel Nordman eds., L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée: Egypte, Morée, Algérie (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998), 3. 43  Ibid., 290–308. 44  Ibid., 22. 40 41

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Europe and Northern Africa shores were submerged, forming the Mediterranean Sea.45 Although he never extrapolated a unitarian racial theory from his hypothesis of a Mediterranean terrestrial unity in his scientific reports of his expeditions, Saint-Vincent connected artistic, historical, and ethnographic evidence in many other articles he published in the first half of the nineteenth century in ways that Sergi would echo in his own theory of Mediterranean race and civilization several decades later. On the one hand, Saint-Vincent argued, on the basis of archeological evidence, that “hydraulic engineering,” including bridges and canals, connected the ancient past of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to the Mediterranean present, as characterized by the recent construction of the Canal du Midi (1789) and the planning of the Suez Canal, while on the other, he devised his own physical-anthropological classification of races according to their cranial structure and the angle of their mandible, which he contrasted with both the linguistic evidence and the customary mélange of eye and skin color, and of hair typology on which most other anthropologists of the time were grounding their taxonomies of human groups. On the basis of his original principles of taxonomy and the customary classification of humans according to Linnaeus’s scheme of species, races, and variations, Saint-Vincent argued that certain races of the European species (Pelagic and Celtic) were closer to the Atlantic race of the Arab species than the latter were to the Adamic race (Jews and Arabs), which also belonged to the same (Arab) species.46 Southern Europeans, in other words, were racially connected to North Africans, and since Saint-Vincent also argued that cranial structure “reflected intellectual faculties,” and that Greek statues embodied the enduring beauty of the “ninety-degree angle” of the mandibular structure, he laid the foundations for the argument of a superior Mediterranean race that Sergi would later develop on a similar mixture of craniometrics and historical-archeological evidence.47 The term “Mediterranean” barely appeared in Saint-Vincent’s writings, on the other hand: in fact, his theory of racial-geographical unity between the inhabitants of Southern-Western Europe (Spain and France) and North-Western Africa (Maghreb) was based, as we have seen, on the disappearance of the Mediterranean itself as a sea. For Saint-Vincent, rather than uniting the descendants of Atlantis, the Mediterranean Sea had separated them. No  Ibid., 308.  Ibid., 278. 47  Ibid., 274 and 278. 45 46

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wonder he compared it so unfavorably with the Atlantic Ocean by defining it as “the liquid desert.”48 As Ann Thompson argues, the thread connecting Saint-Vincent’s fantastical propositions (Atlantis) and a priori arguments in multi-volume reports of highly sophisticated scientific expeditions, were very immediately political, visible in the light of day, and directly connected with the timing of the expeditions themselves.49 For example, his observations that contemporary Greek women—and only contemporary Greek women— had the same profile as ancient Greek statues could have had no other justification than a desire to support hopes for Greece’s return to democracy and its ancient splendor at the very moment it achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire (1830).50 By the same token, his insistence on including the ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands into his imaginary Atlantic continent, along with the explicit exclusion of Egypt and the Adamic races (Jews and Arabs) from any connection with Atlantis and their racial separation from both Berbers and Southern Europeans, found an immediate raison d’être in the desire to “give value to the relationship between Frenchmen of Celtic origin and the autochthonous populations of Algeria, in view of their common Atlantic origin.”51 With Saint-Vincent, then, Mediterranean-ness assumed its first ghostly form almost in spite of the author’s intentions, remained in the shadows of its Atlantic origin, and was downgraded to an element of division rather than union. Things did not change dramatically with the development of the French School of physical anthropology that with Paul Broca (1824–1880) challenged Aryanism in the mid-nineteenth century. The most influential French ethnographer of his generation, Broca married French ethnography with positivist craniology in the early 1860s in order to argue on behalf of the importance of an autochthonous brachiocephalic European race, which he called Gallo-Celtic. Broca’s “race narrative” stood in opposition to the German (and other non-French) tendencies to argue––based on linguistics––that modern Europeans had their origins in an invasion of dolichocephalous Aryans from Asia, who had wiped out the aboriginal Europeans and imposed their superior culture (language).52 Broca’s  Ibid., 307.  Ibid., 273–287. 50  Ibid., 181. 51  Ibid. 52  Richard McMahon “The Races of Europe: Anthropological Race Classification of Europeans 1838–1939” (PhD diss., European University Institute, Florence, 2007), 206. 48 49

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­ osition was not so much an affirmation of the racial primacy and purity p of short-skulled over long-skulled Europeans. Until 1870, the main interest of the so-called Gallic School of anthropology was to affirm the values of polygenesis, racial cohabitation, and assimilation.53 Conscious of the pitfalls of overemphasizing “origins,” which could easily be utilized to construct accusations of “primitive-ness,” Broca also insisted that aboriginal Europeans were not all that different from Asian Aryans, and that among the former there were also pockets of autochthonous dolichocephali.54 Furthermore, he always highlighted the superior Bronze Age culture and languages that had been imported into Europe by Asian Aryans.55 With this emphasis on assimilation, Broca implicitly acknowledged the existence of a subgroup of brachiocephalic Mediterraneans, whom he more frequently referred to as “Iberians,” and assigned a value to them as a result of intense racial intermixing.56 But, just as with Saint-Vincent, the crucial identitarian issue for Broca did not lie with the identification and definition of Mediterraneans, but with the dual legitimization they offered for French colonialism. On the one hand, the Iberians exemplified French claims to primacy by emphasizing the civilizing power of intermixing and assimilation over the German kultur of conquest, while on the other, they also demonstrated the possibility of a higher power of minorities arriving from the outside to civilize autochthonous populations. In Richard McMahon’s words: “These arguments [about Iberians] protected Broca’s aboriginal national French race and separated biological majority from the cultural power of the conqueror, naturalizing modern France’s Latin culture and its Gallicization of colonial subjects.”57 After 1870, French race narratives drifted even further away from notions of Mediterranean-ness, in response to the shocking French defeat against Prussia. Broca’s own positions dramatically reflected this shift from a colonialist paradigm of discursive reference to a more purely nationalist one. Along with all other French ethnographers, he renamed brachiocephalic Celts “Alpines” in order to reaffirm their exclusively French origin and more firmly reject any German claim to associating “Celts” with Teutons and Franks. He then argued that there had been not one but two  Ibid.  Ibid., 215. 55  Ibid., 240. 56  Ibid., 273. 57  Ibid., 215. 53 54

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brachiocephalic groups in Europe: the first was the original Paleolithic one, and the second was none other than the “Bronze Age Aryans” who had brought “civilization.”58 Yet, on account of their racial similarity with aboriginal Europeans, Bronze Age Aryans fused effortlessly with them, thereby forming the Alpine Celts, a superior mountain race that stretched from the Pyrenees to Central Asia, with the Alps as its center of circulation.59 Clearly, in the same period when Sergi was beginning to theorize his Mediterranean Race on the basis of the same craniological methodology advocated by Broca and his followers, French physical anthropology took an altogether different path toward the assertion that Modern French nationals derived from an “upland” race of brachycephals, “who were the only and original Aryans, bringing Oriental, Indo-European culture to Europe.”60 The anti-Germanic involution of French racial discourse post 1870 did not seem to apply Mediterranean-ness to its attempts at a synthesis of nationalist and colonialist agendas, but the dramatic defeat of 1870 also inspired a very large class of French intellectuals and writers to take precisely that direction. The first, and best, illustration of this can be found in the so-called Algérianiste School, founded and led by the French-born writer Louis Bertrand at the turn of the century.61 Despite its name, the movement neither originated in Algeria nor was focused exclusively on that pays: it addressed the entire Maghreb region, most of which, with the occupations of Algeria in 1840 and of Tunisia in 1881 and the several French incursions into Morocco (1882, 1898) had now come under direct French control or influence. Whether in Bertrand’s 1899 popular novel, Le sang des races (The Blood of Races)—which was set in Algiers—or in his 1907 archeological essay Les villes d’or (The Cities of Gold)—which focused on the ancient Roman cities of Berber North Africa—or in the popular cartoon character of Cagayous, created in 1895 by Auguste Robinet (aka Musette), French-occupied North Africa was presented as a “Mediterranean melting pot.”62 Yet the “eternal Mediterranean” that was encapsulated in both popular figuration and high Algérianiste prose harked back to a myth regarding origins that suggested that a “Latin”  Ibid., 244.  Ibid., 242. 60  Ibid., 249. 61  Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, The Transcontinental Maghreb. Francophone Literature Across the Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 48. 62  Ibid. 58 59

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Mediterranean Africa should be celebrated for its vital “barbarism.”63 Despite its exaltation of a racial and cultural hybridity born out of the new colonial mix between the French, other Mediterranean European settlers, and Berbers, Algérianisme insisted on the creation of a “new race,” to the exclusion of all Semitic traits (both Jewish and Arab) of Berber North Africa. As Edwige Tamalet explains, Algérianisme “construed the French colons as the direct descendants of the Romans, while the native populations were considered only insofar as they exhibited residual signs of Romanization.”64 Side-by-side with Algérianisme, albeit more analogous to Catalan Neucentisme, a second Mediterranean imaginary developed in fin-de-siècle France that was not associated with the French nation, but rather with the pays de Provence. The Provençal Le Félibrige movement, which was founded by Frédéric Mistral to defend and promote the Occitan language, or langue d’Oc, encouraged the identification of Mediterranean-ness with Latinitè (Latinity), but based it on racial and linguistic rather than historical (Bertrand’s Latin Africa) or ethical-aesthetic (Neucentisme’s Greco-­ Roman equilibrium) connotations. Singling out Provence as the geographical center of “the six” romance languages, namely, Italian, French, Langue d’Oc, Catalan, Castilian, and Portuguese—thereby excluding Romanian precisely in order to highlight their Mediterranean-­ ness—Mistral’s poetry expressly celebrated a single Latin race that was identified with Mediterranean languages rather than nations, and intentionally excluded any Ottoman–Arab–Muslim connection. At the same time, the Mediterranean as such was not central to Mistral’s and Le Félibrige literature in general: it often remained implicit or was consigned to occasional poems celebrating the similarities between two Mediterranean pays, as in Mistral’s most famous song, Coupo Santo (1867), which was dedicated to Catalan–Provençal brotherhood, or his travelogue Excursion en Italie (n.d.) in which the memory of the Angevin Queen of Naples Joanna I (1326–1381 CE)—who was also Countess of Provence—dominates all else. It would fall on Mistral’s principal follower and the future ideologue of Action Française, Charles Maurras, to clarify the stakes of Latinitè. With Maurras, and to some extent his close associate Auguste-Maurice Barrès, Mediterranean-ness entered the construction of French  Ibid., 46.  Ibid.

63 64

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nationalism full-on. The active purification of the Mediterranean from the “Semitic leprosy” in the name of a Latinity that also completely absorbed Greek-ness became a true obsession for Maurras during the period of the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906).65 Every opportunity proved to be a good one for drawing a clear demarcation line between the “Mediterranean that has entered into the Greco-Roman civilized world and the barbaric Semitic world of Jews and Arabs, and other Levantine people.”66 Following Mistral, the Latinitè advocated by Maurras would not be identified with Ancient Rome as such, but rather with its linguistic filiation, of which France, of course, had a double tie: French and Languedoc. In fact, Maurras had no hesitation in condemning Ancient Rome for its unforgivable sin of having “spread Semitism along with Hellenism, with its caravan of necromancers, prophets, charlatans, and restless agitators with no fatherland.”67 Maurras’s Mediterranean Latinisme thus tied the provincial world of Mistral’s Félibrige to the colonial one of Bertrand’s Algérianisme in a combination that would lead French nationalism from the anti-­ Dreyfus camp directly to the formation of the ultra-nationalist, ultra-­ monarchist movement Action Française. Yet, like the Catalan Neucentisme, French Latinisme was reactionary and backward-looking. It viewed any form of what late twentieth-century scholars have named “modernism(s),” with antipathy. It was, instead, a confluence of Mediterranean-­ness and modernism that gave the Italian articulations of Mediterraneità a unique cultural edge and an ideological potential that would result in a fullfledged form of Mediterraneanism.

Epiphanic Mediterraneanism68 Fin de siècle Italian literature was as heavily influenced as ever––probably more than any other European nation at the time––by French literary movements. French articulations of Latinism were therefore very  Ibid., 87.  Ibid. 67  Ibid., 88. 68  British anthropologist Michael Herzfeld famously coined the  term Mediterraneanism in close analogy to Orientalism in order to highlight the way in which Northern European social scientists (primarily French and  British) have othered and  exoticized Southern Europeans in order to highlight their distance from the normative North. While not directly engaging with  Herzsfeld’s definition, my definition of  Mediterraneanism applies also to  Southern European constructions of  Mediterranean-ness, and  refers to  a  wider realm 65 66

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influential in high Italian cultural circles. The undisputed champion of Latinità in early twentieth-century Italy was its most controversial––but internationally acclaimed––poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio, who spent five years of self-imposed exile (1910–1915) in Paris, wrote several original works in French, and enjoyed a wide-ranging circle of artistic collaborations and friendships with prominent French figures from Claude Debussy, André Gide, and Anatole France to the cofounders of L’Action Française, Barrès and Maurras.69 D’Annunzio shared a parallel political evolution toward radical nationalism with Maurras and Barrès, without Maurras’s virulent anti-Semitism and ultra-Catholicism or Barrès’s Provencalism.70 And yet the cultural and political horizon within which D’Annunzio operated should make us cautious about drawing too close a parallel or filiation between the Italian “Vate” (bard), as he came to be referred universally from the 1890s onward, and his Latinist counterparts in France. D’Annunzio’s aesthetic-political parable was part and parcel of the paradigm of “making Italians,” and his Latinism was steeped in the waters of Mediterranean racial discourse. Above all, no one synthesized the two aspects of the modernist avant-garde that Walter Benjamin would later (erroneously) seek to keep separate––the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics–– better than D’Annunzio.71 In fact, this self-appointed “Italian Nietzsche” may have been the most representative figure of what Roger Griffin has aptly termed “epiphanic modernism.”72 D’Annunzio’s veneration for Nietzsche’s Zarathustrian teachings and their application to a life for art’s sake posture made him the poster child of mental, discursive, and cultural representations than those of anthropologists. As it will become clear in the text, I also use the term Mediterraneanism as parallel, cognate, and partially opposite to Modernism. The latter may have unduly obscured the cultural construction of Mediterranean-ness by self-defined Mediterranean-area artists and intellectuals as an alternative modernity. 69  Guy Tosi, D’Annunzio e la Francia. Saggi e studi (1942–1987), vol. 1 (Lanciano: Rocco Carabba, 2013), 305–342; see also Giovanni Gullace, Gabriele D’Annunzio in France: A Study in Cultural Relations (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966). 70  Tosi, D’Annunzio e la Francia, 305. 71  The reference is to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on The Work of Art in the Era of Machine Reproducibility (1936). 72  Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 61–64. On the basis of this definition, Griffin famously argued for the inclusion of both Italian fascism and German Nazism into the camp of “programmatic” modernist movements. I shall return to this in the next chapter.

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of a generation of artists dominated by the search for epiphanic aufbruch (breakup and breakthrough) and “new beginnings” of a “purely inner, spiritual kind.”73 Not only did D’Annunzio incarnate this core attitude, but he was also a compendium of characteristics that can often be found in opposite forms and moments of epiphanic modernism: from the elitist aestheticism of the high modernists74 to the populist transfusion of aestheticism into nationalist politics;75 from his plans for the construction of a theater for the masses76 to his Nietzschean call for a “Rebirth of Tragedy;”77 from the spectacularization of poetry via the practice of declamation to offering to write intertitles for the most internationally acclaimed motion picture of the era, Cabiria (1914); and from his engagement with both journalism and literary-theatrical criticism to his self-promotional posturing, which anticipated key traits of our contemporary “celebrity culture.”78 His Great War exploits and the post-war occupation of the Dalmatian city of Fiume brought him to the attention of his contemporaries and historians alike as the most active agent in the “sacralization of the fatherland” and the invention of the “new politics” that nourished the fascist movement and took it to power in 1922.79 But for much of the first decade of the twentieth century D’Annunzio identified himself above all with a militant form of Mediterranean Latinism that sought to affirm and support the cultural right of the “Latin” nations—France and Italy, that is—to military hegemony over the Mare Nostrum, to the exclusion of both the “Teutons” and the Turks.80  Ibid., 50, 62.  Aestheticism-decadentism is usually seen as a phase in D’Annunzio’s thought, but his postwar years and writings demonstrate that it was more a facet of his modernist compound than a mere phase. 75  The reference is again to Walter Benjamin. 76  Valentina Valentini, La tragedia moderna e mediterranea. Sul teatro di Gabriele D’Annunzio (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992). 77  Gabriele D’Annunzio, “La Rinascenza della tragedia,” La Tribuna, August 3, 1897, now in Gabriele D’Annunzio, Scritti giornalistici 1889–1938, Anna Maria Andreoli ed. (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), 262–265. 78  Ferdinando Pappalardo, Popolo nazione stirpe. La retorica civile di Gabriele d’Annunzio (1888–1915) (Manduria: Lacaita, 1916), 82. 79  See Michael Ledeen, D’Annunzio the First Duce (Chicago: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and Emilio Gentile The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 80  Filippo Caburlotto, “D’Annunzio, la latinità del Mediterraneo e il mito della riconquista,” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010): 1. Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/ 73 74

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The Mediterranean as a sea entered D’Annunzio’s intellectual horizon early on in his career in the form of a series of articles published in 1888 and collected in the volume L’armata d’Italia, in which he stated unequivocally that “either Italy will be a great naval power or it will be nothing.”81 Ferdinando Pappalardo has traced to these articles D’Annunzio’s shift toward the figure of the “poet-bard” that would characterize his “aestheticization of Italian imperialism.”82 In fact, soon after putting it into prose, D’Annunzio would also put his conception of an “eternal right” of Italy over the Mediterranean Sea into poetry (Naval Odes, 1893). Ten years later, in his famous Laus Vitae (1903), he sang of the sea as the “litmus test for the imperial ambitions of any nation.”83 As Pappalardo suggests, in D’Annunzio’s writings on maritime power we find the guiding image for his rejection of democracy. A captain’s relationship with his ship is like that of a leader with his nation.84 In fact, the image of this relationship of a captain to his ship might be also applied to D’Annunzio’s artistic evolution during the same period. Dissatisfied with the life of a “mere poet,” D’Annunzio turned to the theater in 1895, and produced his first cycle of “Mediterranean tragedies,” while at the same time discovering Nietzsche and presenting himself for election to the Italian Parliament in 1897.85 At this stage, the adjective “Mediterranean,” which he used in his 1897 article on the “Rebirth of Tragedy,” was a merely geographical designation of the birthplace of tragedy in ancient Greece, but the temporal concordance between his move to the theatre and politics very explicitly pointed to the metaphorical agency of the maritime vessel. The “Mediterranean theatre of the masses” was to the modernist poet like a ship to its captain, and a nation to a leader (who was yet to emerge). Although D’Annunzio never abandoned the medium of poetry or prose, from 1897 onward both his artistic fame and political notoriety were primarily associated with the writing and staging of his modern tragedies.86 D’Annunzio’s sole political action after he had been elected to item/7gx5g2n9; other notable exclusions from D’Annunzio’s considerations were Spain and Greece. 81  Pappalardo, Popolo nazione stirpe, 25. 82  Ibid., 95. 83  Ibid., 26. 84  Ibid., 25. 85  Tosi, D’Annunzio e la Francia, 469–512. 86  See Lucia Re, “Più che l’amore: D’Annunzio’s Bitter Passion and Mediterranean Tragedy,” in Discourse Boundary Creation, Peter Carravetta ed. (New York: Bordighera Press, 2103), 131–147.

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parliament was his theatrical walk from the “right” to the “left” of the parliament chamber to demonstrate his disdain for parliamentary politics as such.87 At the same time, as his celebrity status began to grow due to his very public love affairs with the greatest theater divas of the time, the Mediterranean space began to acquire an ever more thematic primacy in his artistic production. Central to the Mediterraneanist configuration of D’Annunzio’s artistic and political vision was the figure of Venice as the final expression of a Mediterranean empire by a Latin city-state.88 In 1900, Venice became the setting for his decadent novel Il fuoco (The Flame of Life), in which he contrasted Latin genius to the “German spirit,” which could never have flourished “on the shores of the Mediterranean, among our translucent olives trees and our tall laurels, and under the glory of our Latin sky.”89 The Mediterranean scope of his Latin reflections would emerge fully in the theatrical drama appropriately entitled La Nave (The Ship).90 Conceived between 1905 and 1907 and set in 552 CE, La Nave has rightly been defined as an “Adriatic tragedy.”91 It used a quasi-Homeric cast of characters and situations—from the femme fatale, a ubiquitous figure in D’Annunzio’s poetics, to fratricidal duels, to Holocaustic death by fire, and expiation via heroic maritime voyages—to celebrate a Venetian stock that had settled on the islands of a lagoon and from these humble beginnings had become rulers of the Mediterranean.92 Opening and closing the tragedy with an invocation to Venice as “stella maris” (star of the sea), D’Annunzio literally put his beloved figure of “la patria” (the fatherland) “on the Ship!” thereby reading the allegory of contemporary Italy’s maritime and imperial destiny into the history of Venice’s foundation.93 In fact, early commentators such as Giovanni Comandè saw the very structure of the drama as being “informed by the sea”:

 Renzo De Felice, D’Annunzio politico 1918–1938 (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1978), 76.  Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 89  Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il fuoco, in Prose di romanzi, II, Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini eds. (Milano: Mondadori, 1989), 286–287; cited in Caburlotto, “D’Annunzio,” 1. 90   Mario Isnenghi, “D’Annunzio e l’ideologia della Venezianità,” Rivista di Storia Contemporanea 19:3 (1990): 419–431. 91  Valentini, La tragedia moderna, 62. 92  Ibid., 63. 93  Gabriele D’Annunzio, La nave (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1907), 18 and 54. 87 88

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In full swing in the prologue, [the drama] quietens down in the first episode, but then, in a manner reminiscent of the foreboding calm that precedes a storm, becomes unhinged and overtaken by fury in the second, only to return in the final episode to the serenity fate reserves for the glad launching of a ship.94

This maritime projection of the theatrical piece was amplified even further in the operatic and film versions of the tragedy in 1918 and 1921, respectively. Guido Marussic designed two huge eyes on the ship for the set of the opera, thereby giving an anthropomorphic form to the metaphoric vessel that had ferried D’Annunzio from elitist poetry to populist nationalism. At this stage, however, D’Annunzio’s passion for Venice and the Adriatic had nothing of the bordertopia of Pacifico Valussi, who, as we saw in Chap. 2, had seen in Venice and Trieste the kernel of a liquid form of nationhood prior to the unification of Italy.95 In Venice, D’Annunzio found not only the perfect cultural ambiance for his decadent aristocratic tastes, but also the mythic-poetic material for connecting his increasing interest in irredentismo to the imperialist project of pushing Italy toward acquiring a Mediterranean colony, which was euphemistically referred to as quarta sponda (fourth shore).96 D’Annunzio’s was not a “generic” form of nationalism, however; he belonged to what Mario Isnenghi has defined as an activist and ideologizing, and at the same time commercial and military, faction of the nationalist movement that had appropriated irredentist rhetoric and motives but looked much further, having set its eyes on the Adriatic and the idea of a quarta sponda.97

94  Giovanni Comandè, Commento storico ed estetico alla Nave di Gabriele d’Annunzio (Palermo: Santi Andò, 1908), 3. 95   Dominique Kirchner Reill, “Bordertopia: Pacifico Valussi and the Challenge of Borderlands in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” California Italian Studies 2, 2 (2011). Permalink http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4r76c785 96  Irredentism was the movement for the “liberation” of the cities of Trento and Trieste, along with the territories of Venezia Giulia and Trentino Alto Adige, which were under Austrian jurisdiction but were claimed by nationalist Italian intellectuals to be ethnically and cultural Italian. 97  Mario Isnenghi “D’Annunzio e l’ideologia della venezianità,” Rivista di storia contemporanea 19 (1990): 419.

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With D’Annunzio, then, we are in the presence of a properly “Latin” form of nationalism which, assuming that Italy had finally matched her sister-­ Latin nation (France) on cultural and poetic grounds (thanks to D’Annunzio himself of course), it now needed to emulate France militarily by securing a colony in the Mediterranean basin, and then build a Mediterranean alliance with France to challenge the Ottoman Empire and British naval hegemony. It would therefore be no more than a mere change of setting for D’Annunzio to abandon his hopes for an Adriatic colony in favor of supporting the creation of a “fourth shore” in North Africa, with the military campaign for the occupation of Cyrenaica launched by Italy in 1911–1912. As Lucia Re has convincingly argued, the colonial campaign that led to the creation of Libya represented a momentous turning point in the history of “making Italians,” for it put the “word and concept razza” (race) front and center of both cultural and political discourse, “not just as another way of saying patria, but rather to forge the sense of an imaginary, yet essential, identity.”98 As we saw in the preceding chapter, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Italian racial discourse had been principally directed toward the internal othering of Southerners. The growth of a robust nationalist-imperialist movement led by Enrico Corradini at the turn of the century gradually shifted the discourse on race toward a positive principle of internal identification for all Italians as a “stirpe” (race or stock) latina, or romana. This literary discourse used the more Latin-sounding term “stirpe” instead of the harsher-sounding “razza” in order to underline the nationalist-imperialist scope of the new stirpe discourse. Even in the absence of qualifying adjectives (latina or romana), the term stirpe automatically affirmed a racial genealogy of modern Italians as descendants of the ancient Romans, which was reinforced by the already widespread mytheme of Italy’s capital as a “third Rome” endowed with the same “universal-imperial” mission as the first Rome of the Caesars and the second Rome of the Popes. The step required to hook this new Latin-racial genealogical discourse to a specific imperialist campaign was therefore a very short one, but it is still remarkable to see how transversal and effective it was in 1911 Italy. As Re highlights, the new racial discourse of stirpe enticed and included “even 98  Lucia Re, “Italians and the Invention of Race: The Poetics and Politics of Difference in the Struggle over Libya, 1890–1913,” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010). Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96k3w5kn. Citations from the abstract.

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those who, like women, Catholics, Jews, peasants, and Southerners, had been (or had felt) excluded or alienated from the humanist discourse and the paternalistic yet secular rhetoric of Italian Risorgimento patriotism.”99 And, of course, to Re’s list we can also add the Socialists, who not only split over the question of supporting the war (with Benito Mussolini famously leading the “opposing” faction), but also saw their Marxist premises being given nationalist form by the ideological imagination of Corradini, and receiving poetic sanction through the authoritative voice of Italy’s poet laureate Giovanni Pascoli. In a speech delivered on November 26, 1911, Pascoli belabored the appealing image of Italy as a “Great Proletarian” “motherland” whose emigrant “sons” had left to enrich all the “capitalist” nations of the world. 100 As Mazzini had done with the exiles of the 1840s, Pascoli addressed the now millions of Italian emigrant workers, inviting them to return to their “motherland” to fight for a long sought-after “Mediterranean colony” that might finally bring their exile to an end. The Maghrebian pays designated Cyrenaica and Tripolitania would be a new patria for returning emigrants, one that their “motherland” was not only determined to conquer and settle, but that it also deserved in the eyes of the world through historical right and the maturity of its modernity. Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were conquered by the Italian army in a war of surprising atrocity, and would be called “Libia” in a symbolic reference to the name given to the territory under the Roman Empire.101 As Nicola Labanca has amply demonstrated, the expected purpose of this new colony as the site for resettling returning emigrants and implementing the Latin imperium failed miserably, during both the Liberal and Fascist regimes.102 On a symbolic level, however, “the Libyan war was construed largely as a literary fantasy and a utopian wish-fulfillment,” and, as Re rightly concludes,

 Ibid.  Adriana M.  Baranello, “Giovanni Pascoli’s “La grande proletaria si e’ mossa”: A Translation and Critical Introduction,” California Italian Studies 2, 1 (2011). Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jh07474. 101  This colonial war inaugurated the use of aerial bombings of civilian targets outside Tripoli. The official unification of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica took place only in 1934. 102  Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), and, more recently, “Italian Colonial Internment,” in Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, Italian Colonialism (London and New York: Palgrave, 2005), 27–36. 99

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it represented the culmination of a racial process of self-definition by Italians, through which the profoundly disintegrating internal differences of race, gender, class, and religious belief that threatened the very notion of a united Italy were at once repressed, forgotten, and surpassed.103

In other words, the mobilization, military campaign, and aftermath of the Libyan war were among the most successful moments in the “making of Italians,” as each of these phases was portrayed by scores of journalists, poets, and intellectuals as the symbolic solution to every single “question” that had been opened, and left open, by the Risorgimento.104 Let us begin with Pascoli’s image of the “Great Proletarian.” This—at last— offered a positive feminine icon for the Italian nation, who was not only comparable to the French Marianne, but was also masculinized by a direct reference to labor. In one fell swoop, Pascoli responded to the lasting undermining image of Italy as a “battered woman” developed by Leopardi in his 1818 poem To Italy, and to the stereotype of effeminate Italians that had plagued the discourse on the Italian character since the eighteenth century.105 Furthermore, the “powerful mother” image of womanhood projected by the “great proletarian” nation functioned as an attractive hook for the women suffrage movement that had developed in the first decade of the century. One after the other—as Re shows—prominent feminists who had been demanding “universal” suffrage for years capitulated to the lure of a “male” suffrage offered by the Italian government to honor their “heroic husbands and sons” who had fought in the glorious colonial campaign.106 As for Catholics, they stood to win symbolic integration within the political body of the nation. The Vatican, which was financially exposed in Libya through the Banco di Roma, lobbied the Italian government for the invasion, and in exchange promised to relax its veto of participation by Catholics in Italian politics. For Italian Jews, a war against Muslim Turkey also represented an opportunity to make common cause with their more numerous Italian-Christian brothers. But most importantly, the Libyan campaign embraced the promise of  Re, “Italians,” 20.  Stefano Trinchese ed., Mare nostrum. Percezione ottomana e mito mediterraneo in Italia all’alba del ‘900 (Milan: Guerini Studio, 2005), and, by the same author, Le cinque dita del sultano. Turchi armeni Arabi Greci ed Ebrei nel continente mediterraneo del ‘900 (Milan: Textus, 2014). 105  Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices, 51–78. 106  Re, “Italians,” 37–41. 103 104

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a definitive answer to the “Southern Question.” Quite naturally, and also geographically, the Italian occupation of Libya created a new “South” to the south of the mezzogiorno that was serendipitously located in that same North African area that had been identified by Sergi as one of the two sites where the Mediterranean race had originated.107 The colonization of Libya thus responded to the Risorgimento motto that “Garibaldi separated Africa” rather than uniting Italy by recapturing the African territories of an Italian Empire state that saw itself in the image of the Roman Empire and could now direct its foreign policy toward the mirage of resuscitating the Latin Mare Nostrum. Last but not least, the Libyan campaign not only turned into a full-fledged Italian-Turkish War, but also involved the very significant occupation of the Dodecanese archipelago––12 Ottoman islands situated midway between Greece and Asia Minor.108 The fact that this occupation was seen even at the time as an unwarranted preemptive strike, unconnected to any clear objective, and militarily insignificant, made it all the more symbolically salient: it placed the Libyan war at the center of a Mare Nostrum-Mediterraneanist imaginary that had been culturally constructed to support the campaign, but had ended up by submitting the campaign itself to its own logic.109 D’Annunzio played the most significant public and intellectual role in constructing this wider Mediterraneanist imaginary and including it within the project of epiphanic modernism. He participated in top rhetorical gear to the creation of the stirpe discourse. In 1905, the same year in which he began writing La Nave, D’Annunzio wrote and staged Più che l’amore (More than Love), a drama about the tragic love between a young woman and an engineer who attempted to finance a scientific expedition to Africa. In the prologue, the poet elaborated on the relationship between “seed” and “blood,” linking the two concepts to “stirpe,” in accordance with a logic of positive eugenics that implied that it is only “through violent sacrifice, courage, and the spilling of blood that blood itself is ennobled.”110 Once again, Lucia Re draws attention to the dialogue between D’Annunzio’s words and the dominant racial discourse of the time.  See Chap. 4.  The Ottoman Dodecanese comprised Icaria, Patmo, Càlino, Lero, Stampalia, Nìsiro, Piscopo, Simi, Calchi, Scarpanto, Caso, and Castelrosso. The Italians occupied all of them, with the exception of Icaria, as well as Rhodes, Coo, and Lisso, a total of 14 islands. 109  Daniel J.  Grange, L’Italie et la Méditerranée (1896–1911). Les Fondements d’une Politique Étrangère. Vol. 1 (Rome: École Francais de Rome, 1995), 338. 110  Re, “Più che l’amore,” 137. 107 108

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Assuming “the hybrid and mixed blood of the composite Italic race, described by the Italian school of anthropology as encompassing extensive zones of chronic and irremediable degeneration and criminality in the south and the islands,” D’Annunzio’s poetry implied that sangue-razza-­ stirpe could “be rendered noble, and the nation sacred, through violent sacrifice.”111 Ideologically, the “Mediterranean tragedy” Più che l’amore superseded the “Adriatic tragedy” (La Nave) even before the latter had been completed, just as the opening of a “fourth shore” in North African shores in 1911 eclipsed D’Annunzio’s reveries on an Adriatic form of imperialism. In fact, connecting the two to D’Annunzio’s post-Libyan productions was a conception of Mare Nostrum as the “redemption” of the Italian-Latin race. In the three years following the victorious conclusion of the Libyan campaign, D’Annunzio produced a number of poetic compositions that referred directly or indirectly to the conquest of the new colony, and its historic role as an allegory of a Latin-Mediterranean imperium. Foremost among these were the three songs he published in the Corriere della Sera, in 1912, which were later collected, along with others, in Merope. Canti della guerra d’oltremare (Songs of the Colonial War), the fourth volume of his Laudi del cielo, del mare, della terra e degli eroi (Songs of the Sky, the Sea, the Land and Heroes).112 In addition, D’Annunzio also published his ideas in prose in a 1911 article for The New York American.113 Later, in 1914, he wrote (or collaborated in the writing of) the intertitles for the first cinematic epic of all time, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria, which told a story of heroism and rescue in the midst of the Punic wars, in which Rome definitively defeated Carthage and opened the way to the establishment of the ancient Mare Nostrum. The choice of disseminating the poetic reveries represented by the Libyan campaign as widely as possible through all the available means of mass communication—newspapers and the cinema— confirms Re’s contention that “the racialization of literary discourse” and the conquest of Libya gave “poets and prose writers” like D’Annunzio the opportunity to assume, “for the first time in the history of united Italy an

 Ibid.  Re, “Italians,” 26–29. 113  Cited in Re, “Italians,” 11; Gabriele d’Annunzio, Scritti giornalistici, 2, Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti eds. (Milano: Mondadori: 2003), 807–12. 111 112

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active political role that in some ways was even more influential than that of professional politicians.”114 One feature of this poetic activism was the clarity with which D’Annunzio expressed the connection between Latinità, North African colonialism, and Mare Nostrum in his article for the New York American. In it, he explained that the “very essence of the Italian race” required the redeeming mission of freeing Libya from the rule of its degenerate oppressor (the Ottoman Turks), as Libya still bore “the traces of Greek Civilization, of Roman rule, and of Christian holiness,” and was therefore “eager” for liberation.115 This article expressed a Mediterraneanist paradigm of Imperium that D’Annunzio had developed in his poetry over the course of a decade and was widely echoed in nationalist writings—especially Corradini’s novel La guerra lontana (1911)—as well as by more conservative-monarchist voices such as Cesare De Vecchi in his 1912 pamphlet Italy’s Civilizing Mission in Africa. The Imperium imaginary of Italian Mediterraneanism resurrected the spider web model of territorialization by making any location in the Mediterranean basin (and beyond) open to revitalization by means of a Latin-nation conquest. In D’Annunzio’s case, the connections between a Latin stirpe revitalized by imperialism and the goal of a Latin Mare Nostrum that had previously been elaborated in La Nave and Più che l’amore were augmented by an ever more aggressive stance against Britons and “Teutons”—as expressed in the censored Canzone dei Dardanelli—and enriched by an unprecedented and “massive use of Christian religious imagery and language.”116 Direct invocations to Christ and justifications for the killing of “infidels” by any means reinforced the poetics of blood offerings elaborated from La Nave on as a means of revitalizing the Latin stirpe, but couching them in explicit Christian imagery sacralized war––“turning it into religion”––while also ethnicizing religion by grouping “Arabs and Turks under the same category of “infidels” and “Muslims”” and conflating them as “a single ethnic other.”117 This sacralization of race in D’Annunzio’s post-Libyan rhetoric made the Imperium matrix accessible to a mass audience in Italy. By the same token, it drove D’Annunzio further and further away from his initial dialogue with the Mediterranean racial discourse as  Re, “Italians,” abstract.  Cited in Re, “Italians,” 29. 116  Ibid., 27. 117  Ibid., 28. 114 115

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initiated by Sergi with which he had implicitly engaged in the 1890s. By 1912, D’Annunzio’s Mediterraneanism was the polar opposite of Sergi’s proposition that “political, cultural, and social Latinism” along with its religious form, “Catholicism,” constituted the “immobilizing forces” of Mediterranean civilization in Italy and was the cause of, rather than the solution to, its fall.118 As we have seen, Sergi even sacrificed his identification of Mediterranean civilization with the Mediterranean race in order to identify Mediterranean-ness with the transmigratory movement of civilization itself away from Italian-Latin imperialism. His voice was drowned out by the Latinist clamor for a Mediterraneanist Imperium led by D’Annunzio and Corradini’s Nationalist movement. His ideas in the first decade of the new century ceased to inspire or affect even the writings of those meridionalisti who had debated them passionately in the previous one, and were now entirely preoccupied with––and split on––the Libyan question. In fact, the pro-colonization campaign found no more ardent and convinced supporter than the director of Naples’s main daily newspaper Il Mattino, Edoardo Scarfoglio.119 And, generally speaking, the symbolic solution the quarta sponda offered to the questione meridionale attracted a sizable and across-the-board section of southern intellectuals and politicians, from the conservative Sicilian-born foreign minister Antonino di San Giuliano to the Socialist Arturo Labriola and the Liberal Giovanni Amendola—both prominent Neapolitan meridionalisti.120 By the same token, the main opposition to the Imperium imaginary that had coalesced around the occupation of Libya also came from other meridionalisti, who saw it as drawing attention away from the South’s real problems and offering mythical and symbolic answers rather than socioeconomic solutions to the Southern Question.121 And yet the anti-Libyan war opposition offered no alternative Mediterranean imaginary. The fishing net matrix elicited by the debates on the Mediterranean race and southern emigration in the 1890s disappeared from the rhetorical horizon of southern intellectuals and meridionalisti in the first decade of the new century. It did not, however, disappear altogether from the Mediterraneanist cultural front. In 118  Giuseppe Sergi, La decadenza delle nazioni latine (Turin: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1900), 38 and 22. See Chap. 4. 119  Roberta Viola, “La guerra di Libia nella percezione dell’opinione pubblica italiana,” in Trinchese ed., Le cinque dita, 39–52. 120  On the other hand, both Benedetto Croce and Gaetano Salvemini opposed it the war. 121  Re, “Italians, 32.

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fact, in an uncannily epiphanic fashion it was to resurge from the ashes of the Great War with D’Annunzio’s most celebrated act of visionary politics, which is known by the name Marcia di Ronchi (the March from Ronchi) or Impresa di Fiume (the Fiume Endeavor).

Fiume: A Mediterraneanist Festival On September 12, 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio led a “legion” of Great War veterans to seize the city of Fiume on the Dalmatian coast in protest against the treatment of Italy at the Versailles Peace Conference. The march and occupation were designed to force the annexation to Italy of Fiume and (possibly) other Dalmatian cities and islands inhabited by an Italian ethnic majority but assigned by the victorious Allies to the newly born Yugoslavian state. This military Coup de Théâtre crowned the evolution of D’Annunzio from nationalist bard to principal promoter of the Libyan campaign, to “poet-hero” of the Great War. He had enlisted at the age of 52, and at last had had the opportunity to play the part of a male diva on the stage of history. His exploits in the air and on sea and land during the war were the “stuff of heroes,” and became legendary in the aftermath of the war.122 In fact, the very contrast between D’Annunzio’s spectacular feats of military courage and cunning, on the one hand, and the customary association of the Great War with the end of man-to-man combat and individual heroism on the other hand, contributed toward making D’Annunzio himself a far more poignant and popular symbol of transcendence than any of his speeches or poetry could. Pitted against the hypocritical machinations of peacemakers in Paris, the march on Fiume captured the imagination not only of Italians but also of many Europeans and non-Europeans. Along with the many veterans of the arditi (shock troops) and regular officers of the Italian army who joined D’Annunzio and pledged allegiance to him personally, Fiume also attracted a plethora of scalmanati, rowdy, radical young people of all stripes from across Europe and beyond, who ended up defining the history of the impresa far more than the initial plan for annexation did. In fact, D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume received unlikely praise and sympathy from revolutionaries who could not have been more at odds with each other on most other fronts: from the Dadaists of Berlin to the Italian futurists, from Lenin to 122  Claudia Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione. Artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 11.

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Mussolini, from the leader of Italian anarchists, Enrico Malatesta, all the way to D’Annunzio’s principal collaborator, the revolutionary syndicalist Alceste De Ambris.123 As George Mosse argued long ago in his classic study on the nationalization of the masses, Fiume was a quintessential laboratory for the “new politics” that would find its full-blown expression in the Italian fascist movement.124 Notwithstanding the capitulation on New Year’s Eve 1920, after 16 months of festive insurrection, the popularity of the Fiuman adventure projected D’Annunzio to the status of a de facto contender with Mussolini for the leadership of the nascent fascist movement.125 Even though Mussolini outmaneuvered D’Annunzio and kept a firm grip on the movement, Fiume’s anthem Giovinezza, symbolic gestures such as the Roman salute, ritual crowd calls like “eia, eia, alalalà,” and more generally the “politics of spectacle based on the mystic relationship” between leader and crowd, created by D’Annunzio at Fiume were transfused seamlessly into the formation of the fascist movement and the image-politics of the regime.126 As a result, the question of the degree to which fascism was related to Fiume has legitimately impassioned historians.127 As Claudia Salaris has underlined, however, the significance of Fiume cannot be abstracted from its epiphanic status as a revolutionary “festival” outside “historical time,” in which, according to the memoirs of many of its protagonists, “time itself acquired an unusual quality.”128 Following cyberpunk theorist Hakim Bey, Salaris has rightly highlighted the “insurrectional,” as opposed to “revolutionary,” status of the Fiume adventure, and defined its characteristic “temporary mobilization and apex-experience” which qualify it as the prototype for all twentieth-century insurrectional movements, such as the Parisian “May 1968.”129 For Bey, however, Fiume was also “the last of the pirate utopias,” relying on what he calls “pirate economics,” that is to say “living high off the surplus  Ibid.  George Mosse, “The Poet and the Exercise of Political Power,” in Masses and Man. Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: Fertig, 1980), 87–103. 125  Renzo De Felice, D’Annunzio politico, 103–104. 126  Salaris, Alla festa, 11. 127  See especially the opposing views of Paolo Alatri, Nitti, D’Annunzio e la Questione adriatica: 1919–1920 (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1959), Ledeen, The First Duce, and De Felice, D’Annunzio politico. 128  Salaris, Alla festa, 13 and 12. 129  Ibid., 16. 123 124

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of social overproduction.”130 This definition is not further explored by Bey, and we can only speculate that it might have referred to D’Annunzio’s ability to secure financial support for his enterprise from such different sources as Mussolini’s fasci, the Banca Commerciale Italiana, and an association of emigré Italians residing in Brazil.131 But Bey’s definition is revealing on a much more literal level: during the 16 months when the independent state of Fiume remained in existence, a key form of funding for the city was indeed piracy, in the form of the abduction of vessels in the Mediterranean Sea. At least two military and three commercial cargo ships were captured by Fiuman volunteers, whom D’Annunzio called uscocchi in memory of the sixteenth-­century Christians who had turned to piracy after being driven off their lands in the Balkans by the advance of the Ottomans. Some of these ships provided the Fiume military command with all the weapons and ammunitions necessary for the defense of the city. The hijacking of the cargo ship Cogne provided over 8000 tons of wheat, most of which was sold back to the Italian government after what was needed to feed the population of Fiume had been held back.132 Several other acts of piracy were also conducted on land, including the capture of some 50 horses from the Italian army and the emptying of wagons containing foodstuffs at nearby train stations.133 Most of these actions would not have been possible, however, without the logistical assistance and organizational support of the Federazione italiana lavoratori del mare (the F.I.L.M.) (the Italian Union of Maritime Workers) and its leader Giuseppe Giulietti.134 On October 15, 1919, Giulietti personally delivered the first of the captured ships, the Persia, to D’Annunzio in Fiume with a cargo of 13 tons of ammunitions and weapons that had originally been destined to arm anti-Bolshevik forces. F.I.L.M. members also collected 50,000 lire to support Fiume.135 Giulietti had been an interventionist, and this was surely a factor in his personal support for D’Annunzio’s adventure, but, as he made clear in his May 1915 declaration, the rationale behind his 130  Cited in Ibid., Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.  The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Automedia, 1985), 124. 131  Ibid., 19. 132  Ferdinando Gerra, L’impresa di Fiume (Firenze: Longanesi, 1974), 321. 133  Ibid., 661 134  See Giulio Tanini, Storia della Federazione Italiana Lavoratori del Mare (Genova: Tip. Ed. A. Angassini, 1952). 135  Gerra, L’impresa, 71.

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i­ntervention was the revolutionary syndicalist position that the war would inevitably have led to a “social revolution” rather than the “patriotic religion” that characterized D’Annunzio’s relationship with the Great War.136 Additionally, few maritime workers had been hardcore interventionists or likely lovers of decadent poetry! The fact that Giulietti’s was the only workers’ union that openly and enthusiastically supported D’Annunzio, not only from the very beginning but throughout the entire period of the occupation, suggests that there was something deeper than political contingency that connected these two unlikely allies. Since before the war, Giulietti had distinguished himself from most Italian union leaders for prohibiting the affiliation of F.I.L.M. members with any political party (including the Socialist Party), as well as for having included every maritime worker “from the ship’s boy to the captain” in his union.137 In the aftermath of the war, he had given institutional form to the productivist and corporativist perspective of revolutionary syndicalism by creating a cooperative of shipowners—jointly owned by all union members—that sought to challenge the monopolistic power of capitalist shipowners from the inside.138 Despite his interventionism and syndicalism, his ties to mainstream socialist leaders had also remained strong. D’Annunzio’s and Giulietti’s respective political points of departure could not have been more distant, therefore. Nevertheless, D’Annunzio’s thank you letter to Giulietti for the capture of the Persia shows that on D’Annunzio’s side, too, there was more than mere gratitude for the providential gift of weapons and an enthusiastic gusto for Giulietti’s beffa at the expense of the anti-Bolshevik forces. Starting from the premise that Fiume was not a “causa del suolo” (struggle over land), D’Annunzio announced the global and anti-imperialist ambitions of the Fiume insurrection to Giulietti before anyone else: From the indomitable Irish Sinn Fein to the red banner uniting in Egypt the Crescent and the Cross, all the Spirit’s revolts against those who devour human flesh are about to be rekindled by sparks from us, which travel far and wide.139

 Tanini, Storia, 49.  Ibid., 14. 138  Ibid. 139  Ibid. 136 137

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Fiume was not a struggle over land because it rejected the territorialist logic of occupation and built a mutually supportive network of insurrectional forces to fight the imperialist devourers of human flesh. Nor was this maritime endeavor limited to Valussi’s dream of a Dalmatian bordertopia. D’Annunzio’s political imaginary now expanded his beloved Adriatic to include the whole of the Mediterranean (Egypt) and beyond (Ireland). It is no surprise, therefore, that he would see Giulietti and his maritime workers as natural allies. In fact, the references to Sinn Fein and the Egyptian nationalist movement were not abstract examples: these were two of the many anti-imperialist organizations D’Annunzio invited to be a part of his most ambitious project—the creation of an international Lega di Fiume. Designed as an anti-League of Nations, the League of Fiume was meant to connect “all rebels of all races” for a “crusade of all poor or impoverished nations, [...] of all men who are poor and free, against those nations that usurp and accumulate all the wealth.”140 Although it would never come to fruition, D’Annunzio’s documented efforts to realize his dream testify to the postwar transformation of his nationalist creed into an antidote to Meridionist Imperium. Sure enough, his rhetoric in Fiume still contained references to the Italians’s right to annex Fiume and Dalmatia on the basis of their common Latin origins and Venetian past, and in the end, he rejected any compromise with the Italian state and the Allies because it would not open up a route to the annexation of Fiume to Italy. Yet the main reason why the poet-soldier rejected the Locarno Treaty was that it would have separated the city of Fiume from its free port and the islands facing it across the Carnaro Gulf.141 The connection among all these maritime elements suggests that D’Annunzio’s alliance with Giulietti and the F.I.L.M. was a key element in the configuration of Fiume as an anti-imperialist “middle ground” (see Chap. 3). Conversely, on Giulietti’s side, the prospect of a League of Fiume that included the Egyptian national-liberation front must have been quite close to his revolutionary syndicalist heart. As documented by Lucia Carminati and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Italian émigré workers in Egypt and throughout colonial Northern Africa had been a huge factor in the spreading of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist ideas among North African national-liberation fronts.142 Especially  D’Annunzio’s speech “Italia e vita,” 24 ottobre 1919; cited in Salaris, Alla festa, 42.  De Felice, D’Annunzio politico, 100. 142  Lucia Carminati, “Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in NineteenthCentury Egypt and the Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59:1 (2007): 127–153. 140 141

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in Egypt, Italian “anarcho-syndicalists” had participated actively in the 1919 rebellion that followed the exile of the national-liberation leader Saad Zaghul,143 who was one of the anti-imperialist leaders who not only agreed to be part of the Lega but also visited Fiume.144 The idea of a “working-class cosmopolitanism” that crossed national, colonial, religious, and ethno-racial barriers and united both shores of the Mediterranean thus spread rapidly following the Egyptian Revolution, which coincided with the occupation of Fiume. This powerful correlation between the Mediterranean scope of revolutionary syndicalism and D’Annunzio’s plans is confirmed by a letter in which D’Annunzio talks about the Carnaro as a “future sea” and reveals to Giulietti his hopes for the formation of an independent Dalmatian “league of maritime cities [...] from the Dinarides to the sea.”145 This letter also includes D’Annunzio’s positive response to Giulietti’s most daring political overture toward him. On January 5, 1920, Giulietti proposed to D’Annunzio that he should lead a “red march on Rome” that would depart from Fiume and reach the port of Ancona by sea, where Fiume’s legionnaires would join the maritime workers of his union and anarchist and socialist forces to march on the capital and take power, and install a revolutionary syndicalist Republic.146 Although the plan did not come to fruition, D’Annunzio’s enthusiastic acceptance of Giulietti’s offer reversed the territorial logic of the occupation altogether. In the words of Alceste De Ambris, the encounter between the revolutionary Mediterranean and the patriotic Adriatic resulted in D’Annunzio’s new and most ambitious goal, namely, to “annex Italy to Fiume.”147 The evolution of Fiume’s “revolutionary festival” thus reveals an epiphanic imaginary quite different from the celebration of Mediterranean Imperium cultivated by D’Annunzio between 1900 and 1918. The contemporaneous plans for an anti-imperialist league and a revolutionary march on Rome were part of the same matrix. In Fiume, D’Annunzio began to see Italians as a people who needed to be liberated not only from  Ibid., 140.  Leon Kochnitzkin, La quinta stagione; o, i centauri di Fiume (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1922), 213. 145  Tanini, Storia, 67. 146  Ibid., 147  Letter from De Ambris to D’Annunzio dated September 18, 1920, in Renzo De Felice, Sindacalismo rivoluzionario e fiumanesimo nel carteggio De Ambris-D’Annunzio (1919– 1922) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1966), 209. 143 144

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an oppressive and treacherous government, but also from the tyranny of imperialist-capitalist relations. Both Salaris and De Felice have attributed this evolution first to Giulietti’s role in supporting the pirate state of Fiume, and then to the growing influence on D’Annunzio of the many scalmanati, which led to the subsequent ouster or voluntary departure from Fiume of many “moderate” nationalists.148 In particular, the radicalization of D’Annunzio’s political imaginary has been attributed to the arrival in Fiume of the revolutionary syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, who became his Chief of Staff in January 1920.149 De Ambris’s role in conceiving and writing the famous Carta del Carnaro, the revolutionary-­ syndicalist charter that was promulgated as the constitution of the Reggenza del Carnaro (Fiume Republic) in August 1920, appears to support this interpretation. But why would D’Annunzio choose someone like De Ambris for such a delicate task in the first place? Despite the fact that between the two it was reportedly “love at first sight,” D’Annunzio had never had any contact with De Ambris before the latter arrived in Fiume on November 15, 1919.150 Giulietti and others in his entourage may have exposed D’Annunzio to revolutionary syndicalist principles, but it is highly improbable that D’Annunzio would have allowed a complex ideological compound such as revolutionary syndicalism to seduce him in little more than a fortnight.151 Something more than external influences must have inclined D’Annunzio to accept––with very minor modifications––the principles De Ambris enshrined in the blueprint of the Carta del Carnaro, which D’Annunzio enthusiastically endorsed in late March 1920. This something, I suggest, was the deeply anti-utilitarian attitude that Salaris has identified at the root of Fiume’s pirate economy.152 Salaris argues that the integration of piracy with donations from both anonymous and non-anonymous sources, along with requisitions and quasi-extortions, made Fiume a paradigmatic example of a “Maussian gift economy.”153 In Salaris’s view, the logic of “being of use”—rather than extracting use value—was firmly rooted in D’Annunzio’s narcissism, 148  Salaris, Alla festa, 35–37, and Renzo De Felice, “Introduzione,” in Gabriele D’annunzio, La penultima avventura. Scritti e discorsi fiumani (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), XXVI. 149  Ibid. 150  De Felice, Sindacalismo, 65. 151  He appointed De Ambris as his Chief of Staff on January 10, 1920. 152  Salaris, Alla festa, 13–14. 153  Ibid., 131.

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which was aimed at “gaining esteem, admiration, and recognition,” but also expressed itself in the “network of friendships and reciprocal consideration” that according to all accounts extended to the entire corps of legionnaires in Fiume and beyond.154 The ubiquitous definition of Fiume as a “party” or “festival” captured the liminal state of an epiphanic community that was tied to what Salaris calls “sociality”; namely, a “third level of circulation of goods and services” that responds not to the use and exchange values of the “market,” but rather to what she calls “bond value.”155 In Fiume, she concludes, this bond value was “situated at the fulcrum of human relationships” and was transformed into a vision of the world that, refusing to accept society as a mechanism regulated solely by the lever of profit and production, opens itself to the risky, the unexpected, the aleatory, the adventurous.156

There is no mistaking the resonance of Salaris’s definition of Maussian Fiume with the “circulation” market of eighteenth-century Naples and the “civil economy” theorized by the Neapolitan school of economics in that same century (explored in Chap. 3). Even though the word “Mediterranean” never appears in D’Annunzio’s Fiume speeches, the pirate state he created responded not only to the direct Mediterranean solicitations of anarcho-syndicalism, but also to the far subtler ones of a shift in his own Mediterranean imaginary. In the epiphanic atmosphere of Fiume, the image of Imperium that had guided D’Annunzio “the Bard” (il Vate) before the war gave way to the figure of the emporion, which had been ingrained for centuries in the sociocultural history of the Italian mezzogiorno, had been repressed in the territorialization of Italy and Italians, and had gradually reemerged in the intellectual battles around emigration and colonization. This conjecture, of course, relies on the strength of the arguments presented in the previous chapters, along with some very indirect evidence. But the inclusion of Fiume among the manifestations of the fishing net matrix of Mediterranean-ness is also supported by some rarely considered elements of D’Annunzio’s experience at Fiume.

 Ibid., 134.  Ibid. 156  Ibid. 154 155

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On the solemn occasion of his presentation of the Carta del Carnaro to the citizens of Fiume, D’Annunzio couched his speech in the customary language of a Pentecostal gift of “spirit,” but also wove into it the memory of an unusual encounter with a poverello (poor fellow): Listen. One day last winter I chanced to meet a poor fellow in an empty street. He was one of our poor, at once admirable and adorable, who have created an Italian magnificence from their own poverty here in Fiume. I know some of them. I stopped and, not without a certain shyness, offered him what I had with me. As he bent down to kiss my hand, I tried to shield it from him; and, as he persisted in this act of humility and I in my clumsy efforts to repulse him, he lost his balance and fell on his knees. Then I too knelt in front of him. For a few moments we faced each another, kneeling like the patrons whose portraits you find in the lower part of votive paintings. Who was the first to stand up again? Not I. It seemed to me that I was the less worthy of the two. Thus it would be fitting for me to read these pages aloud, which are nothing other than “a fraternal offering made with purity of heart.” And thus it would be fitting for us to communicate with each other through the Spirit. Kneel down “with the knees of your mind,” as our father would say. Like the time before, I will not be the first to stand up again. But if we all rise together at the same time, while taking one another by the hand, we will have saved and exalted our souls, and we will have saved and exalted the fatherland, [set] in the firmament of the future and at the very apex of freedom.157

157  Speech delivered on August 30, 1920; Gabriele D’annunzio, La penultima avventura, 330–331. This and following translations of D’Annunzio’s texts are courtesy of Jon R. Snyder.

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Of course, we have no idea whether or not D’Annunzio was recounting a real or imagined incident or simply embellishing one with which he was familiar. It is highly likely that this master orator included this episode in this very important speech because he wanted to soften up his audience as much as he could, fearing that many would be displeased by his dual declaration of an independent state (Reggenza del Carnaro), instead of annexation, and a constitution inspired by revolutionary syndicalist principles (Carta del Carnaro), which were opposed by the bourgeois National Council of Fiume. Yet the incongruous image of the poverello in this momentous address also functions as a symbol of the very real danger of famine the Fiuman polity had risked from day one of the occupation, and which had been avoided thanks to the many acts of piracy, unlawful requisitions, collective subscriptions, gifts that had been more or less extorted from bankers and industrialists, and, of course, provisions the Red Cross and the Italian government had provided for the starving population of Fiume.158 The episode therefore also transfigured the bond-value economy that had already sustained the life of the Impresa. In fact, the image of the poverello in this speech also recalls a much more powerful evocation of poverty in a speech given by D’Annunzio a few months earlier (April 9, 1920), in which he had made the connection between his maritime imaginary and the civil economic principles that guided his identification with working-class collectivism and revolutionary syndicalism much more explicit. On April 6 and 7, 1920, a general strike was declared in Fiume, and the workers’ unions gave D’Annunzio the power to negotiate with the representatives of capital and the National Council on their behalf.159 Two days later, he addressed his almost daily audience from his customary balcony, relating in vivid detail his successful role as negotiator on behalf of Fiume’s workers against the representatives of the business community.160 “In that dignified hall,” D’Annunzio recounted, there was truly the figure of hunger, and there was truly the figure of poverty. The images of my Sunday talks came back to life, but cruelly highlighted: women—gaunt, worn-out, almost lifeless—who had sold their last household goods and their last rags; emaciated children, gnarled like little  Salaris, Alla festa, 133–151.  Gerra, L’impresa, 324–330. 160  D’Annunzio did manage to get the wage demand increased from 8 to 13 lire. 158 159

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old folk, and curled up in order to go back into the matrix of death, whose unbearable gaze seemed to pass through eyelids made of colored marble; sick men, whose weak, hoarse desperation of some sort or other was wrapped in a scarf of colorless wool, were just unburied leftovers from the [years of] hard labor that had emptied their lungs, bent their bones, burned their eyes, and corroded their insides. And the widows were there, with clusters of children clinging to their widow’s weeds as the shipwrecked cling to the pitch-blackened wreckage; and the little orphan girls with their bewildered eyes, who at the slightest motion buckled and fell down like unsupported tendrils in the vineyard; and abandoned women with their fugitive gaze, who spoke of their error and motherhood and solitude with words that flowed like water dripping down on to a red-hot slab; they all were there. All the sadness of my Sundays—filled with compassion and alms—was there, and pressed hard upon me. And I suffered for them, and I fought for them. I knew how their emaciated chins quivered with shame and anguish, and how their poor hands trembled when anything was given to them. For them I fought for a crust of bread and a cent, like a father, like a husband, like a brother, like a son—like all those bitter men seated uneasily on soft armchairs at home, with at their backs a hearth, a dinner table, and a cradle.161

This long passage testifies to the fact that in Fiume D’Annunzio did not merely encounter leftist radicalism, anarchy, and syndacalism, but also came face-to-face with working-class poverty and hunger. This was not the same working class that he had encountered in the Italian army during the war. This was a working class defined by the creative power of poverty and hunger, which therefore proved to him that “hunger will create whatever heroism could not create. Hunger is the creator of worlds, like desire.”162 And this was the same working class with whom he now identified on the express foundation of his maritime orientation. Workers derived their strength and collective identity from their “contact with the masses, [and] from adhering to their unanimous will.” D’Annunzio professed to be able to gain access to the same strength and feeling of class solidarity by literally going “to sea” “at the bow of a small, fast ship” with “my face to the wind of truth and freedom.”163 Predictably, he presented himself as the only “good comrade” and “unforeseen interpreter” who could give a coherent voice to the unexpressed anguish of the workers’ demands, so as to achieve  D’Annunzio, La penultima avventura, 224.  Ibid., 225. 163  Ibid. 161 162

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a mystical union with them: “I concurred with everyone, and everyone concurred with me.”164 But quite aside from the typically narcissistic image of his Pentecostal role in the dispute, what rings true in D’Annunzio’s account of the episode is that his daily encounter with Fiume’s working class resonated with key elements of his epiphanic imaginary. Thus, his role in this and other disputes between labor and capital would not be limited to that of a mere referee or moderator. He saw himself as an active participant in the creative war against the principles of economic utilitarianism advocated by the representatives of capital in Fiume, whose mantra he repeated throughout the speech, with evident disdain: “this costs that much, and that costs this much. This is sufficient, and that is insufficient.”165 His conclusions from the victorious fight he led on behalf of the workers (and in their midst), after several hours of negotiations with the representatives of capital in the occupied city, were therefore as unequivocal as they were revealing: The new order can only arise from the tumult caused by the fervor of the struggle, as measured by the beat of all fraternal hearts. And it can only be a lyrical order, in the most vigorous and impetuous sense of the word.166

The concluding words of this speech demonstrate that D’Annunzio’s “fight” was not just on behalf of workers, but aimed to win the hearts and minds of capitalists over to the “fraternity” of a civil economy of reciprocity. The “lyrical” “new order” he envisioned was none other than the corporativist one De Ambris had sought to enshrine in the Carnaro Charter. Most commentators have rightly identified this document as the most advanced constitution of its time, thanks to its affirmation of the “social value of labor,” and, in the words of Alessandro Agrì, its conception of property as having a “social function” rather than being an absolute right of the individual, its provisions for social security, social ­justice, and substantial equality, as well as for its unique valorization of working-­class associations.167

 Ibid., 223.  Ibid., 225. 166  Ibid. 167  Alessandro Agrì, “La Carta del Carnaro: un disegno costituzionale incompiuto,” in Fiume. Rivista di studi adriatici, 27 (2013): 3–4. 164 165

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All these elements were clearly present in De Ambris’s and D’Annunzio’s conceptualization of the corporation as an organism that tied labor and capital to a productivist conception of property. However, some elements of the Carta very specifically highlighted its debt to the fishing net imaginary that D’Annunzio had developed during the occupation. On the surface, D’Annunzio paid his debt to Giulietti and their shared maritime orientation by adding one corporation to those originally listed by De Ambris: the corporation of “the people of the sea.”168 A second key aspect of the Carta that was to resonate completely with the same matrix was the emphasis that D’Annunzio and De Ambris consistently placed on the benefits of the “continuous interference,” the “harmonic play of diversities,” and the “continuous conflictual and cooperative interactions” the Carta would enshrine as the new basis for the sociality of Fiume.169 These relations of prescribed interference, conflict, and cooperation defined not only the internal structure of each corporation but also the expression of the relationship between the corporations and the comuni (municipalities) into which the territory and ethnic diversity of Fiume (an Italian majority and a Croatian minority, as well as others) were subdivided. In this respect, Agrì has concluded that the real kernel of the Carta was not revolutionary-­ syndicalist, but rather “federalist.”170 Not only did the Charter give the municipalities a “federalist slant in the direction of decentralization,” but it also represented a “direct application of the federalist ideal in the economic domain.”171 It provided for each corporation to develop on a more or less social scale by creating its own unions, banks, and cooperatives, or simply remain as an association of producers defined by its activity (industrial and agricultural workers, technicians and service-sector employees, etc.). Both corporations and municipalities could regulate themselves through their own autonomous rules, leaving the Reggenza (the actual government of Fiume) the sole task of preventing the formation of oligarchies. The archaic world of the Mediterranean fishing net may thus have received its first modern political expression in the Carta del Carnaro; or at least, this is what De Ambris himself suggested when he pointed to the “Helvetic Confederation” as  De Felice, D’Annunzio politico, 115.  Citations in Agrì, “La carta,” 14, 15, and 18. 170  Ibid., 13. 171  Ibid., 17. 168 169

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the main source of inspiration for his Charter: the very same confederation that Giuseppe Sergi had indicated as the expression of Mediterranean civilization in modernity.172 No reader of the Carta del Carnaro can miss the ubiquitous references, even in this most revolutionary expression of D’Annunzio’s epiphanic Mediterraneanism, to the patriotic goal of annexing Fiume to Italy, to the celebration of its Latin origins, and even to the Roman character of the Charter and the foundations of the medieval corporation under “Roman law.”173 There can be no doubt that these references are utterly incongruous both with Sergi’s virulently anti-Latinist rhetoric, and with the polarization discussed in Chap. 3 between the spider web matrix of the Roman Mare Nostrum and the fishing net matrix of Mediterranean-ness. And yet this polarization is the fruit of discursive strategies that immediately dissipate when we observe the results of this research from the perspective of “making Italians.” As I argued at the beginning of this book, the nationalist-­imperialist element in this process is constitutive, and cannot be eradicated—not even in Sergi’s anthropological defense of Mediterranean civilization against Latinism. In fact, as far as Sergi is concerned, suffice it to say that he continued to write about Homo Mediterraneous under fascism, adapting his theories to the racist and nationalist tune of the regime.174 What needs to be equally highlighted, however, is that, the subaqueous permanence and liquid spread of a fishing net matrix of Mediterranean-ness not only transfigured itself in innumerable ways, but also sustained a relational conception of identity that found its expression in the process of making Italians precisely because it was so radically negated in the process of making Italy. No one has ever truly answered the question of why a land that was projected for centuries toward a Mediterranean space of interaction, and subdivided for an equal number of centuries into city-states or larger political-territorial units with distinct linguistic and sociocultural specificities, was unified in modern times into a highly centralized Empire State rather than a federation. It is no wonder, then, that the federal idea would play such a prominent role in the conceptualization of Homo Mediterraneus and Fiume’s political  Alceste De Ambris, La costituzione di Fiume (Fiume d’Italia, 1920), 10.  Ibid., 8. 174  Giovanni Cerro, “Giuseppe Sergi. The portrait of a positivist scientist,” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 95 (2017): 109–136. 172 173

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constitution, and it can come as no surprise that it also resonated with a southern inflection of Mediterranean-ness that had been severely repressed during the unification process. What we have observed in the case of D’Annunzio is, therefore, the epiphanic oscillation of the Mediterranean imaginary between its poles of Imperium and emporion. In the next two chapters, we will observe how this oscillation was programmatically realized under fascism.

CHAPTER 6

Between Imperium and Emporion

At first sight, nothing could be conceived as more antithetical to mediterraneità than an avant-garde movement that had its center in the northern Italian city of Milan, and made of modernolatria (idolatry of modernity) and the destruction of all forms of passatismo (love of the past) its battle-­ cries for over three decades of artistic, cultural, and political activity. In fact, according to Roger Griffin’s classification, Futurism could be compared and contrasted with D’Annunzio’s “epiphanic modernism” as the quintessential form of “programmatic modernism.”1 It certainly saw its program, from the beginning, as one that extended far beyond the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics, into a “mission to change society, inaugurate a new epoch, [and] start time anew”, and it also bore all the traits of a wholesale “revitalization movement” that pitted itself both in alignment with, and against “the forces of Modernity.”2 In other words, Futurism made what Griffin calls the “liminoidality” of modernity its unique, constituent, and consistent raison d'être. Whether figured as a “promontory” between past and future, or the expression of the new spatio-temporality of speed, futurist modernity was both a state of “perpetual crisis” and an opportunity “for cultural regeneration,” hence a perennial “threshold” and an “in between time” that engendered the 1  Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning (London and NY: Palgrave, 2007), 61–64 and 107–9. 2  Ibid., 62 and 107.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_6

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possibility and need for a breakthrough to the other side (or other time).3 And with its unique and sustained manifesto-production, Futurism surely presented itself as the most programmatic vehicle for this breakthrough. Furthermore, like all revitalization movements, whether modernist or premodern, it coalesced around a charismatic leader who gave mythic status and a sense of “superiority to the new communitas” he founded.4 Finally, futurist aesthetics, just as much as futurist politics were all characterized by what Griffin indicates as the modernist rite of passage par excellence: an “intense syncretism” aimed at the production of a “new mazeway” for what Marinetti and company boisterously called the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (1913 manifesto).5 Griffin’s definition of programmatic modernism correctly points with one hand to the structural contiguity between modernist and premodern revitalization movements, and with the other hand to the permanent liminoid character of modernity, but it avoids confronting more mundane and ideologically charged conceptions of modernity that inflected the different mazeways produced by different forms of programmatic modernism. As a case in point, the modernity against which Futurism pitted itself was not at all that of “decadence” from which D’Annunzio had begun his journey, but, from the outset, it was the modernity that the Vate had fought at Fiume, namely, “l’immondo opportunismo affaristico” (the filthy opportunism of business), as Marinetti would name capitalist modernity in his rebuttal to the accusation of pornography leveled against his novel Mafarka il futurista.6 As Günter Berghaus has shown, Futurism maintained much of its original anarcho-communist sympathies even after it reconciled with Fascism in 1922.7 But quite aside from its political connotation, Marinetti’s anti-business attitude is best understood from a cultural perspective, as code for his self-identification as a man of the South,  Ibid., 109–113.  Ibid. 5  Ibid. 6  F.  T. Marinetti, Mafarka il futurista: Edizione 1910, Luigi Ballerini ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 233. For a reading of Futurism as anti-capitalist avant-garde see Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism. Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Palo Alto, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1996). Claudia Salaris has also compared Marinetti’s 1919 manifesto Al di là del Comunismo to the Carta del Carnaro, highlighting several confluences in Alla festa della rivoluzione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 75–98. 7  Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics. Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence and Oxford, Eng.: Berghahn books, 1996). 3 4

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and his rejection of the values universally identified with northern Europe and, specifically, the Anglo-American world. Although Marinetti was born in Alexandria of Egypt, and liked to affirm that he felt more “Neapolitan” or “Sicilian” than Italian, his southern-ness was no mere biographical fact.8 Marinetti’s southern perspective was expressed in the Mediterranean mazeway from which his revitalization movement originated. Published in French in 1909 under the title of Mafarka le Futuriste. Roman Africain, Marinetti’s “African novel” constituted the first of three successive reenactments of the birth of Futurism.9 The novel was translated in Italian and published in 1910 but was immediately sequestered by the authorities as pornography because of its first chapter entitled “the rape of the black women.”10 Since then, Mafarka has received most critical attention for its early formulation of futurist “rhetorics of virility,” and “male fantasies of non-female creation,” while the proper act of aesthetic self-creation of Futurism has been usually associated with the less controversial Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo (Funding Manifesto of Futurism) published in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909.11 There are, however, at least two reasons for paying more attention to Mafarka as the Ur-document of Futurism, especially in its form of programmatic modernism. The first is that the structure of the novel informs that of the manifesto. The second is that it was Mafarka, far more than the Manifesto, which produced a “syncretism” of styles, motives, emotional states, voices, and reveries, sufficiently intense to constitute an appropriate mazeway for the creation of the futurist community.

8  Claudia Salaris, “La Napoli di Marinetti,” in Marinetti e il futurismo a Napoli, Matteo D’Ambrosio ed. (Rome: De Luca, 1996): 59–66, and, by the same author, “Marinetti e il Sud,” in Futurismo e meridione, Enrico Crispolti ed. (Milan: Electa, 1996), 22–28. See also, Guglielmo Jannelli, “Marinetti sul cratere dell’Etna,” L’Impero (September 17–18, 1923). 9  The other two births of Futurism are in Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo (1909) and Zang Tumb Tumb (1912). 10  For a chronicle and documents regarding the publication history of the novel and its aftermath see Marinetti, Mafarka, VII-XLVIII and 233–322. 11  Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Phantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1996), and Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism. F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fictions of Power (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press, 1996), 74. See also Lucia Re, “Barbari civilizzatissimi’. Marinetti and the Futurist Myth of Barbarism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 17, 3 (2012) 350–368, and Ara H. Merjian, “Manifestations of the Novel: Genealogy and the Sculptural Imperative in F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste” Modernism/modernity 23, 2 (April 2016): 365–401.

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According to Lorenza Miretti, Mafarka is to the Manifesto what the “aesthetic” is to the “ethical” advent of Futurism.12 The novel anticipates the plot of the manifesto in most of its parts. We witness a hero who enters the folds of the Earth (the underworld of the ipogei in Mafarka, a “maternal” ditch in the Manifesto) to emerge more powerful, and ready to declare his creed (the “Futurist Discourse” in the novel, the Manifesto itself in the Fondazione). Predictably, Miretti has also identified textual similarities and borrowings by the Manifesto from the novel.13 But, most importantly, she has shown how authentically polyphonic—in the Bakhtinian sense—and syncretic, in a more anthropological sense, this novel/epic/lyric poem/drama actually was.14 Mafarka’s syncretism was fractal in the sense that it was both the modus operandi of Marinetti’s palingenetic gesture and its principal aesthetic message. Syncretism was inscribed in the fluid hybridization of the novelistic, epic, lyric, and dramatic registers in the composition of Mafarka, and it was equally figured in the “strange” and “exciting” melody of “total music” that the narrator announces at the end of the novel as the new (futurist) aesthetic arising from the wings of the Christ-like figure of Gazurmah.15 Surely, the metaphor of “total music” could not have been more stock-in-trade for a modernist writer, and gave no indication of the actual principles and stylistic expression that Futurism advocated. But neither did the Manifesto.16 In this respect, both of Futurism’s first two acts of birth were programmatically modernist precisely because they were palingenetic and overproductive rather than prescriptive. But only Mafarka was fractal as it anticipated the actual evolution of futurism toward syncretism and synaesthetics. The first aesthetic principles and techniques in which Futurism sought expression only began to appear between 1910 and 1912, especially in La pittura futurista. Manifesto Tecnico (Futurist Painting, Technical Manifesto, 1910) and Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912). From then on, Futurists would use the performative genre of the manifesto as their signature 12  Lorenza Miretti, Mafarka il futurista. Epos e avanguardia (Bologna: Gedit Edizioni, 2005), 191. 13  Ibid., 178–191. 14  The reference is to Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic study of heteroglossia and the carnevalesque in early modern literature in his Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968). 15  Marinetti, Mafarka, 228–9. 16  It is indicative that D’Annunzio added a tenth entirely symbolic corporation to the Carta del Carnaro, which was to celebrate “music.”

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vehicle for announcing most of their technical-aesthetic innovations— even those that never found artistic expression. Yet, the very proliferation of often antithetical aesthetic principles, such as analogy and synthesis, endorsed by different manifestos at different times in the evolution of the movement, and in different artistic realms, speaks to the futurist refusal to be identified with any specific stylistic mark, and to the enduring legacy of Mafarka’s aesthetic message of syncretism. There is no denying, of course, that in the novel the echo of aesthetic syncretism was submerged by the much louder rhetorics of sexual violence, hyper-virility, autotelic generation, and suppression of the feminine that will make Marinetti’s Futurism one of Fascism’s sources of inspiration, and, during the regime, a cultural ally and thoroughly domesticated avant-garde. But the very clash between these aggressive traits and the “suave melody,” as well as the “yearning for fluidity” that also arise from Gazurmah-Futurism, returns us to Cinzia Sartini Blum’s observation that, despite its “totalitarian logic,” Futurism’s “male fantasy” never went in the direction of “rigidly hierarchical totality formations.”17 It always moved in the direction of reabsorbing the abject “feminine other” as in the final image of the novel, which presents us with a “soaring Guzurmah enveloped in the ‘total music’ and ‘poetry’ created by his own mechanical wings.”18 There is a third element that suggests that Mafarka represented not just the antefatto but the Ur-text of Futurism and a major factor in its enduring appeal for two generations of Italian artists. This is the epic nucleus buried deep inside its novelistic structure: a syncretic nucleus, of course, in which the heroic warrior encounters the inverted figure of the Christian God begetting a son without the help of a man’s sperm (in Mafarka’s case without the aid of a woman’s womb). But unmistakably a Mediterranean epos, one that absorbed and mixed elements from Homeric (Iliad and Odyssey) as well as later Greek (Heliodoros’ Aethiopica) and Roman epics (Virgil’s Aeneid).19 Miretti has identified not only specific textual parallels between Mafarka and classic Mediterranean epics, but also the presence in Mafarka of eight specific topoi derived from this epic tradition. She has concluded that the presence of the epic in the novel was “not casual but causal,” and, in particular, she has shown the very specific

 Blum, The Other Modernism, 74.  Ibid. 19  Miretti, Mafarka il futurista, 49. 17 18

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debt the novel owed to the Odyssey.20 Without mincing words, Miretti has proposed that behind Marinetti’s hero, Mafarka-al-bar, lurks Ulysses in Zarathustran disguise. A Ulyssian matrix buried deep within the structure of Marinetti’s epic supports the parallelism suggested by Griffin between modernist and premodern revitalization movements, but it also alerts us to the importance that the Mediterranean context played in the futurist program of national revitalization. Despite its being advertised as an “African” novel, the hero of the book bears the name of Mafarka-the-sea (el-bar, from the Arab bahr, sea), is referred to as an “admiral,” and invoked as “The Sea! The Sea!”21 Most of the key episodes in the novel take place at sea: Mafarka attacks from the sea the forces of his uncle, Bubussa, and then puts out again to sea to reach the underworld of the ipogei. The reader will not encounter one-eyed giants or singing mermaids in Mafarka, but an eleven-meters-­ long erect penis cooked and served as a “fish,” and then functioning as a mast for Mafarka’s sailing boat. Further on in the novel, the reader will also get acquainted with an entire bestiary of “poisonous fish” fantastically named tetrodonte, sinacea, scorpoena, artemate, and bathracus grunneus.22 Mafarka’s voyage to meet his dead mother (and father) will not take the reader hopping from island to island around the Mediterranean, but the four-page description of Mafarka’s departure for the ipogei pulled by two rowing boats, ties the hero of Marinetti’s novel to the mast of maritime life just as tightly as Homer’s Ulysses.23 In fact, the identification of Mafarka with “the sea” is reinforced by the association of all of his enemies with earth and land. Brafane-el-kibir is the African king of the desert;24 Kaim-­ Friza, leader of the rural owners seeks peace because all he wants is to build “canals,” and Coloubbi, the very image of love and desire in the novel, cries out against Mafarka: “By slaying me you have killed the Hearth!...The Hearth.”25 Coloubbi is the principal of many figures of feminine temptation that challenge Mafarka’s autotelic conception of masculinity throughout the novel. Critics have justly highlighted the connections between the violent rejection and suppression of the abject feminine in the novel with the path  Ibid.  Marinetti, Mafarka, 324, 13, 69. 22  Ibid., 52, 54, 101. 23  Ibid., 134–138. 24  Ibid., 40. 25  Ibid., 15, 224. 20 21

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taken by Futurism toward the “aestheticization of war.”26 But to restore Mafarka to its Mediterranean epic context means also to highlight the Meriodionist context of this abjectification.27 As we have seen in Chap. 2, one of the key rhetorical strategies in the northern construction of Europe’s South was its identification as female, and its systematic discursive de-masculinization. By harking back to the Homeric saga, Mafarka not only constructed a Zarathustran Ulysses, but also sought to redeem the original sin of Mediterranean epics, that is, their tendency to revolve around feminine figures. Whether in Paris’ abduction of Helen, which led to the mutual destruction of Greek and Trojan heroes, or in Ulysses’ wanderings between lust for Nausica and familial love for his faithful Penelope, the nucleus of ancient Mediterranean-ness was identified with the über-­ power of the feminine. Sure, the violence of the collective rape scenes, and of Mafarka’s treatment of women throughout the novel, far exceeds a simple reversal of gendering. But in 1909, the “battered woman” of Giacomo Leopardi’s To Italy (1818) was still waiting for her redemption in Pascoli’s image of the Great Proletarian (1911) motherland.28 And the fact that Mafarka is North African and Arab, rather than Italian, makes it no less a figure of redemption for Italians and all southern Europeans. As Marinetti explained in the announcement he published in his review Poesia, Mafarka was a figure of “the Heroism and Will of our race.”29 Our race! But who does that “our” refer to? In direct opposition to D’Annunzio, Marinetti’s reference to “our race” had nothing to do with Latinism, and everything to do with Giuseppe Sergi’s Homo Mediterraneus. Physical descriptions of Mafarka in the novel, and the sharp differentiation between this Muslim leader and the many other Muslim leaders of “blacks” that he fights, suggest that Marinetti’s “our race” referred to North Africans (Berbers and Arabs) and Southern Europeans, to the exclusion of the “blacks” of the rest of Africa. While his “terracotta skin” separates the Arab-Berber Mafarka from black Africans, his “large temples” and “square jaw” single him out as the  Blum, The Other Futurism, 75.  On “meridionism” see the introduction to this book and Luigi Cazzato, Sguardo inglese e Mediterraneo Italiano. Alle radici del meridionismo (Milano: Mimesis, 2017), as well as, by the same author, “Fractured Mediterranean and Imperial Difference: Mediterraneanism, Meridionism, and John Ruskin,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 26, 1 (2017): 69–78. 28  The references are to the images used by Giacomo Leopardi in All’Italia (1818) and Giovanni Pascoli in La Grande proletaria si è mossa (1911). 29  Marinetti, Mafarka, 233. 26 27

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“Mediterranean man” identified by both Sergi and Bory de Saint-­Vincent (see Chaps. 3 and 4).30 References in the novel to “canal building” also echoed Saint-­Vincent’s theorization of the Mediterranean basin as the lost continent of Atlantis, and so does the reference to the African kingdom of Brafene-el-­kibir as a “desert ocean.”31 Marinetti’s Ulyssian epic drives therefore a caesura between the Africa of “the-sea” and the Africa of “theland.” Yet, Mafarka-the-sea is a Mediterranean hero, but he is no Black Athena.32 He does not Africanize Ulysses to restore blackness to the Ancient Mediterranean. The Mediterraneanist matrix of the novel seeks to only address and subvert the Meridionist logic that assigns a fixed hierarchy to North and South, not to undo its racial politics. We see this in Mafarka’s dialogue with the “Grand Leader of the peasant owners” KaimFriza, who describes the countryside as “depopulated […] and abandoned to the black cavalcade of unknown numbers that inhabit the monotonous algebras of the desert.”33 A monotonous countryside subject to desertification and depopulation because of the rule of numbers is not an easy image to unpack, but enough elements in it suggest that it did not refer to any African location but, instead, syncretized the image of the desertocean lying to the south of the Mediterranean continent with that of the number-­driven industrial world of Northern Europe. As Marinetti would state in the dedication of the novel to his fellow futurist poets, the enemy of his Mediterranean fantasy were all those “peace lovers who, in order not to resemble the ancient Romans, have contented themselves with abolishing daily bathing!”34 The reference to Britain’s Pax Britannica is cryptic, but quite readable in the reverse stereotype of the unbathed Englishman. This Mediterranean-inflected reading of Futurism’s first act of birth proposes an interpretation of futurist Mediterraneanism to be read against the grain of Meridionism as a programmatic modernist gesture that displaced the symbolic violence of southernization onto the value-figure of 30  Ibid., 82, 5, 10. For a full discussion of Sergi and Bory de Saint-Vincent’s racial theories see Chap. 5. 31  Ibid., 15–16. 32  The reference is to Martin Bernall’s provocative discussion of the de-Africanization of ancient Greece in the ideological production of the West, in Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (1785–1985) (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987). 33  Marinetti, Mafarka, 16. 34  Ibid., 4.

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the feminine, and replaced the latter with a “breakthrough” to the syncretic figure of autotelic masculinity. The importance of this Futuro-­ Mediterranean imaginary has not escaped the attention of critics. Putting Marinetti’s biographical facts in connection with the capillary dissemination that Futurism achieved in Southern Italy in the interwar period, Claudia Salaris has proposed that the South-Mediterranean came to constitute the counter-polarity to the “idolatry of modernity” and the “destructive tendencies” characteristic of early Futurism, thereby allowing the movement to acquire a more “solar” and “constructive” character in the 1920s and 1930s.35 Salaris’ argument, however, temporalizes a polarity that, as shown with Mafarka, should be understood as an oscillation constitutive of Futurism from the very beginning rather than a developmental dichotomy, and should also not be reduced to reproducing the polarization of North versus South that it was designed to challenge. It is not solely that below the aesthetic projection of syncretism lay the agency of the archaic emporion matrix of Mediterranean-ness; what made Futurism a programmatic form of Mediterraneanism was its systemic oscillation between autotelic fantasy and syncretism. Said in reverse: Futurism constituted the first programmatic form of Mediterraneanism not only for its sustained identification of modernism with aesthetic syncretism, but also because it rebuked the Meridionist logic of modernity by replacing polarization, dialectics, and hierarchy with oscillation. To no one’s surprise, the constitutive matrixes of this oscillation can be best conceptualized in the Mediterranean polarity between Imperium and emporion discussed in previous chapters. Futurism, of course, did not seek to conquer lands or establish trading posts, nor did it claim any Latin-­ Roman ancestry, but its cultural politics can be fruitfully seen as oscillating between the imaginary poles of Imperium and emporion, precisely because these notions not only restore Mediterranean depth to the futurist imaginary, but also highlight the centrality of Futurism to the discourse and project of “making Italians.” A search for Imperium over the cultural field of the avant-garde connected futurist rhetoric of virility, modernolatria, and love of war as “the world’s sole hygiene” to the enthusiastic support that the movement lent to Fascism’s building of an Italian-Mediterranean Empire. By the same token, the futurist drive toward emporion is eloquently testified by the unique projection of this movement toward breaking down barriers and opening up the doors between avant-garde aesthetics  Salaris, “La Napoli,” 59.

35

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and mass mediatic communications, high-art and commercial-art expressions. But, most importantly, this Mediterraneanist oscillation can be seen at play since the earliest phase of the movement’s history, and specifically in the poetic work of Marinetti before and after the publication of Mafarka. As already mentioned, the announced birth of Futurism in Mafarka and the founding Manifesto left Futurism without a proper poetic theorization or realization, until a series of manifestos, defined the connections between the liberation of poetic language from syntax (Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista-Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912), the abolition of the poetic “I” in favor of a poetry dominated by unbridled chains of analogies (Immaginazione senza fili. Distruzione della sintassi. Parole in libertà—Wireless Imagination. Destruction of Syntax. Words in Freedom, 1913), and the synesthetic charging of the linguistic sign with visual, aural, and even tactile resonances (Lo Splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica—Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914).36 In these manifestos, Marinetti presented the futurist revolution in poetics as the expression of a dynamism and simultaneity intrinsic to the experience of modernity, and, hence, the distinguishing hallmark of Futurism from all other avant-­ gardes. Yet, the third birth-act of Futurism, and first expression of paroliberismo (words in freedom), namely, Marinetti’s poem Zang Tumb Tumb (1912), reveals that the connection between Futurism, modernity, and the destruction of syntax, owed just as much to developments in Marinetti’s Mediterranean imagery as to the idolatry of the machine or masculine self-generation. Composed as a journalistic reportage from the 1912 siege of Adrianopolis by the Serbian-Bulgarian army against the Ottoman Empire, Zang Tumb Tumb presented an altogether different birth of the movement from the phallic self-generation in Mafarka, or the car crash in the first manifesto. In Zang Tumb Tumb, futurist poetry was “BORN” on a slow train ride through Southern Italy (Calabria and Sicily) somewhere between the devastating earthquake of Messina and the “petrified lava” of

36  Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature), 1912; Immaginazione senza fili. Distruzione della sintassi. Parole in libertà (Imagination without Wires. Destruction of Syntax. Words in Freedom), 1913; Lo Splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica (Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility), 1914.

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the Etna.37 Deprived of the bombastic grand standing of the first two, this utterly unheroic third birth testified instead to the evolution of Marinetti’s Mediterranean poetics from his pre-futurist texts La Conquête des Ètoiles (The Conquest of the Stars, 1902) and Destruction (Destruction, 1903) to his last pre-words-in-freedom poem Le Monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Monoplane, 1912), passing, of course, via Mafarka (1909). Like the latter, both The Conquest and Destruction are marked by the image of the sea. In the first, Marinetti invokes “the Sovereign Sea,” and in the second the “Almightily Sea” to free his poetic language from its enslavement “to the ideal.”38 But in his last free verse composition, The Pope’s Monoplane, we find again the Mafarkian theme of “the Dark African wind,” but also a brand new cypher of Mediterranean-ness.39 In this poem Marinetti flies “Over Sicily, the New Heart of Italy” engaging for over 20 pages in an imaginary duel with its Volcano, Etna, thereby anticipating but of a few months the association between the birth of Futurism and the same volcano in Zang Tumb Tumb.40 The substitution of the volcano for the sea as the principal cipher of analogy between Mediterranean-ness and futurist poetics was no mere flight of fancy. Within a year from the publication of The Pope’s Monoplane and Zang Tumb Tumb Marinetti would make the analogy explicit in the manifesto Il teatro di varietà by speaking of Futurism as “that great mass of incandescent metals that we have extracted with our bare hands from the depths of a volcano.”41 Entering the futurist universe of 1912, the image of the volcano thus came to iconize the Imperium pole of futurist Mediterraneanism and flourished well into the 1920s, as testified by Marinetti’s 1927 play Prigionieri e vulcani (Prisoners and Volcanoes) and the birth of the futurist journal Vulcani (Volcanoes) in 1929. In the process, however, the volcanic center of futurist imaginary also shifted from the Sicilian Etna to the Neapolitan Vesuvius, as graphically exemplified by the word-in-freedom portraits of Marinetti and the young Neapolitan poet and song-writer, Francesco Cangiullo, published by Marietta Angelini

37  F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose. Luce Marinetti ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 57–59. 38  Ibid. 13 and 21. 39  Ibid. 47. 40  Ibid., 48. 41  F. T. Marinetti and Francesco Cangiullo, “Il Teatro di Varietà” (1913), in Teoria e invenzione futurista, Luciano De Maria ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), 267.

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in 1916 (Fig. 6.1 a and b).42 In identifying Marinetti as a “Vesuvian brain,” this double portrait made explicit the process of “Neapolitanization”—in Ardenigo Soffici’s polemical definition—that Futurism and its leader had undergone during the war-years as a result of Cangiullo’s influence on the Grand Master.43 Between 1910 and 1916, the friendship, patronage, and collaboration between Marinetti and Cangiullo had grown beyond all expectations, even the comprehension of Marinetti’s closest collaborators.44 The explicit and specific references that Marinetti made to Cangiullo’s works in key manifestoes such as Teatro di varietà, the Declamazione dinamica e sinottica (Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation, 1916), and the Il teatro della sorpresa (The Theatre of Surprise, 1924) further indicate that this was no mere matter of patronage. Marinetti’s encounter with Naples-Cangiullo fostered a genuine and strategic turn of Futurism toward the syncretic contamination of futurist poetics with forms of popular culture absorbed primarily from Southern Italy—and away from identifying words-in-freedom exclusively with the lyrical and the poetic, as advocated by Soffici and other Florentine Futurists.45 Even more significantly, this encounter was mediated by the Imperium island par excellence: Capri. Marinetti visited Naples for the first time in 1908 and met Cangiullo in 1910, but from 1916 onward he made frequent visits to Capri where he

42  Marietta Angelini, “Ritratto di Marinetti” and “Ritratto di Cangiullo,” Vela latina IV, 5 (February 12, 1916). On Cangiullo, see the introduction by Ernestina Pellegrini in Lettere, 5–47; Mario Verdone, “Francesco Cangiullo,” in Marinetti e il Futurismo, 67–88, and Luciano Caruso, Francesco Cangiullo e il Futurismo a Napoli (Florence: SPES, 1979). More generally, on Futurism in Naples see the already cited collections by Crispolti, Futurismo e Meridione, and D’Ambrosio, Marinetti e il Futurismo, along with, by the same author, Nuove verità crudeli. Origini e primi sviluppi del Futurismo a Napoli (Naples: Guida, 1990) and Futurismo a Napoli. Indagine e documenti (Naples: Liguori, 1995), and, by Ugo Piscopo, Futurismo a Napoli (1915–1928) (Napoli: Pironti, 1981) and Questioni e aspetti del Futurismo con un’appendice di testi del Futurismo a Napoli (Naples: Ferraro, 1976). 43  MART, Fondo Carrà, item 200: letter from Soffici to Carlo Carrà dated April 28, 1915. For a discussion of Soffici and Lacerba’s brief flirtation with Futurism see Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 44  Ibid. Other letters between Soffici and Carrà testify to the widespread disconcert over Cangiullo’s impact on Marinetti even by staunch supporters of the latter in the polemic with Soffici. 45   See F.  T. Marinetti—F.  Cangiullo, Lettere (1910–1943), Ernestina Pellegrini ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1989), especially 57–121.

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Fig. 6.1  (a) Marietta Angelini, “Ritratto di Marinetti,” and (b) “Ritratto di Cangiullo,” from the front page of Vela latina IV, 5 (February 12, 1916)

also decided to spend his honeymoon with Benedetta Cappa in 1921.46 The encounter with Capri produced its most direct poetic effects in the development of Marinetti’s erotic novels, a genre that will counterbalance the ferocious condemnation of libidinal love in Mafarka with more mainstream images of seductive masculinity as in the many narrations of Marinetti’s conquests of women in Come si seducono le donne (How to seduce women) of 1916, L’alcova d’acciaio (The Steel Alcove) of 1921, and Scatole d’amore in conserva (Love in Tin Cans) of 1927. Among these, however, we also find L’isola dei baci (The Island of kisses) an “erotic-­ social” novel written by Marinetti with Bruno Corra in 1918, and taking place entirely in Capri. Rather than focusing on manly conquests, L’isola 46  On Futurism and Capri see Gino Agnese, “Marinetti e i futuristi a Capri,” in Marinetti e il Futurismo, 107–114, and Capri futurista, Ugo Piscopo ed. (Naples: Guida, 2001).

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dei baci stages a confrontation between Marinetti and the homosexual members of the “Pink Congress,” which, in the novel, is identified with all the typical crimes of passatismo (love of the past): from the pacifist condemnation of war, to the call for full financing of archeological digs, to the “establishment of Schools of Slowness, Indecision, and Delicacy in order to heal humanity from the pest of Speed.”47 The novel’s antigay sarcasm demonstrates the perfect harmony between futurist rhetoric of virility and the volcanic-Mediterranean imaginary that Futurism was forging during the war years. In fact, the novel staged the Pink Congress in the “mellifluous” and “picturesque” waters of the blue grotto, while identifying the poet “wearing his grey-green uniform” with the island’s “volcanic rocks” that reminded him of the war theater of the “Carso.”48 In so doing, L’isola dei baci effectively reified the evolution of futurist poetics into a polarization between past-loving sea and futurist lava. The analogical chain of associations linking Futurism to volcanoes, Vesuvius, volcanic rocks, and the manly seduction of women, thus found its war-like completion in the image of Capri-Carso. It would therefore require just a small step for Marinetti—in a 1922 keynote address at a conference held in Capri on the relationship between architecture and the environment—to describe the island in perfect Imperium style as a “geological and plastic summary of our peninsula and race,” and “a piece of that volcanic pier that once connected Europe to Africa.”49 While capping the metaphorical expansion of futurist Imperium with the identification of futurists with the whole Italian race, this image also anticipated Mussolini’s famous description of the Italian peninsula, on the eve of the Ethiopian campaign, as a natural aircraft carrier projected toward the Northern shores of Mediterranean Africa. And yet, it is in this same 1922 text that we can also capture traces of a futurist imaginary seeking to offset its own drive toward Imperium with a more syncretic attitude of emporion, that is, with an active engagement and transfiguration of popular forms of Mediterranean culture. Having developed the analogical chain Capri-Italy-Futurism by identifying the island’s rocks as “Italian,” that is, “rebellious, lyrical, and 47  F.  T. Marinetti and Bruno Corra, L’isola dei baci (1918), (Naples: La Conchiglia. 2003), 93. 48  Ibid. 82. 49  F.  T. Marinetti, “Discorso al convegno sul paesaggio,” (1922), in Piscopo, Capri futurista, 33.

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revolutionary like futurist art,” Marinetti proceeded to present the island as a “varietà” (a variety theater) in which the natural elements (the sun, the rocks, the moon, the sea) “mimicked” futurist paintings, theatre, and poetry.50 Far from being casual, the image of Capri-varietà gestured explicitly toward the key contribution of Neapolitan Futurism—and Cangiullo in particular—to the transfiguration of the Variety Theater into a futurist “Theatre of Surprise.”51 Marinetti had explicitly praised the variety theater in the already cited 1913 manifesto in which he had also extracted Futurism from volcanic lava. That manifesto began by exalting the Parisian tradition of variety theaters, and explicitly the Folies-Bergère for all the usual futurist reasons: its dynamism, antipassatismo, and anticipation of the futurist sensibility destined to become dominant. In the last part, however, Marinetti had prescribed the need for Futurism to “destroy all logic in variety spectacles” and “abolish the Parisian Revues” by introducing “surprise effect[s].”52 This way, the Teatro di varietà manifesto had already registered the theorization of the principle of “la trovata” (the surprise effect) in Francesco Cangiullo’s poetic work of 1912–1913, and anticipated its application to the theater by Cangiullo and Marinetti in their manifesto Il teatro della sorpresa published just a few months before Marinetti’s keynote speech in Capri.53 The composite image of Capri-­ Futurism-­teatro di varietà in L’isola dei baci thus pointed to a new analogic series parallel to that of Futurism-war-Carso. This series identified Futurism with the absorption of the popular-cultural heritage of the Neapolitan trovata, and, in so doing it also registered the impact of Marinetti’s intense collaboration with Cangiullo during and immediately after the war.  Ibid., 36–40.  See Francesco Lista, “Francesco Cangiullo e la teatralità futurista,” in Marinetti e il Futurismo, 89–98, and Il teatro futurista a sorpresa (documenti), Luciano Caruso and Giuliano Longone eds. (Florence: Salimbeni, 1979). On futurist theater in general see Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971), and Günther Berghaus, Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998) 52  F. T. Marinetti, “Il Teatro di Varietà” (1913), in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 88–89. 53  Cangiullo introduced the surprise effect in the visual-poetic language of Futurism in 1916 with his Caffeconcerto: alfabeto a sorpresa, which was first exhibited as visual artifact in the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome, and then published, as poetry, by Marinetti for the Edizioni Poesia in 1919. For a self-aggrandizing but illuminating account of the origins of the surprise effect in popular Neapolitan variety theater, its migration in Cangiullo’s poetry, and its return to theater in Marinetti-Cangiullo’s theater of surprise see the account published by Cangiullo himself in F. T. Marinetti + F. Cangiullo = Teatro della Sorpresa (Leghorn: Belforte, 1968). 50 51

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This collaboration had begun in 1910 with Cangiullo’s participation in the first futurist soiree in Naples. From that date onward Cangiullo had become Marinetti’s man in Naples as well as one of the most active participants in the futurist soirees.54 Cangiullo’s pre-futurist experience as a composer of Neapolitan pop songs, musical motifs for the lively cafè chantans of the city, and creator of comic sketches for the local variety theaters, put him in an ideal position to create an osmotic channel of communication between the “high” of futurist avant-gardism and the “low” of Neapolitan gesticulation, scurrility, and crass humor.55 In consequence of this role, Cangiullo has remained a somewhat belittled figure in the movement, suffering from the negative judgment of temporary Futurists such as Soffici, who regarded him as dangerous to Futurism, and the principal cause for Marinetti’s supposed betrayal of the movement. Authoritative scholars such as John White and Willard Bohn have since rendered justice to the originality of Cangiullo’s contributions in the development of futurist visual poetry, and made his poetic work known to the English-­speaking public.56 But, for as important as Cangiullo’s poetic compositions such as Piedigrotta (1914), Caffeconcerto: alfabeto a sorpresa (The Surprise Alphabet, 1916), and Poesia pentagrammata (Pentagrammatical Poem, 1918) were in pushing futurist poetics toward their pictorial and onomatopoeic limits, the historical role played by Cangiullo in the evolution of the whole movement has remained largely unexplored, possibly because it can only be appreciated by looking at his activity as theatrical playwright, impresario, and theoretician after the war.57 In 1921, Cangiullo set up a futurist theatrical company designed to perform an entirely new style of futurist theatre, which he called Teatro della sorpresa (Theater of Surprise) and theorized in an homonymous manifesto written with Marinetti in the same year. Marinetti-Cangiullo began their manifesto by expanding the scope of Variety Theater, proposing that the highest value in a work of art rested in its “surprise value,”  See Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le “eroiche serate” (Novara: Interlinea, 2002).  On Cangiullo’s pre-futurist activities see D’Ambrosio, Nuove verità, 241–278. 56  See John White, Literary Futurism. Aspects of the first Avant Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 22–25, and Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 57  On Cangiullo’s contributions to futurist theater see in particular Giovanni Lista, “Francesco Cangiullo e la tetralità futurista,” in Marinetti e il Futurismo, 89–98, and Mario Verdone, “La componente meridionale nella teatralita` futurista: Vasari e Cangiullo,” in Futurismo e Meridione, 49–58. 54 55

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that is, “the effect of wonder produced by the first viewing of a painting or a fresco.” This value, they went on, was clearly the highest for both artists and patrons in the past, if “as we all know, so many frescoes and paintings were covered up by new ones because they had lost their surprise value” due to both “ritual” viewing and “reproduction” in different media.58 In this day and age, the authors continued, it has become so difficult to surprise audiences—due to the multiplication of reproductive techniques—that a “theater of surprise” may be needed to reintroduce surprise value in our lives. Marinetti-Cangiullo then spelled out the combined three goals of the theater of surprise as follows: first, to conceive of “surprise” always in specific relation to the audience encountered; second, to organize the performance in such a way as to produce a concatenation of comical ideas that would draw the audience into the spectacle; and, third, to extend the surprise effect into the streets of the city. Most importantly, the primary goal of the futurist theater of surprise was to bring together and mix popular forms of entertainment, such as “magicians,” “illusionists,” and “athletes” with all forms of futurist art: from the performance of synthetic theatrical pieces, to the synoptic declamations of poetry, to the exhibition of futurist painting and sculptures, to the distribution to the audience of the “tactile tables” just invented by Marinetti, to the improvisation of “musical dialogues between two pianos,” and all the way, to the inclusion of a “theatrical news section on futurist activities.”59 Clearly, in the Teatro della Sorpresa we recognize a unique emporion of futurist art forms, for here it was not Futurism that absorbed principles or techniques from rival avant-gardes; it was Futurism that was absorbed and demonstrated through a popular-cultural art form—the Neapolitan varietà. In fact, the manifesto insisted on enacting all the prescriptions that Marinetti had wished for in the earlier manifesto of the Variety Theater, including the gluing of chairs and the selling of ten tickets per seat.60 Unfortunately, over ten years after its explosion upon the stage of the avant-garde, Futurism was no longer a novelty, and its capacity to surprise was very limited indeed. As the surviving chronicles of these novel futurist  Francesco Cangiullo and F. T. Marinetti, “Il Teatro della Sorpresa” (1921), in Francesco Cangiullo e il Futurismo a Napoli, 28–33. 59  Ibid. 29. 60  See Il teatro futurista della sorpresa, 13–19, and compare to Teoria e invenzione, 89. 58

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soirees, and some of the texts in our possession, amply record, the “surprise value” of the theatrical pieces was more often than not ridiculed by both audiences and critics.61 To give just an example, two of Cangiullo’s most famous pieces were entitled, Non c’è un Cane (There Isn’t Even a Dog Here), and Luce (Light). In both pieces, the trovata consisted in representing the gap between the literal and the idiomatic value of their titles: in the former, a dog was made to cross the stage from right to left, and then the curtain was dropped. In Italian, “there isn’t even a dog here” means “nobody is there”—the joke-trovata being that in fact a dog was on stage, however briefly! As for Luce, this was the exclamation that one would sometime hear in a movie theater at the beginning of a film if management forgot to turn off the lights. Cangiullo’s piece entailed a completely darkened theater and, after a good ten minutes, a couple of actors in the audience would start shouting: “light!” As the shouting multiplied over several minutes and reached a climax, suddenly the lights on the stage would be turned on and after a minute the curtain would come down… amidst further cries of the audience asking for their money back. Whether written by Cangiullo or Marinetti, these surprise pieces amounted to little more than plays on idiomatic expressions, and, what’s worse, their reproduction in the chronicles of the newspapers destroyed their surprise effect altogether. Within a few weeks from the first performance, almost everybody in Italy knew that members of the orchestra would sit among the audience, that a few members of the audience would be sold the same seat in the theater so as to initiate a rouse, and that at least one seat in the theater would be spread with glue. Newspapers even reported that the first ten rows of the theaters were always empty because people knew part of the action would take place there, and sought to reinstate the barrier between actors and audience.62 But, predictably, the value of this form of theater did not reside, for Marinetti and company, in its adherence to its manifesto, or in its ability to truly surprise its audience. It was the cultural lowering of highbrow Marinetti-Futurism that the audience came to watch. In this form of theater it was the audience that played the part of the provocateur, often preventing the Futurists from finishing their synthetic acts, and, at the end of the spectacle, waiting for them outside to escort them to their hotel, thereby offering a 61   See the many newspaper chronicles republished in Il teatro futurista della sorpresa, 98–234. 62  Ibid., 230.

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self-conscious and original rendition of the third principle of the theater of surprise (the extension of the stage to the street). Rather than breaking the boundaries between actors and audience, the theater of surprise ended up inverting their places, with the latter, acting according to a script written in the pages of the newspapers. For the Futurists, however, a series of more important consolations were in store. In the first place, thanks to the “surprise” of doubling the prices for the third gallery seats, and offering the best seats at half price, these futurist spectacles did manage to break even and have an impact on the social composition of the audience by democratizing it. Second, unlike the evenings of the 1910s, the theatrical evenings of the surprise theater were generally attended by an audience that, while booing and even coming to blows with the Futurists, remained until the end of the spectacle, and beyond. In such a futurist emporion, there would always be something that each spectator would appreciate in the end. Cangiullo’s Teatro della sorpresa lasted only two years, but remarkably, Marinetti attended every single performance, knowing full well that his presence was indispensable in order to electrify the atmosphere. It is not without a sad tinge of irony that, at the end of the second tournée, in 1924, Cangiullo would not only leave the company but also publicly dissociate himself from Futurism because he believed that the movement had exhausted its “surprise value.”63 The irony—not lost on Cangiullo who reconnected with Marinetti in the mid-1930—was that by 1924 the Cangiullian principle of the trovata had made its mark on the whole of Futurism, especially on that part of the movement that was bent on pushing toward destroying the boundary between high-art and mass communications. Reinforcing the connection between Futurist Mediterraneanism and the meridione, in 1929, Cangiullo’s principle of “surprise” was enshrined by the Calabrian futurist Enzo Benedetto in a manifesto entitled L’arte della reclame (The Art of Advertising). Here Benedetto argued that the bourgeois era of the painting had finally come to an end and had been replaced by that of the advertising poster. This, however, he considered a much higher form of art than the former because “while [painting] depended only on the inspiration of the artist” the latter was much harder

63  Tony Procida, “Perchè Cangiullo è uscito dal Futurismo,” Il Mattino (September 13–14, 1924).

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to create because it was “dependent on a commission and the ability of the artist to translate it into a trovata”—a surprise effect.64 No futurist painter—whether a Southerner or not—ever completely abandoned the easel for the street wall. But Benedetto’s manifesto of the advertising poster correctly interpreted the road toward emporion that most Futurists had embarked upon under the Fascist regime, when the avant-garde status and revolutionary zeal of the movement had long been exhausted. This was particularly the case in the south where Futurism made most of its adepts in the 1920s and 1930s rather than in its first decade of revolutionary life. The loss of giants like the Calabrese Umberto Boccioni (1916) or the defection of Cangiullo in 1924 did not impede the spread of so-called second Futurism in the south. In fact, the main direction of futurist geographical spread during Fascism was southward and, according to Enrico Crispolti, in this period, the mezzogiorno did not only constitute an “archetype and a polarity of the [futurist] imaginary,” but also a key “territory for its affirmation and operative presence.”65 This was the case for all primary movers of second Futurism, from Fortunato Depero to Enrico Prampolini to Giacomo Balla, none of whom was born in the south or lived there, but all of whom received commissions and/or invitations to participate in futurist exhibitions in the meridione.66 It was even more the case for the high number of southern-born and southerndwelling artists who declared themselves “futurist” in the 1920s and 1930s, and for the formation of several futurist artistic groups in the south.67 Recent studies have mapped the diffusion and development of southern Futurism under Fascism, highlighting not only its quantitative spread but also its distinctiveness. Crispolti, in particular, has remarked its overall differences from Roman and northern Futurism in terms of its continuing insistence on “theatricality and gesturalism” over the idolatry of the machine, its aesthetic privileging of “solarity and luminosity” over the celebration of speed, and its passion for “a mysterious and organiccosmic metamorphism with a peculiar tendency toward materiality.”68 We could add to this that in Franco Casavola, from Puglia, second Futurism  Il teatro futurista della sorpresa, 361.  Enrico Crispolti, “Futurismo e meridione,” in Futurismo e meridione, 18. 66  Ibid. 19. 67  There is no study that compares the number and percentages of northern-center as opposed to southern futurists but without any doubt the number of southern artists who became futurist during second Futurism was vastly superior to that of first Futurism. 68  Crispolti, 20. 64 65

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attracted as innovative a musician as avant-garde futurism had found in the Venetian Luigi Russolo, and that with Antonio Marasco from Nicastro, Calabria, there even emerged a new leader who, in 1932, separated from Marinetti and formed the Movimento futurista indipendente (Independent Futurist Movement), which had its headquarters in Florence but found most of its adepts in the south.69 Finally, one could locate what Crispolti rightly calls the combination between a certain “freedom of aesthetic experimentation” and the “intolerance for any hegemonic line of conduct coming from the movement or the regime,” in the formation of the circumvisionisti group of painters in 1929 in Naples, and of the Unione distruttivisti attivisti (Union of Desctructivist Activists) in the same city.70 The contention of this study, however, is that the southern-­ ness of Futurism was surely reinforced by its acquiring so many adepts from and in the south, but should not to be identified with mere geographical spreading. This southern-ness resided in the oscillation of the futurist imaginary between avant-garde Imperium and syncretic emporion; that is, in a futurist mediterraneità that in the 1930s came to constitute the common discursive denominator for all modernist movements under fascism, and a primary point of reference for the fascist completion of the making of Italians.

 Berghaus, 239–245.  Ibid., 279–281.

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CHAPTER 7

Fascist Mediterraneanism

There could be little doubt in the mind of the reader that Italian Fascism represented the mature ideological expression of what I have called the Imperium matrix of the Italian imaginary constructed around the value figure of the Mediterranean. Spurred by the Risorgimento-era repression of Mediterranean belonging in the colonized south, emerged in a series of Mediterranean imaginaries at the heart of “making Italians” discourse, Mediterraneanism assumed full-fledged ideological dimensions in the central position that the great myth of resurrecting the Roman Empire and the Mare Nostrum held in Fascist image politics in general, and in Mussolini’s foreign policy in particular. Contemporary scholarship has already rendered justice to key elements of this picture. After a relatively long period of cultural and scholarly obscurity, the logic of coloniality has been squarely placed at the foundation of the Italian-fascist project. Books analyzing in detail the interaction between the Fascist myth of Rome, racial discourse, racist legislation, colonial ruling, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, and the “Mediterranean Empire” assembled between 1939 and 1943, have emerged in the past two decades to invert a long-standing tendency to minimize both the cultural resonance of the Roman myth and the centrality of Empire-building as the driving forces of Italian Fascism from rise to fall.1 This research stands on the shoulders of those studies but 1  Attention to the continuities between liberal-times colonialism and the fascist imperial project has been present in Italian historiography since the 1960s, particularly in the works

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_7

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challenges the priority given to the myth of Rome over the Mediterranean imaginary that, in my view, impacted the form and diffusion of that myth, and both preceded and outlasted it. Appeals to the glorious Roman past, mythic or otherwise, can hardly be found in any of Mussolini’s writings before 1919. The first unequivocal declaration that ancient Rome was going to be a guiding star in the Fascist firmament can be traced to April 21, 1922, when Mussolini chose to declare the day traditionally associated with the founding of Rome as the “Day of Fascism”, calling himself “cives romanus” (Roman citizen—in Latin) and affirming that from that moment forward “Rome is our myth.”2 Joshua Arthurs, however, includes the earlier Mussolini in the “anti-­ Romanism” that “was a common refrain within the intellectual and political milieu that spawned the Fascist movement.”3 For the Mussolini of 1910, Rome was “a vampire-city that drains the best blood of the nation,” and if these words referred to contemporary Rome, his leadership of the revolutionary socialist faction that, in 1912, opposed the “imperialist war” in Libya was rooted in an equally scathing mockery of the nationalist-­ imperialist claim of the Italian entitlement to ancient Roman colonies.4 Symptomatically, not even in the founding document of Fascism—the speech delivered by Mussolini on March 23, 1919 in Piazza San Sepolcro— do we find any reference to ancient or modern Rome.5 We find instead a direct reference to Imperialism as “the foundation for the life of any people that aims to expand economically and spiritually” and a declaration that “Italy needs to find completion on the Alps and the Adriatic by of Angelo Del Boca and Nicola Labanca, but the rise of “colonialism” to the center of a general interpretation of Italian Fascism can be attributed to the publication of Ruth BenGhiat’s Fascist Modernities. Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); since then, several collections of essays on Italian Colonialism have also appeared to highlight colonial and postcolonial continuities in Italian history from the Risorgimento to the present, among these, Patrizia Palumbo, ed. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), and Mia Fuller and Ruth Ben Ghiat, Italian Colonialism (London and New York: Palgrave, 2005). 2  Benito Mussolini, Popolo d’Italia (April 21, 1922), now in Edoardo and Duilio Susmel eds., Opera omnia XVIII (Florence: La Fenice, 1951–78), 160–1. 3  Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 9. 4  Ibid. 5  Benito Mussolini, “Discorso di Piazza San Sepolcro” (March 23, 1919), in Opera omnia XII, 371–376.

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reclaiming and annexing both Fiume and Dalmatia.”6 This declaration, as we know, will not be fulfilled by the movement of the fasci di combattimento (fighting squads) born in Milan, but by D’Annunzio’s legionnaires who occupied Fiume from September 12, 1919 to December 31, 1920. This was the period in which Mussolini came within the orbit of D’Annunzio’s epiphanic gesture, absorbed its modernist-revolutionary charge, and transferred it to his own movement. There is indeed a quasi-­ straight line from D’Annunzio’s epiphanic politics to those of Fascism, and both Latinity and the myth of Rome surely entered the bloodstream of fascist ideology via Fiume-D’Annunzio. They did so, however, bathed in the waters of both Orientalism and Mediterraneanism. Mussolini’s visit to D’Annunzio in Fiume on October 7, 1919 is justifiably famous because it reportedly gave the future Duce the idea of a march on Rome, which the Vate suggested to him during a private meeting long before he planned it with Giulietti (see Chap. 4).7 But in the aftermath of that visit, Mussolini, the journalist, began to publish articles that rather than focusing on the insurrectional activities at Fiume, elaborated the outlines of a foreign policy for his own nascent movement. In the first of these, published on December 12, 1919 and symptomatically titled “Italia marinara” (Maritime Italy), he examined data from maritime traffic in ports, government subsidies, and maritime commerce to conclude that Italy was set “to recapture the maritime primacy that, if she wishes, she can obtain again” and thus “return to be the dominant power in the Mediterranean.”8 Several days later he returned to the theme in an article focused on the relationship between Italy and “the Orient.” There, he discussed the importance of the Adriatic ports of “Fiume, Venice, Trieste, Ancona, and, especially Bari” as the “bases from which the young maritime Italy that is in our dreams will necessarily jut forward” and then invited Italians “to familiarize themselves with other seas; [namely] the seas of the Eastern Mediterranean.”9 Three days later, on January 1, 1920, he published “Navigare necesse,” in which, despite the Latinism, he made no reference to ancient Rome but reiterated his views that the future of the nation was tied to its reclamation of the sea, and ended by advocating  Ibid., 374.  Ferdinando Gerra, L’impresa di Fiume (Firenze: Longanesi, 1974), 112. See also Chap. 5. 8  Benito Mussolini, “Italia marinara,” Popolo d’Italia (December 20, 1919); now in Opera omnia XIV, 205. 9  Benito Mussolini, “Italia e Oriente,” Popolo d’Italia (December 27, 1919); Ibid., 220. 6 7

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the replacement of the cross with “an anchor or a sail” on the national flag.10 In the following months, Mussolini continued to develop his theses that the only viable trajectory for an Italian—and eventually fascist—foreign policy was its “inorientamento” (Eastward  projection), that is, its “expansion in the Mediterranean” through the control of its “Adriatic gulf.”11 At last, at the second congress of the fascist movement, on May 24, 1920, he spelled out the implications of his call to inorientamento: We have no fear of being called imperialists. There are two forms of imperialism: the German kind and the Roman kind, that of brute force and that of intelligence. The Italian people must necessarily be expansionist, Italy must pursue a daringly maritime foreign policy.12

However brief and cryptic, this was the first implicit reference to ancient Rome in Mussolini’s important speeches or articles. Significantly, it came in direct reference to the imperialist spirit of expansion that Mussolini had for months associated with a foreign policy aimed at making Italy a maritime power in the Eastern Mediterranean, with its epicenter in the Adriatic. Clearly, the initial impact that Fiume’s epiphanic atmosphere had had on Mussolini had not been connected to D’Annunzio’s cult of latinità, but to the Mediterranean imaginary that the revolutionary festival had activated in its participants. Yet, the acting Mediterranean matrix in Mussolini’s mind was from the beginning that of Imperium rather than emporion. The term “expansion” that Mussolini and fascist propaganda will use throughout the 1920s and early 1930s to avoid riskier references to Empire, was used as a synonym for a military, and tangentially economic plan for Italy to replace England as the dominant maritime power on Mediterranean waters and become the new imperialist force in Mediterranean Africa. Already in November 1920, Mussolini blatantly betrayed D’Annunzio’s opposition to the Treaty of Rapallo (November 12, 1920),13 accepting the solution of an independent state of Fiume, and the abandonment of any territorial claim on Dalmatia, because these claims where “hypnotizing Italians on the Adriatic Sea” and distracting them from the wider “Mediterranean Sea, where the possibilities for Italian expansion were  Benito Mussolini, “Navigare necesse,” Popolo d’Italia (January 1, 1920); Ibid., 231.  Benito Mussolini, “Facilismo,” Popolo d’Italia (June 1, 1920); Ibid., 236. 12  Benito Mussolini, “Discorso al secondo congresso dei fasci” (March 23, 1920), Ibid., 469. 13  Gerra, L’impresa di Fiume, 536–552. 10 11

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much more vital and likely.”14 Returning to this theme in a speech in Trieste on February 6, 1921, he clarified the objectives of Fascist foreign policy in unequivocal terms: It is written in destiny that the Mediterranean shall be ours again. It is written in destiny that Rome will return to be the city that exercises its hegemony on the entire European West. We raise the flag of our Empire, that is, of an imperialism that must not be mistaken for that of Germany or England.15

Prefiguring the bombast of his later speeches, Mussolini transmutes the Mediterranean Sea, Maritime Expansion, and Empire into the holy trinity that will guide the Fascist making of Italy into a fully realized Empire State. The reference to ancient Rome is present from the beginning, but noticeably in an ancillary capacity, and in the last lines, the emphasis is on contemporary Rome resuming its role of capital-hegemon. From the assertion that the Mediterranean needed to become “our lake,”16 to the statement “all of Italy lies on the sea” because “with its 8,500 kilometers of coast, Italy is effectively an island,”17 and the famous motto “if for others the Mediterranean is a road, for us it is life itself,”18 uttered in Milan after the takeover of Ethiopia, the consistency of the link between maritime expansion and empire-building was uniquely remarkable, in large part because it lacked any reference to ancient Rome, historical or mythic. In fact, at least in one case, Mussolini went so far as to sharply distinguish ancient Romans from the “Romans of modernity” (i.e., the Fascists), stating that contrary to the Fascists “the ancient Romans had more of a continental than a maritime psychology.”19 Furthermore, another Mediterranean element cropped up in Mussolini’s speeches more frequently than references to Rome, namely, the necessity of an Italian inorientamento that he first referred to during the Fiuman Endeavor. “Italy cannot but go towards the Orient,” its “lines of pacific expansion are 14  Benito Mussolini, “Ciò che rimane e ciò che verrà” (November 13, 1920), in Scritti e discorsi II (Milan: Hoelpi, 1934), 113. 15  Ibid., 149. 16  Benito Mussolini, “Discorso della Sciesa,” Popolo d’Italia (October 6, 1922), in Opera omnia XVIII, 439. 17  Mussolini, “Sintesi di regime,” Popolo d’Italia (March 20, 1934), in Opera omnia XXVI, 190. 18  Mussolini, “Discorso di Milano” (March 10, 1937), in Scritti e discorsi X, 208. 19  Mussolini, “Roma antica nel mare” (April 21, 1926), in Scritti e discorsi V, 400.

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towards the Orient”—said Mussolini in 1924.20 In fact, for the Duce, Ancient Rome itself had been “Oriental,” that is, it had “realized on the shores of the Mediterranean the union of Orient and Occident,” and this “Mediterranean union [had] lasted many centuries.” But while “the Occident was colonized by Rome, with Syria, Egypt, and Persia the relationship involved reciprocal creative understanding.”21 So, for the Mussolini speaking to the quinquennial assembly of the party in 1934, “the objectives of the regime today” as in “the year 2000,” have only “two names: Asia and Africa. The South and the Orient are the only cardinal points that must command the attention and will of Italians.” This, he added, “did not mean territorial occupation […] but a natural expansion that will lead to collaboration between Italy and the peoples of Africa.”22 If proof were still needed, this last sentence alone should be sufficient to demonstrate the deceptive nature of any Mussolinian statement, and the impossibility to take any of his pronouncements at face value. When he uttered these words, plans for the invasion of Ethiopia had been drawn up for nine years (1925), and the gassing of Libyans had already revealed the true face of Fascist colonial rule.23 One should not therefore make too much of the distinction between the term “expansion” that Mussolini and Fascist propagandists used to mystify their imperialist goals throughout the 1920s, and the use of the term “empire” that became more ubiquitous and explicit after 1934. Similarly, the primacy (and relative independence) of references to Mediterranean expansion over references to the Ancient Roman Empire in Mussolini’s speeches should neither be taken as applicable to all Fascist discourse, nor be understood as absolute even for Mussolini. These references were as often intimately interconnected as they came isolated.24 20  Mussolini, “Ottantatreesima riunione dei ministri” (February 22, 1924), in Opera omnia, XIX, 181; for other examples of references to inorientamento see “Libertà alla Siria,” Popolo d’Italia (June 16, 1922), in Opera omnia XVIII, 244–46; “La gratitudine dei siriani per l’Italia,” Popolo d’Italia (July 14, 1922), Ibid., 279–81; “Sintesi del regime,” Popolo d’Italia (March 23, 1934), in Opera omnia XXVI, 185–193. 21  Mussolini, “Oriente e occidente,” Popolo d’Italia (December 23, 1933), in Opera omnia XXVI, 190. 22  Mussolini, “Sintesi di regime,” 192. 23  Robert Mallett, The Italian Navy and Fascist Expansion: 1935–1940 (Portland: Frank Cass, 1998), 9. 24  For Mussolini, see for example, “Passato e avvenire,” Popolo d’Italia (April 21, 1922), in Opera omnia XVIII, 161; “Intransigenza assoluta,” Popolo d’Italia (June 23, 1925), Opera omnia XXI, 357–64. As for fascist publicists, the list would be endless.

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The question is not whether or not Mediterranean Imperium was a myth independent of, and prior to that of Rome, but whether or not it qualifies as a myth. The suggestion of this study is that Mediterranean Imperium was not a myth but the cornerstone of the Italian imaginary, inherited by Fascism and developed within the paradigm of making Italians. This assertion, however, is not meant to sweeten the bitter pill of empire with Mediterranean molasses. As scores of historians have proven, Fascist Empire—call it Roman or Mediterranean—was ruthless, and all Fascist propaganda was aimed at creating a mystique around its ruthlessness. To highlight the role of an imaginary over a myth is not to lower the criminal threshold of Fascist imperialism, it is to open up a space for better understanding interrelations between key aspects of the regime, and see them within the optics of Meriodionism, coloniality, and Mediterraneanism. We may begin by recognizing how incremental, constant, and thorough Mussolini’s foreign policy objective was to replace the British in their unchallenged Imperium over the Mediterranean. Predictably, Mussolini had announced this idea during his first trip to Fiume to November 1919 where he asserted that “the first thing to be done is to banish foreigners from the Mediterranean beginning with the English.”25 The idea had gained currency in Fascist public discourse throughout the 1920s and was codified in the journal Antieuropa (1929) that Mussolini’s government directly financed to propagandize the idea of a Fascistized Europe with an Italian mare nostrum.26 For Mussolini, Italy was literally “imprisoned” between British Gibraltar and Suez, hence his obsession with capturing the “five straits” of the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, Sicily-­ Tunisia, Dardanelles, Suez, and Bab-el-Mandeb in the Horn of Africa.27 This aspiration, for example, was at the forefront of Mussolini’s decision to help General Franco militarily topple the legitimate Republican government of Spain in 1936. The hope was to have access to Spanish ports in order to counterbalance the British navy, and be in a position to attack Gibraltar from Spain.28 In that same year, the Italian navy drew up plans for a so-called flotta d’evasione (escape fleet) that would include the construction of four aircraft carriers, and plans for occupying both Malta and Gibraltar in order to open up the possibility of German and Italian fleets  Cfr. Mallett, The Italian Navy, 9.  Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (New York: Viking, 1978), 26. 27  Ibid. 28  Mallett, The Italian Navy, 94. 25 26

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joining forces in the Atlantic.29 It is, however, a well-known anecdote that the Italian army never obtained the approval of even a single aircraft carrier from Mussolini because he continued to insist that Italy was itself a gigantic one—a decision that made it technologically impossible for military airplanes to reach Alexandria from Italy, let alone Gibraltar.30 And finally, the cost of invading Ethiopia was as much to blame for crippling the dreams of Mediterranean hegemony as was Mussolini’s bad planning, scarce financial backing of the navy, and gross military miscalculations.31 As Peter Mallett concludes, despite all the rhetoric, Fascism “did not even use available naval technology realistically to prepare for war,” and to pursue its military goal of a Fascist Mare Nostrum. And yet, this only proves the firm hold that the Imperium imaginary had on Mussolini’s mind, who never relinquished his rhetoric of Italian “imprisonment” in the Mediterranean,32 and never gave up planning operations against Suez and Gibraltar, even without the means to achieve his goals.33 In fact, frustrated by chronic lack of funding for building battleships, Mussolini did turn his dream of naval supremacy in the Mediterranean into one significant primacy: he built the largest submarine fleet in the Mediterranean, which he continued to rely on as a strategic lynchpin in his naval plans, until, of course, the British use of radar technology made even this segment of his outsized dreams inoperative and obsolete.34 The intersection between racism and Fascist empire-making, be it in the “pacification” of Libya or the conquest of Ethiopia, or the building of a proper “Mediterranean Empire” during World War II, has also been the subject of great scholarly attention during the last two decades.35 In particular, scholars have highlighted the role that colonial rule over Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia played in bringing racism and race-talk to the forefront of Fascist discourse between the early 1930s and the Occupation of Ethiopia, and how the latter radicalized this process.36 As David Rodogno  Ibid., 54.  Ibid., 62. 31  Ibid., 61. 32  Ibid., 69. 33  Ibid., 66. 34  Ibid., 172. 35  See footnote 1. 36  See Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999), Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York: Routledge, 2002), Fabrizio De donno, “La razza Ario-Mediterranea,” Interventions 8: 3 (2006): 394–412, Gaia 29 30

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writes in Fascism’s European Empire, for Mussolini “territorial expansion was to be the logical outcome of the Italian race’s spiritual and demographic supremacy in the Mediterranean.”37 In other words, the Mediterranean was, from the beginning, conceived as Italy’s “spazio vitale” (Germany’s lebensraum or living space) for the “expansionary impetus of the state” and the settler colonialism that Mussolini obsessively envisioned as the necessary outlet for the demographic growth he planned for the Italian nation.38 Racial vitality, state expansion, and Mediterranean Empire were therefore part of the same territorializing logic that extended from Fascist Rome over the entire sea and into the Mediterranean-area lands that Mussolini either occupied—Albania was annexed in 1939—or intended to occupy as he illustrated in two speeches to his cabinet in November 1938 and February 1939. In the projected European war, the Duce planned to move first against France to occupy Tunisia and Corsica, and then to turn to challenge Great Britain by invading Malta and Cyprus, and finally, Gibraltar and Suez.39 These military moves would have given Fascist Italy a north-south and east-west military control of sea routes before turning its attention to neutralize or occupy Britain-friendly Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, which Mussolini considered “virtual enemies of Italy and its expansion.”40 Clearly, then, the rise of racial discourse between the late 1920s and mid-1930s went hand-in-hand with both Fascist colonial policy (pacification of Libya and occupation of Ethiopia) and the planning for a truly Mediterranean empire. Still, most scholars would agree that the invasion of Ethiopia marked a neat disjunction between an early colonial phase marked by “assimilation,” and the post-Ethiopian Empire and “racial state.”41 As late as 1933, Somali and Eritrean children suspected of being of “mixed race” could be granted citizenship if they displayed Italian “cultural and/or racial features,” and, in 1934, all Muslim subjects of Libya Giuliani, “Mediterraneità e bianchezza. Il razzismo italiano tra fascismo e articolazioni contemporanee (1861–2015),” Iperstoria 6 (2015): 167–182, and Eden K. McLean, Mussolini’s children: race and elementary education in Fascist Italy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). 37  Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire, 47. 38  Ibid. 39  Ibid. 40  Ibid. 41  De Donno, “La razza,” 405. McLean, on the contrary, argues for a fundamental continuity between pre- and post-Ethiopian racial state.

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were granted Italian citizenship.42 With the invasion of Ethiopia, a policy shift toward racial separation, subjugation of subjects in the colonies and of nonracially “white” elements at home took place, leading swiftly to the increasing endorsement of Nazi biological racism, Aryanism, and the promulgation of the notorious Racial Laws and the Manifesto degli scenziati razzisti (Manifesto of Race) in 1938. All these well-known steps can be legitimately seen as deriving from colonial rule and aggression, and also mark a line of discontinuity between the less racially inflected 1920s and the increasingly racist 1930s. Yet, even in this configuration, the Mediterranean referent was paramount in the racial “making of Italians”— not just their racial others—in all colonial settings. As Gaia Giuliani has argued, the colonial experience was marked by the construction of Italians as simultaneously “white and Mediterranean.”43 The “Mediterranean whiteness” of Italians was the result of what Giuliani calls a “symbolic anthropophagy” of the indigenous population, who were “racialized and gendered as objects of erotic-exotic desire” by those Italians who resided in the colonies, as much as by commentators in the mainland.44 This cannibalism of non-white Mediterraneans was fused with the myth of Rome to yield a new vision of the “Mediterranean race” that exalted the “patriarchal virtues of virility and aggressivity” in the new Fascist man, and “of a femininity at one and the same time maternal and sensuous,” that would outlast the regime’s end.45 The Fascist Homo Mediterraneus emerging from the colonial experience was reinforced by the continuity existing between liberal-times and fascist-times racial theories developed by anthropologists during the regime. These were fundamentally indebted to Giuseppe Sergi’s identification of Italians with the “Mediterranean Race.”46 Although Sergi lived a long life and died in 1936, he did not exercise a direct influence on the development of racial theory under Fascism through his own writings. It was the new generation of anthropologists, such as Sergi’s son, Sergio Sergi, and Sergi’s coeval colleague Francesco Pullè, that adapted Homo Mediterraneus to unfolding circumstances. Pullè’s 1927 Italia. Genti e favelle (Italy. Peoples and Languages) affirmed the unequivocal  Ibid., 404.  Giuliani, “Mediterraneità e bianchezza,” 168. 44  Ibid. 45  Ibid., 169. 46  See Gillette, Racial Theories, 104–125 and Maiocchi, Scienza italiana, 47–78. 42 43

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­ superiority” of the Italian people derived from its “variety” and “synthe“ sis on a spiritual plane,” which he opposed to the biologism of all “Nordic” racism, which cast Italy as an “artificial juxtaposition of different racial segments.”47 The culturalist framework of Sergi’s racial theory survived intact in Pullè and the culture-creating characteristics of the Mediterranean race were bumped up to the spiritual plane. The fact that Pullè never explicitly mentioned Sergi in this book, and referred incessantly to the “stirpe italica” rather than the Mediterranean race, made the identification between the latter and the Italian people more implicit and automatic than ever. What Pullè, and especially Sergi’s son added to the Mediterranean racial mix was what Sergi had carefully excluded: latinità. For the younger Sergi, and virtually all Italian anthropologists during the regime, Ancient Rome was the symbol of the “racial synthesis,” and the “racial primacy” of the Italian stirpe, as it had revealed itself in the “Imperial work of Rome.”48 Anthropologists, however, were no longer the primary intellectual movers and shakers of racial theory and science under Fascism. Health scientists and demographers were the principal architects of Italo-Fascist racial discourse. Of the first group, Nicola Pende was surely the most original and influential sponsor of racial “biopolitics” in the 1920s and early 1930s.49 In his 1933 treatise Bonifica umana (Human Reclamation), Pende argued that Fascism was rooted in the biological law of the subordination of the individual to the collective and advocated turning away from “Nordic industrialism” because it led to demographic regression. Explicitly citing Sergi, Pende argued that the mix of Mediterranean and Alpine races had made the Italians “the most harmonious people on earth,” and the “civilizing people” par excellence. At last, he also took it upon himself to give a purely Mediterraneist explanation to the terminological oscillation in racial discourse and Fascist propaganda between the terms razza and stirpe. For Pende, the “razza mediterranea” was to be explicitly identified with the razza italica, precisely because of its essential characteristic of being a mix of different “regional” stirpi, which bore different “psychological characteristics.”50 The Mediterranean mélange of races, in other words, was reflected in the regional mélange of Italian stirpi that characterized the Italic race. The primacy of the Italian people thus  Maiocchi, Scienza italiana, 146–7.  Ibid., 181. 49  Ibid., 47. 50  Ibid., 54. 47 48

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rested for Pende—as for Pullè and Sergi junior—in having synthesized a “multiplicity of stirpi,” which, under the Roman Empire had already absorbed and merged all Mediterranean ones, making of latinità the historical fusion “of all the stirpi of the Mediterranean race.”51 Besides their Mediterraneist tenor, Pende’s theories were also crucial in establishing the close connection that existed during Fascism between so-­ called negative eugenics, health legislation, and medicine.52 As Roberto Maiocchi suggests, “the racist rhetoric” that emerged from this unholy alliance was crucial to the diffusion of more explicit racist discourse and legislation in the second half of the 1930s, because it got Italians used to think that their government was involved in a policy of protection and care for the quality of the race, and that this defense of the qualities of the race had been in place for a long time in Italian society.53

It was from this discourse on the betterment of the race, Maiocchi concludes, that the widespread convictions regarding the “special and superior qualities” of the Italic race emerged: from the “emphasis on its aesthetic and psychological” traits, to the “exaltation of its variety” and its “rural types.”54 And from these convictions, there also came the further inference that the most appropriate eugenic interventions for a perfect and superior Italic race rested on facilitating its reproductive and demographic expansion. The step from the “political biology” advocated by Pende to the racial discourse endorsed and sponsored by Italian demographers during the regime was indeed a very short one.55 Among Mussolini’s obsessions, that of the necessary demographic growth of the Italian nation may have been the most enduring.56 Everything for the Duce seemed to derive from increasing the Italian population: Great Nation status, the natural expansion of the race, the Empire. Pro-natalist policies for the “human reclamation” of the Italian people  Ibid., 180.  By negative eugenics, Italian racial thinkers intended the measures connected to the “prevention” of racial degeneration, as opposed to Nordic (i.e., Nazi) eugenics, based on the “elimination” of biologically inferior stock for the purification of the race. 53  Maiocchi, Scienza italiana, 59. 54  Ibid., 78. 55  Ibid., 47. 56  Carl Ipsen, Dictating demography: the problem of population in fascist Italy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). 51 52

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were thus as important to the growth of Italic racism as Pende’s preventive “orthogenesis.”57 Little surprise, then, that the dean of Italian demographers, Corrado Gini, would identify the Italian people with the “Mediterranean race,” and the latter with “youth,” “natalist vitality,” and a “natural and necessary propension towards expansion,” at the expenses of the “senescing” Nordic races.58 Demographic colonialism, racial expansion, and Roman Imperium thus came to constitute the key argumentative triad for a wide range of social scientists in the 1920s, and found in classicists, archeologists, historians, and mere propagandists of all stripes, a continuous, and formidable amplifier.59 To offer just two significant examples, for the king of all Fascist orators, Paolo Orano, “the Latinity of the Mediterranean first was italic, and now is Italian,” because Italy had finally responded to “the Mediterranean law of hegemonic domination, command, and conquest.”60 And for the prominent journalist-writer Orio Vergani, “only Italy inhabits the marine temple like an unmovable divinity,” for the latter has been “united for three millennia to the destiny of a single Italian-Mediterranean race.”61 But the list of contributors was truly endless. As well known, the Mediterraneanist bent of Italic racism did not maintain its hegemony past the invasion of Ethiopia and the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany in 1936. Within two years, the Racial Laws targeted one of the populations that had most disproportionately supported Fascism, Italian Jews, and the Manifesto of Race affirmed unequivocally that “the population of contemporary Italy is in the majority of Aryan stock and that his civilization is Aryan.”62 There is no question that the real-life consequences of this shift toward Nazi-German biological theory of race, anti-Semitism, and Aryanism dwarfs any discursive opposition, overt resistance, or bravo italiano behavior, displayed between 1938 and 1945 by a  Maiocchi, Scienza italiana, 47.  Ibid., 137. 59  On the contribution of classicists and humanists see Mariella Cagnetta, Antichisti e impero fascista (Bari: Dedalo, 1979) and Romke Visser, “Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of Romanità,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, 1 (1992): 5–22. 60  Paolo Orano, Il Mediterraneo (Napoli: Lega Navale Italiana, 1929), 14 and 19. 61  Orio Vergani, Il mediterraneo (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1930), 29. Among the most fervent propagandists were of course historians like Gaspare Ambrosini, L’Italia nel Mediterraneo (Foligno: Campitelli, 1927), Guido Vannutelli, Il Mediterraneo, origine e fonte risorgente della civiltà mondiale (Bologna: Cappelli, 1932), and Pietro Silva, Il Mediterraneo dall’unità di Roma all’Impero italiano, 2 volumes (Milan: ISPI, 1941). 62  “Manifesto della razza” (1938), reprinted in Maiocchi, Scienza italiana, 328. 57 58

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miniscule number of Italians, compared to the collaboration, acquiescence, and consent given by the great majority of Italians to Fascist racial policies. But in the limited scope of this research, the evidence points decisively to a hybrid intermingling of Aryanism and Mediterraneanism during the last years of the regime. To begin with, while affirming the Aryan status of Italians, the Manifesto of Race also declared that there “exist both big and small races,” and, among the latter, it listed the “Mediterraneans,” specifying that these smaller groups are “individualized by a greater number of common characteristics,” and “constitute, from a biological point of view, the true races.”63 Further along, the same manifesto introduced a whole article (# 8) to “make a net distinction between European Mediterraneans (Occidental) on the one hand, and Oriental and African [Mediterraneans] on the other.”64 If Italians were of such pure Aryan race, why all this interest by the drafters of the Manifesto in the Mediterraneans? And how could the relatively small Mediterranean race be from a biological point of view a true race and Italians belong instead to the much larger group of Aryan races? Clearly, the drafters were trying to strike a rhetorical synthesis that scholars have aptly named “Aryan-­ Mediterranean” theory.65 According to Fabrizio De Donno, the premises of this composite racial theory were already present in the work of Sergi and Pullè, but were only fully developed after 1936 in response to the rise of the Nazi-style Aryanism preponderately sponsored by the journal La difesa della razza.66 Mussolini himself contributed to the theory by affirming that Italians were “Aryans of the pure Mediterranean type.”67 Similarly, one of the principal supporters of Aryanism, Giulio Cogni, whose 1936 book Il razzismo is credited with being the first book of overt Aryanist propaganda, only a year later, published I valori della stirpe italiana (1937) in which the “Nordic and Mediterranean types are joined together as the true children of the Spirit, [and] the most divine embodiment of the Idea, creator of the European World.”68 In fact, according to Aaron Gillette, “Mediterraneanist race theory remained strong even after 1938” thanks, in large  part, to the  Ibid., 327.  Ibid., 329. 65  Both Gillette and De Donno utilize this term. 66  De Donno, La razza, 397–8. 67  Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 157. 68  Giulio Cogni, I valori della stirpe italiana (Milan: Bocca, 1937), 48–49. De Donno, La razza 405. 63 64

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establishment of the journal Razza e civiltà in 1940—which constituted the Mediterraneist antithesis to La difesa della razza—and the writings of prominent gerarchi like Giacomo Acerbo.69 In his I fondamenti della dottrina fascista della razza (1940), Acerbo produced the “most radical Mediterraneanist text ever to receive official recognition” returning all the way to Sergi’s original positioning regarding the Neolithic arrival of Mediterraneans, the preeminence of “cultural and spiritual” aspects of race over biological ones, and the outright rejection of the Nordic creed that “race is destiny.”70 In Acerbo, racial Mediterraneanism found a champion who would refer to Mussolini’s endorsement of Aryanism as the principal reason for voting him out of power in 1943. But, once again, as in the case of the distinction between Mediterranean imaginary and the myth of Rome, this discussion of the permanence of Mediterraneanism at the heart of Fascist racial discourse is not meant to mitigate the collective responsibilities of Mussolini’s henchmen, and the intellectual class that elaborated Fascist racism of one sort or another. It is meant to mark the resilience and spread of a Mediterranean Empire imaginary that had been stimulated throughout the regime and could no longer be repressed, not even by the realpolitik of the Nazi-­ Fascist alliance. The genie, as it were, had been out of the bottle since 1919, and in fact, not even Mussolini had the courage to object to Acerbo’s formulations when he visited him on December 7, 1939 to express his uncompromising Mediterraneanist position to the Duce.71 The Mediterranean imaginary of Imperium, to conclude, was the most consistent source of inspiration for the realization of the Italian Empire State that Mussolini set, from the beginning, as Fascism’s foremost goal, and it was also the common denominator between Fascist foreign policy, colonialism, and racial discourse. This said, Fascist Mediterraneanism was not exhausted by giving political form and action to an Imperium Mediterranean imaginary. The Fascist imaginary was also nourished by an emporion matrix that had appeared first in Futurism, but had rapidly spread to the entire Fascist-modernist cultural front, and may have not been entirely absent from Mussolini’s own convictions, if, just like Marinetti, he affirmed that the Mediterranean was “certainly a southern sea.”72  Gillette, Racial Theories, 104.  Ibid., 121 71  Ibid. 72  Mussolini, “Il discorso di Napoli” (October 25, 1922), Opera omnia XVIII, 453–60. 69 70

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Fascist Emporion “In the golden years of rationalist architecture, Mediterranean-ness became our polar star.”73 Thus, architectural and art critic Belli recalled in 1976 the key role that the idea of mediterraneitá had come to play for both modernist Italian artists and rationalist architects in the early 1930s. Whether identified with a modern sense of the “classic” intended as an art of “intimacy cum narrative depth”—which accommodated equally the abstractism of Milanese painters and the “scuola Romana” of Giuseppe Capogrossi, Emanuele Cavalli e Corrado Cagli—or with the “solarità” (solar disposition) of Italian-rationalist architecture, Mediterranean-ness became the most effective line of defense on the Italian-modernist front.74 It allowed Italian modernists under Fascism to unify around a common discursive strategy in order to simultaneously distinguish themselves from their Northern European rivals, and to fence off the increasingly worrisome accusations of esterofilia (love of everything foreign) levied against them by the ever more vocal proponents of an official fascist style (stile littorio) responding to the idea of romanitá.75 Yet, the roots of this modernist turn toward the Mediterranean were not to be found in a direct engagement with Futurism, which, as we have seen, articulated Mediterranean-ness in a programmatic esthetics between 1910 and the mid-1920s. Oddly enough, they were mutated mostly from the outside. Specifically, Mediterraneanism first became an attractive discourse for a number of Italian emigre painters in Paris who called themselves “les Italiens de Paris” and, according to Fabio Benzi, combined “magical realism” and “abstract classicism” to create a Mediterranean alternative to the Surrealist “appeals to the unconscious, unexplored lands, and elementary forces.”76 This composite group comprised ex-Futurists like Gino Severini and sui generis novecentisti like Massimo Campigli and Filippo De Pisis. But, unquestionably, their central figure was the Greek-born father of pittura metafisica (Metaphysical painting), Giorgio De Chirico, who joined 73  Carlo Belli, cited in Silvia Danesi, “Aporie dell’architettura italiana in periodo fascista— mediterraneità e purismo,” in Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo, Silvia Danesi and Luciano Patetta eds. (Venice: La biennale, 1976), 25. 74  Marisa Vescovo, “Luci e miti mediterranei,” in Marisa Vescovo ed., Luci del Mediterraneo (Milan: Electa, 1997), 24. 75  Benzi, Fabio. “La ‘mediterraneità’ nel dibattito artistico italiano degli anni trenta,” in Ibid., 30. 76  Ibid., 31.

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D’Annunzio and Marinetti as the pictorial bard of Italian-modernist Mediterraneanism in the 1920s. Since his symbolist beginnings, Mediterranean antiquity was lastingly omnipresent in De Chirico’s art. It appeared first in terms of Greco-­ Roman themes (1907–1909), and then assumed the typically rarefied atmosphere of his metaphysical paintings (1909–1919), which, as Ara Merjian aptly puts it, “empt[ied] out the specificities of mythological narratives in favor of a spectral architectonics,” while “still evok[ing] the Mediterranean as its unnamed […] setting.”77 French commentators such as Waldemar George were quick to hail De Chirico’s metaphysical art as capturing “the limpid light of the Mediterranean coast,” but De Chirico’s Mediterraneanism was much more inspired by his readings of a northern European author, than the Greek sun under which he was born. Like for D’Annunzio, De Chirico’s guiding star was Friedrich  Nietzsche. In Nietzsche he saw a fellow “southerner not by descent but by faith,” who had unveiled the mysteries of the pre-socratic Mediterranean.78 In Nietzsche’s writings he found Mediterranean-ness as a “philosophical trope” that his paintings translated into an “evocation of dryness, clarity, and linear definition” aimed at producing “ostensible intelligibility and coded obfuscation.”79 This purposeful dedication of De Chirico—and of his brother Alberto Savinio—to the “profound obscurity of light,” put his metaphysical art in the 1920s on a parallel track with the evolution of Luigi Pirandello’s theater from paradox to myth. And like Pirandello, De Chirico also came to endorse and support Fascism and, in particular, its Imperial path. Declaring that the newly opened Via dell’Impero in Rome had surprised him “for its beauty,” De Chirico clearly recognized the contribution that his visions of skeletal architecture had given to the Fascist imaginary that yield the sventramento (demolitions) of Rome’s medieval center, and the building of New Towns in the reclaimed countryside around Rome.80 But this is precisely what made De Chirico’s Mediterranean imaginary so quintessentially Italian and modernist: just like that of D’Annunzio and Marinetti, it was marked by an inexhaustible oscillation 77  Ara Merjian, “‘Il faut méditerraniser la peinture’: Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting, Nietzsche, and the Obscurity of Light,” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010): 2. Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/12d9s5vb. 78  Ibid., 11. 79  Ibid., 12. 80  See Arthurs, Excavating Modernity, and Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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between emporion and Imperium, connections to the pre-classic mysteries of the Small Greek World and conservative reveries of a “return to order,” overcoming of nationalistic preclusions and support for “the rebirth of Italy” under Fascism.81 De Chirico’s paintings of metaphysical squares, columns, and Roman-­ looking busts, also made clear that architecture would be a key point of reference for the affirmation of a Mediterraneanist imaginary under Fascism. Once again, however, the inspiration for architects seemed to come from abroad. Possibly, the first solicitations that young Italian architects received in the 1920s came from the many Northern European architects that traveled to the Mediterranean in search of inspiration, and who wrote extensively about it. Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Bernard Rudofsky and, especially, Le Corbusier (to cite only the major figures) had a decisive influence on the formation of the Gruppo 7 (1926), and the diffusion of the rationalist architectural creed thereafter. In particular,  the explicitly Mediterranean bent of Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, 1923, was a constant point of reference and reflection in Italian debates on the relationship between rationalist architecture and the Mediterranean. Yet, it was a different foreign culture other than France or Germany that cemented the alliance between Mediterraneanism and Italian rationalism. The key protagonists of what Mia Fuller calls the “Mediterranean-modern” theory of architecture were Carlo Antonio Rava and Florestano Di Fausto, both of whom operated in Libya, and took much of their inspiration from Magrhebian architecture.82 Rava’s reflections began in 1929 with an article in which he exalted the authentic “Arab vernacular” he had found in native Libyan homes against the fake “Moorish style” that colonial powers in North Africa, particularly France and England, seemed to have adopted.83 Within two years, Rava had solidified a number of theses that not only projected a Mediterranean form of architecture that he saw extending “from the Libyan coast to Capri,” but tied it to the construction of a new architecture that was both  Merjian, “‘Il faut’,” 12.  Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2007), 105. See also Michelangelo Sabatino, “The Politics of Mediterraneità in Italian Modernist Architecture,” in Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean. Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, Jean François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino eds. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 41–64. 83  Carlo Enrico Rava, “Dobbiamo rispettare il carattere dell’edilizia tripolina,” Oltremare 3: 1 (1929): 458–464; cited in Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 112–113. 81 82

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modern-rationalist and quintessentially Italian. In three consecutive articles published in Casabella in 1931, he remarked first on the spontaneous “functionalism” of vernacular North African architecture, then advocated for it to be the sole source of inspiration for Italian rationalist architect, and finally connected it to the “general Mediterranean character” of the “ancient Roman house.”84 As Fuller remarks, in one theoretical move, Rava’s concept of Mediterranean-rationalist architecture “allowed to overcome the difference between Italian and Arab,” by making Libyan architecture both “Roman” and “Italian” ante litteram. Conversely, by “modeling rationalist architecture on the Libyan vernacular,” he also cast latinità in its “Mediterranean essence.”85 Although Rava’s arguments were not bought wholesale and universally by the Italian-rationalist front, still, his conceptualization of Mediterranean-­ness had an immediate and lasting appeal in both theory and practice. As late as 1936, Giovanni Pellegrini’s Manifesto dell’architettura coloniale (Manifesto of Colonial Architecture) referred to Rava’s Mediterranean theory of colonial architecture and “Libyan vernacular architecture” as the ideal sources of inspiration for all Italiancolonial architecture, that is, for its “adaptation of functional architecture to local conditions and necessities.”86 A year later, fellow rationalist, Luigi Piccinato denied that Arab architecture existed because all architecture in the North African colonies was in his opinion just “Mediterranean,” rooted in the “Maltese style” that spread Italian architectural principles throughout the Mediterranean in the early modern period.87 For their part, the members of the Gruppo 7 used Rava’s ideas to cast their polemic against the “cold rationalism” and “socialistic” tendencies of Bauhaus architecture, in opposition to the “solar” and “spontaneous” rationalism of Southern Italian and Greek island architecture.88 Even more than De Chirico’s Mediterraneization of painting, architectural Mediterraneanism 84  Carlo Enrico Rava, “Spirito Latino,” Domus 38 (February, 1931): 24–29, and “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna. Parte prima,” Domus 41 (May, 1931): 39–43; cited in Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 116. 85  Ibid., 117 86  Giovanni Pellegrini, Manifesto dell’architettura coloniale, cited in Vittoria Capresi, “Architectural Transfer, Italian Colonial Architecture in Libya: ‘Libyan Rationalism’ and the Concept of ‘Mediterraneity’, 1926–1942,” in Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa, Fassil Demissie ed. (London: Ashgate, 2012): 45. 87  Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 119. 88  Danesi, “Aporie dell’architettura,” 25.

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i­nfluenced the whole modernist cultural front.89 The novecentista review Quadrante (1933–1936), became the center of the debate on Mediterraneanism among architects, painters, and writers, hosting articles that made of mediterraneità what Benedetto Gravagnuolo calls a “poetic game, a literary metaphor, a Neo-Pythagorean allegory of number and cosmic rhythm, a metaphysical desire to rediscover.”90 As Sherry McKay puts it, modernist-Mediterraneanist discourse enjoyed enduring success in fencing off conservative sponsors of historicism and stile littorio because it “supplemented discussions of aesthetics with issues of identity.”91 In turn, built examples of Mediterraneanist architecture in both the colonies and the mainland helped solidify the cultural gains and appeal of modernist Mediterraneanism. Architect Florestano Di Fausto began his carrier on Rhodes, one of the Dodecanese islands occupied by Italy during the Libyan campaign. He was the author of an ambitious plan of urban renovation that between 1923 and 1930 led to the formation of entire new quarters and representative buildings beyond the walls of the historic city. The most imposing building designed by Di Fausto in 1927 was the Grande Albergo delle Rose (Grand Hotel of the Roses). This hotel had no hint of the rationalist-­ Mediterraneanist passion advocated by Rava for the vernacular and functionalist architecture in North Africa.92 But it was located in Rhodes, an  See Chap. 5.  Benedetto Gravagnuolo, “From Schinkel to Le Corbusier The Myth of the Mediterranean in Modern Architecture,” in Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean, 35. 91  Sherry McKay, “Mediterraneanism: the politics of architectural production in Algiers during the 1930s,” City & Society XII, 1 (2000): 86. 92  On Di Fausto see Sean Anderson, “The Light and the Line: Florestano Di Fausto and the Politics of ‘Mediterraneità’” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010), permalink https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/9hm1p6m5; Krystyna von Henneberg, “Public Space and Public Face: Italian Fascist Urban Planning at Tripoli’s Colonial Trade Fair,” in Ben Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 155–66; Brian L. McLaren, “The Architecture of Tourism in Italian Libya: the Creation of a Mediterranean Identity,” in Ben Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 155–66, and Architecture and Tourism in Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); George Epolito, “Mediterraneità Desired and Realised: the Imposition of the Fascist Aesthetic Ideology of Mediterraneanness Overseas from 1935 to 1940,” in Joana Cunha Leal, Maria Helena Maia, and Begoña Farré Torras eds., Southern Modernisms: from A to Z and Back Again (Porto: Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo, 2015), 79–98; Filippo Marco Espinoza, “’Il problema turistico dell’Egeo non presenta soltanto un interesse economico’: villeggiatura e politica estera nel Dodecaneso italiano (1923–1939),” in Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea 37, 1 (2019): 1–18. 89 90

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island of ancient Greek traditions that had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1522, and on Venetian trading routes. Accordingly, the syncretic combination of “Venetian gothic and Moresque motives” was not out of place as it would have been in other colonial settings, and Di Fausto could legitimately refer to it in 1937 as part of his “Mediterranean vision of architecture,” which rested on not placing a stone “without filling myself up with the spirit of the place.”93 Di Fausto didn’t belong to the rationalist front, nor did he write much, but his colonial buildings were all marked by a search for balance between traditional and modernist forms, eclecticism, syncretism, and functionalism. And others, like the architectural critic Apollonj, recognized his influence when affirming that thanks to his work all “Italian architecture in Libya is Mediterranean rather than colonial.”94 This was particularly evident in the many “tourist projects” Di Fausto built in Libya between 1932 and 1940. In these, Brian McLaren sees that Di Fausto’s appropriation of local forms responded to a “more variable context” than in Rhodes, “thereby creating a series of different responses to climate, site, and building tradition that were part of a more general category of Mediterranean architecture.”95 In particular, Di Fausto treated the exteriors of his tourist architecture with the same intonation of “indigenous architecture of Amalfi or Capri” and the “continuous horizontal reference” provided by terraces.96 The interiors, instead, offered a completely different experience: eclectic, surprising, hybrid, and composite as in the mix of Roman and Turkish bath elements in the Uaddan.97 There, Mediterraneanism and Orientalism met in a simulation of the exotic space of colonial literature “where the reader,” again writes McLaren, “engages with a constantly changing series of encounters with unfamiliar situations and cultures.”98 In this respect, Di Fausto’s architecture from Rhodes to Libya could be seen not only as the most coherent corpus of architectural Mediterraneanism but also as an expression and implementation of inorientamento that Mussolini had advocated since before coming to power. 93  Florestano Di Fausto, “La mia visione mediterranea dell’architettura,” 1937, cited in Mc Laren, “The Architecture,” 167. 94  Bruno Maria Apollonj, “L’attuale momento edilizio della Libia,” Architettura 16, 2 (1937): 816; cited in Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 106. 95  McLaren, “The Architecture,” 170. 96  Ibid., 172. 97  Ibid. 98  Ibid.

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The urban revival of Rhodes was planned by the Italian governor, Mario Lago (1924–1936), with the paramount goal of making this island a unique tourist destination in the Eastern Mediterranean so that it would become the symbol of “Italian-ness in the Levant.”99 Unlike the policies pursued by the regime in Libya, and later in Ethiopia, where the re-­ settlement of Italian peasants remained a constant concern, the development of Rhodes was aimed at “inviting the greatest number of Orientals to Rhodes so that they can see with their eyes that Italy is now a Levantine power and knows how to administer a colony no less than any other power.”100 Similarly, the coastal villages and tourist sites built by Di Fausto in Libya, especially during the governorship of Italo Balbo (1933–1940), were all inscribed in a policy more aimed at impressing foreigners and other colonial powers, than hosting Italians in the colonies.101 Furthermore, as Sean Anderson remarks, “purity of form within the colonies evoked mythic and historic claims to the land,” eminently serving the Romanizing and autarchic goals of the Regime.102 In this respect, architectural theories of Mediterraneanism and their built realizations were also inscribed within the Imperium goals of the regime. But, would Rava have not similarly articulated his response to the connections between Arab architecture and the functionalist principles of rationalism even if Fascism had not come to power? And, conversely, would Di Fausto have insisted as much as he did on the integration of the genius loci with Mediterranean-Italian elements if an emporion matrix had not been operating at the level of individual and collective imaginaries even under Fascism? Admittedly, these questions are blatantly rhetorical, but they point to an oscillation between Imperium and emporion imaginaries that was constitutive of architectural Mediterraneanism under Fascism. Let us look, for example, at Di Fausto’s practice of building hotels bearing overtly Mediterranean architectural traits at the periphery of the Sahara, or conversely, his quintessentially Italian-style Piazza Cattedrale in Tripoli, in which Anderson finds “the essence of mediterraneità,” namely, “a complex negotiation of economic, social, and historical practices captured within the interlocking piazzas of the city and buildings themselves.”103 As  Espinoza, “Il problema turistico,” 8.  Ibid., 10 101  Capresi, “Architectural Transfer,” 49. 102  Anderson, “The Light and the Line,” 9. 103  Ibid., 10. 99

100

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for the six rural villages built by Di Fausto to host the mythic “20,000” Italian peasants sent by the regime to colonize the most fertile coastal lands in Libya, each of them “alluded to the icons of the rarefied Italian town: piazza/mosque, arcade, campanile/minaret,” and at the same time recalled “the housing and urban typologies” used in another act of Fascist colonization, that of the Pontine marshes.104 For Vittoria Capresi, Di Fausto’s villages thus served as a “semantic bridge” for the colonizers, while also functioning as a “compromise between the habitually well-­ known from the homeland and the newly observed in the colony.”105 None of the historians who have taken mediterraneità seriously as a lens to evaluate the cultural work of Italian-fascist architects, artists, or writers, refrain from also indicating how this work was consistently re-­absorbed by the imperial logic of Fascist colonial rule. Di Fausto’s government buildings in central Tripoli were typically “fuoriscala” (disproportionate), with their gigantic arcades, double the size of those in the surrounding private buildings, also built by Di Fausto.106 But the key element here is that, as Capresi starkly puts it, “the idea of Mediterranean” during Fascism “was born in Libya,” in both theory and practice.107 This origin element cannot be underestimated because it suggests that the discourse around mediterraneità developed in Italy from the end of the nineteenth century through the conquest of Libya in 1912 and all the way to Fascism anticipated traits and must be also considered from the perspective of what Olivia Harrison—following François Lionnel and Shu-Mei Shih—has aptly named transcolonialism. Seeking to go beyond the binary constructs of classic postcolonial theory (colonizer/colonized, center/periphery, etc.), Harrison has proposed that we consider the transcolonial as a theoretical and physical space that encompasses “the myriad transversal relations that connect one end of empire to another and indeed any of several points on the map of the Global South within or across former colonial empires.”108 For Harrison, as for Lionnel and Shih, the transcolonial belongs of course to our postcolonial world, and demarcates “a site of trauma, constituting the shadowy

 Capresi, “Architectural Transfer,” 60.  Ibid. 106  Ibid., 47. 107  Ibid., 60. 108  Olivia C. Harrison, “Transcolonial Cartographies: Kateb Yacine and Mohamed Rouabhi stage Palestine in France-Algeria,” in The Postcolonial World, Jyotsna G.  Singh and David D. Kim eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 247. 104 105

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side of the transnational.”109 It marks out the cultural works of minorities inside the ex-colonies or in the metropole that use other colonial referents (i.e., Palestine for Algerian authors) to “reinvestigate the colonial, redefined to include continuing forms of direct colonial rule.”110 But looking at Harrison’s definition in the light of both Meridionism and coloniality, one could argue that the pre-postcolonial case of Italy fits within a transcolonial space that Harrison posits as replacing a North-South (post)colonial map with a multipolar and multidirectional Mediterranean cartography, one that is better suited […] to the transnational affiliations of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries, in the South as well as in the North.111

The “transcolonial map” Harrison’s work elicits “obtains when we take into account horizontal or South-South vectors of communication and no longer privileges a vertical and necessarily hierarchical North-South axis.” It is a map that “decolonizes imperial mappings,” by calling attention to “transcolonial political imaginaries, imaginaries that do not fit neatly into the (post)colonial world order governed by colonizer-colonized relations.”112 Neither Rava nor Di Fausto, any more than Sergi, D’Annunzio, Marinetti or De Chirico were minority actors or colonial subjects of course, or in any way bore the traumatic markings of colonial rule simply because they operated in a colonial context (Rava and Di Fausto), were born in the Italian south (Sergi and D’Annunzio), or in another Mediterranean country (Marinetti, Egypt; De Chirico, Greece). Their biographies are not the issue here, but their relationship to Italy’s liminal position as Europe’s South, and the colonial relationship between the Italian North and the Italian South, are both relevant. Pre-postcolonial transcoloniality coalesced equally in Italy’s perception of itself as a “proletarian nation” vis-à-vis the Imperial nations of northern Europe, as in its projection of its own south as a piece of Africa. What Fascism added to the mix was the opening of a space for the collective identification of Italians with a Mediterranean South (/East) against the European North (/West). 109  François Lionnel and Shu-Mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 110  Harrison, “Transcolonial,” 248. 111  Ibid., 249. 112  Ibid.

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Under Fascism, the liminality of Italians was thus doubled by being simultaneously Southern and Mediterranean. This is why, however tentative, discontinuous, tenuous, or contradicted by tendencies to identify with the Imperium of the metropole, the cultural Mediterraneanism expressed by the characters examined in this book, and the many others that are briefly mentioned or have escaped my notice, is worth highlighting. These figures gave cultural form, appeal, and prestige to a Mediterranean imaginary that did not fit neatly into the colonial world order governed by colonizer-­ colonized relations, did not privilege a vertical and hierarchical North-­ South axis, and imagined a cultural space that was multipolar and multidirectional. That the discourse initiated by Rava on the Mediterranean essence of Italian rationalism was born of his observations and attachment to the Arab vernacular, or  that Di Fausto’s attention to the genius loci can be detected in most of his colonial-time architecture in Rhodes and Libya is not inconsequential—any less than Sergi’s nomadic conception of Mediterranean civilization, D’Annunzio’s pirate state of Fiume, or Marinetti’s embrace of southern surprise culture over the lures of Florentine avant-guardism. These authors articulated an emporion imaginary of Mediterranean-ness that ultimately referred to a reciprocal idea of be-longing, and contrasted the making of Italians with a tentative making of Mediterraneans. Still, even applying a transcolonial lens, some questions remain. Was mediterraneitá anything more than a modernist dream? A politically convenient strategy for carving a vital space for the avant-garde under Fascism, while at the same time continuing to feed the cultural mill of Italian-ness? And were the reveries of Futurists and Fascist modernists sufficiently connected to the southern Mediterranean imaginary discussed in previous chapters to merit transcolonial consideration? Did, for example, Malaparte-­ Libera’s architectural masterpiece in Capri (Fig.  7.1) share substantial traits with both the centuries-old spontaneous architecture of the Corricella harbor on the island of Procida (Chap. 2), or the “marine landscapes” that became a statistically relevant product of Italian-modernist painting in the second half of the 1930s?113 To these questions, the influential critic Edoardo Persico responded throughout the 1930s from the pages of Casabella with a resounding “no.” For Persico, the idea of mediterraneitá was as vague, rhetorical, and banal as its more official and conservative  Vescovo, “Luci e miti,” 20.

113

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Fig. 7.1  Adalberto Libera e Curzio Suckert Malaparte, Villa Malaparte (Capri, 1942). © Alamy

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counterparts of romanitá, latinitá, and italianitá.114 Worse still, a serious brand of Latin-Mediterranean modernist architecture existed, but not in Italy it was of course, Le Corbusier’s.115 Surely Persico’s opinion was not dominant, but even if one were to connect more architectural and artistic dots than he was prepared to do and to recognize as avant-garde, the mediterraneitá of Italian Di Fausto’s rationalism, Marinetti’s Futurism, and De Chirico’s metafisica, one would probably have to admit, that on the aesthetic plane, it did not amount to much more than a suggestion of natural classicism, a vague idea of purity distilled from the sea and bathed in light, an abstract genealogy without the burden of history. What Persico did not consider, however, was that the emporion matrix of mediterraneità under Fascism had found an aesthetic form of expression in more than single artists and even artistic movements. It has spurred the development of a properly Fascist-Modernist art form, namely, exhibition art.

The Fascist State of Mediterranean Exhibition Italian Fascism, was, among many other things, also a state of exhibition, that is, the regime relied on the institution-tool of the thematic mass exhibition to an unprecedented extent, unrivalled by even its totalitarian competitors.116 Naturally, Fascism did not invent the art of designing thematic mass exhibitions but, especially in the 1930s, state-organized exhibitions became ubiquitous in the life of the regime, possibly as a means to counterbalance the excessive ritualization of public life.117 The exhibition of every aspect of the socioeconomic workings of the corporate state—from the extraction and use of Italian minerals to the establishment of summer camps for children—constituted much more than a means of propaganda. Fascist exhibitions did not so much aim to solidify consensus or collective identity, but rather, were aimed at stimulating an ever-weaning enthusiasm by seeking to envelop the visitor in a synaesthetic experience of absolute distinction directly derived from futurist poetics of virility.118 On the other  Danesi, “Aporie,” 25.  Ibid. 116  Marla Stone, The Patron State. Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 223. 117  On this point see Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1997). 118  See my The Historic imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 114 115

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hand, the extraordinary effort poured by the regime into this area stimulated a boom even in commercial fairs and exhibitions. By the early 1930s, we can observe the signs of a Fascist meta-exhibition culture developing through exhibitions dedicated to exhibition art or the surprise art of advertising, as well as exhibition pavilions dedicated to the advertising of the exhibition or fair of which they were part.119 Predictably, both meta-­ exhibition and exhibition art attracted modernist artists and architects more than any other group. Several prominent Futurists, for example, spent most of their time and talent designing pavilions and advertising campaigns throughout the 1930s.120 And yet, Fascist modernism did not develop a specifically “Mediterranean” exhibition-style. It was in the exhibition form per se, that the Mediterrranean imaginary cultivated by the modernist cultural front found the perfect means to bring together imperium and emporion, as we can appreciate in the words of Persico’s friend, Mario Pagano. Writing in a 1941 special issue of his journal, Casabella, dedicated to a comparison between Italian and European exhibition-culture, Pagano— who was anything but an uncritical sponsor of Italian-ness—affirmed that Italian exhibition-art had bypassed all others in Europe because it had accomplished “a futurist synthesis of novecentismo and razionalismo,” which consisted in bringing together two apparently contradictory tendencies.121 On the one hand, under Fascism, exhibitions had been entrusted to the vision of single “architect-painter” who expressed the idea of imperium through the “exaltation of ‘pure’ values that ignore practical considerations in order to attempt an affirmation of style in the most lyrical sense of the word.”122 On the other hand, Pagano added, this idea of “style” without adjectives had expressed itself in the field of “advertisement architecture” much better than in the political exhibitions organized by the regime. Thus, writing retrospectively in 1941, Pagano favorably compared the futurist-rationalist experimentations in purely 119  Both the Fiera del Levante and the Mostra dell’Oltremare analyzed in this chapter had pavilions dedicated to their self-advertising. 120  On futurist design and advertising production see Silvia Barisone, Matteo Fochessati, and Gianni Franzone eds., Parole e immagini futuriste dalla collezione Wolfson (Milano: Mazzotta, 2001), and Claudia Salaris, Il futurismo e la pubblicità, dalla pubblicità dell’arte all’arte della pubblicità (Milan: Lupetti, 1986). 121  Giuseppe Pagano, “Parliamo di Esposizioni,” Casabella-Costruzioni (March–April 1941): 159. 122  Ibid.

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emporion exhibitions such as the Mostra nazionale della moda (National Exhibition of Fashion, 1933) or the Mostra del poster e della pubblicità commerciale (Exhibition of Poster and Commercial Advertising, 1936), to the “compromise aesthetics” of exhibitions like the Mostra augustea della romanità (Exhibition of Augustus’ Rome, 1937) in which the regime had explicitly celebrated its right to Imperium.123 Pagano’s article rightly identified a configuration of forces that had made of exhibition art a key point of confluence between regime image-­ politics and modernist poetics in Fascist Italy. If one considers further the celebrated Triennali of architecture and design in Milan, or the 1934 Mostra dell’Areonautica that Pagano organized himself, one might even agree with his assessment of the greater success (of both public and critical acclaim) of purely commercial over state-organized exhibitions. And yet, Pagano’s neat distinction between these two types of exhibitions turns out to be quite arbitrary and to fly in the face of the mother of all Fascist exhibitions, the Mostra della rivoluzione (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 1932–1934), which set an indisputable modernist apex and reference point for all subsequent mass exhibitions of one kind or another, including regime-organized exhibitions. This was the case, for example, with the Fiera di Tripoli (FT; Tripoli Trade Fair) established in 1927, and the Mostra coloniale (MC; Colonial Exhibition) held in Paris in 1931. The entrance to the FT could not have been more Imperium in style with its “typical Fascist overkill” of gigantic archways, the word “ROME” spelled out in all caps above them, and both she-wolf and eagles positioned above free-standing pillars. The inside however was altogether different: 40 pavilions, all built in different styles, and most of them representing different Italian cities, ministries, and industries, as well as local arts and crafts along with those of the other Italian colonies (Dodecanese and Eritrea). The effect, Krystina Von Hennenberg writes, was not solely one of architectural “syncretism” but also of “harmonic diversity” between “the Italian and the Libyan.”124 Even more strikingly, several Italian pavilions were built in “a pastiche of Islamic styles” while the Libyan Arts and Crafts pavilion, erected in 1932, was uniquely built with pure rationalist functionalism. In addition, no divide between Italian,  Ibid.  Krystyna Von Hennenberg, “Public Space and Public Face: Italian Fascist Urban Planning at the Tripoli’s Colonial Trade Fair,” in Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 157 and 159. 123 124

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colonial, and Libyan buildings existed, with Milan’s pavilion positioned right next to East Africa’s. Inside the FT, the message was one of “organic equivalence” between the metropole and the colonized.125 As Von Hennenberg correctly observes, there was nothing particularly original about the Tripoli fairgrounds that had not been seen in preceding World Fairs, with their eclectic architecture and reconstructed colonial villages.126 Even the mix of rationalist and local-flair pavilions had been experimented by the Italians at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition.127 There, in Paris, the Fascist Ministry of Colonies had presented its exhibits in three buildings that contrasted strikingly with the “indigenous spirit” of the other pavilions in the exhibition.128 These were, first, a slightly smaller scale reconstruction of the recently excavated Septimio Severo basilica at Leptis Magna, in Libya; second, a “fantastical pastiche” of Rhodes sites with a modernist-monumental tower as a façade and reconstructions of late fifteenth-century hostels for French-speaking and Italian-speaking pilgrims behind it (Fig. 7.2); and third, a restaurant built by futurist architect Guido Fiorini in collaboration with Enrico Prampolini (Fig.  7.3). As Maddalena Carli underlines the “metahistorical” message of inserting Romanità in a cyclical narrative that included the medieval-early modern period and the present, could not have been louder.129 But equally evident was the insertion of this cyclical view of history in an overtly Mediterraneanist framework. In the first place, both the references to Severo in Leptis Magna and to Rhodes’ Governor, Lago, were explicitly aimed at highlighting the common Mediterranean passion between French and Italians: Severo, born in Libya, had later become governor of the Gaul provinces (Southern France), and Lago had fought alongside the French at Tangier.130 Secondly, the architectural rhetoric of Mediterranean expansion was enshrined in the emporion references to the early modern  Ibid.  Ibid., 160. 127  See Maddalena Carli, “Ri/produrre l’Africa romana. I padiglioni italiani all’Exposition Coloniale Internationale, Parigi 1931,” Memoria e Ricerca 17 (September-December 2004): 211–232, and Viviana Gravano, “La Romanità dell’Italia coloniale e fascista. La partecipazione Italiana alla Exposition Coloniale de Paris del 1931,” Roouts and Routes. Research on Visual Culture 6, 23 (December 2016). https://www.roots-routes.org/la-romanita-dellitalia-coloniale-fascista-la-partecipazione-italiana-alla-exposition-coloniale-de-paris-del1931-viviana-gravano/ (accessed on October 19, 2019). 128  Carli, “Ri/produrre,” 223. 129  Ibid., 229. 130  Gravano, “La romanità,” 4. 125 126

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Fig. 7.2  The Palazzo di Rodi at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (Paris). In Guide officiel de la Section Italienne à L’Exposition Coloniale, Paris, Publicité de Rosa, 1931

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Fig. 7.3  The Italian Pavilion at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (Paris). In Guide officiel de la Section Italienne à L’Exposition Coloniale, Paris, Publicité de Rosa, 1931

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hospitality tradition of Rhodes, renewed by the regime’s policy of inorientamento expressed in making Rhodes the new center of Mediterranean tourism, and Futurism’s key role in the modernist elaboration of southern mediterraneità.131 From the point of view of messaging coherence, and the envelopment of this message in modernist forms, the Italian pavilions at the Paris MC found no match in any other colonial exhibition installed by the regime. Still, the FT contained an element that made it unique on a colonial, not just Italian-fascist, scale. This was the simple fact that it was organized in Tripoli—on colonial soil. All European exhibitions and fairs, Von Hennenberg writes, “recreated the ‘exotic’ at a remove.”132 In the FT, Fascist Italians created “an ideal Tripoli” in Tripoli itself. Accordingly, Von Hannenberg concludes, the main function of the FT was “not to fantasize, but to mystify, and ultimately reinforce the separatist relations outside.”133 This was certainly true, but, as we have seen in the case of racial legislation, separation was not absolute, especially in Tripoli. Just as Arab Muslims were given Italian citizenship, and mixed-race children were also regarded as potentially Italian until 1936, so the separation between colonizer and colonized in Tripoli was not absolute or the sole option outside of the Fair.134 Seen in the context of Di Fausto’s architectural Mediterraneanism, the FT did not instantiate a fantasy or a lie, but an imaginary Mediterranean world of emporion and reciprocity instead.135 The major input in the Fair was the display of Italian-Fascist Mediterranean-ness to the local population (mostly upper-middle class, of course). By the same token, the Fair also oscillated to the other pole of Fascist Mediterraneanism. In 1928, the FT organizer, Ugo Traversi, proposed a plan for a Mostra delle realizzazioni (MR; Exhibition of Fascist Realizations) to the Ministry of Colonies, to be hosted in a special new pavilion at the 1929 fair.136 The exhibition’s plan was hijacked by the powerful secretary for the Colonies, Dino Alfieri, who made it its own, and transformed it into the above-mentioned Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. Unfortunately, there are no archival traces of Traversi’s plan, but the very fact that a colonial administrator felt the need  Carli, “Ri/produrre,” 229.  Ibid. 133  Ibid., 161. 134  See Mia Fuller, “The Italian Colonial City: Tripoli,” in Moderns Abroad, 151–171. 135  Ibid. 136  See my PhD dissertation, “The Historic in the Making: Fascism and the Politics of Historical Representation” (UCLA 1995), 248–50. 131 132

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to organize an exhibition of Fascist accomplishments even before anyone else had done so on the mainland, and for the benefit of the Mediterranean crowds at the Fair, demonstrated a desire to impress and convince that does not square with the coloniality of mere dominion, separation, and subordination, but emphasized the classic Imperium goal to territorialize by elite-cooptation. The FT lasted until February 1939 and represented the most important colonial market in the Fascist Empire, but not the apex of its Mediterranean oscillation between Imperium and emporion. That place belongs to a trade fair established in 1930 in Bari and appropriately named Fiera del Levante (FL; Levant’s Fair). Judging it from Pagano’s perspective on the modernist fusion of rationalist architecture and futurist principles of design in commercial exhibitions, the FL was probably not what he had in mind when he made his argument. Its architectural framework was hardly rationalist, let alone futurist. The monumental entrance-buildings (Fig.  7.4) were clearly inspired by the Romanic style of many of Bari’s medieval Churches and monuments. The interior space was equally unoriginal with the expected eclecticism of historicist pavilions mixed with trading posts

Fig. 7.4  The Façade of the Fiera del Levante (1931). In Saverio La Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante, Bari, Favia, 1931

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for foreign nations built according to the “architectural characteristics typical of those nations,”137 and, finally, a handful of rationalist-inspired buildings (Fig. 7.5).138 As advertising, the FL was equally unremarkable: although it did develop an aggressive communications campaign, and even enlisted futurist artists to undergo a modernist make-over in 1934 (Fig. 7.6), the first image it used endured, and remains the fair’s primary logo today. It is the image of a red caravel, the boat uniquely associated with Columbus’s “discovery” of America (Fig. 7.7). The historicist framework of the fair, rather than rationalist or futurist aesthetics, was therefore front and center in its public presentation. In fact, in two separate occasions, FL organizers staged “historical carousels” and “dances” to illustrate the commercial traditions of Bari in the middle ages and early modern period.139 Clearly, in Bari, the modernist form of exhibition art did not

Fig. 7.5  Commercial pavilions at the Fiera del Levante (1931). In Saverio La Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante, Bari: Favia, 1931

 Fiera del Levante. Periodico Mensile [FDLPM] 2, 5 (February 1932): 8.  Saverio La Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante (Bari: Favia, 1931), 39. 139  In 1932 and 1935. 137 138

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Fig. 7.6  Futurist-inspired cover of the Fiera del Levante. Periodico mensile (1934)

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Fig. 7.7  The logo image of the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico mensile IV, 2, 1934

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shine through, but what about the Mediterranean imaginary that had sustained it?140 Bari’s was from the beginning an international fair (Tripoli’s would become so only in 1931), with up to 49 nations represented (1937–1939), an average of 4500 exhibitors and over 1 million visitors per year.141 Like the FT, the FL lasted until 1939, but unlike both the FT and all major thematic exhibitions and fairs during the regime, it was designed, paid for, realized, and operated by local elites.142 The FL, in other words, represented a quintessentially southern initiative and realization. Its origins date to 1925  in a proposal made by the local Camera di commercio italo-­ orientale (Italy-Orient Chamber of Commerce), but its inspiration, routinely invoked by organizers and commentators alike, harked back to Mussolini’s 1919–1922 statements about inorientamento, and, in particular, the indication of Bari as the “joining link between Orient and Occident,” and the third leg of a southern “triangle of labor” that comprised Palermo and Naples.143 In Bari and in its fair, Orient and Mediterranean Sea found a point of optimal conjunction that was highly geographically convenient, but it would be a mistake to equate this encounter with an ideological contraction of Orientalism and Mediterraneanism. The dominant ideological dimension of the fair was its southern-ness, and its explicit goal was to solve the “southern question” by the establishment of a modern-Mediterranean emporion. In the presentation of the fair to its anxious southern audience on the pages of the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, historian Michele Viterbo billed it as “redeeming the southern regions from the fatal judgement” of backwardness, and turning them into the “stepping ground for the expansion of Italy in the Mediterranean.”144 Several days later, Wanda Gorjux would qualify the latter by underlining that Bari was not only the apex of Mussolini’s southern triangle, but also the “point of intersection between 140  Pagano himself may have recognized as much since he decided—uncharacteristically— to publish his most explicit endorsement of rationalist Mediterraneanism on the very pages of the fair’s monthly in September 1931. Mario Pagano, “Capisaldi per una concezione di una bella casa moderna,” FDLPM 1, 7 (September 1931): 6–10. 141  Biblioteca Provinciale di Bari, Fondo Fiore: Panorama statistico del primo periodo storico della fiera del levante (1930–1939), 2–6. 142  Mario Dilio, Fiera del Levante: 1930–1986 (Bari: Mario Adda, 1986), 23–25. 143  Michele Viterbo “La Puglia e l’oriente,” Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno [GM] (August 30, 1930). 144  Ibid.

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the routes of Barcelona-Tangiers, Tunis-Marseille, and Malta-Suez.”145 From then onwards, tying the FL, Bari, and the meridione to the Mediterranean imaginary of Fascism became the most lasting feature of every yearly opening and closing ceremony, even after the declaration of Empire. For Giovanni Gorio, for example, the FL itself was “a graph that tracked the development of the mezzogiorno.”146 In 1936, Carlo Curcio returned to Viterbo’s initial argument confirming that the FL had indeed become the symbol of a “meridione projected towards the Mediterranean,” but he also added that having attracted so many northern Italians and Europeans to the south, the FL had equally absolved the function of being a “center for the improvement of Italian unity,” thereby proving that its “Mediterranean function, […] had always been in the plans of the fathers of the nation.” In so doing, he concluded, the FL had single-handedly transformed the “southern question” into an “imperial mission.”147 Viterbo himself would return to the topic a year later (1937), affirming that “a continuous motion pushes Italian life towards the south and this motion has become irresistible after the conquest of the Empire.”148 The rhetorical and political framework of expansion had noticeably shifted from maritime commercial routes in 1930 to colonial empire (1936–1937), but the identification of the FL with the act of giving shape and content to a Mediterranean mission that was both southern and Italian, remained constant and consistent. In fact, the absence of racial exhibitions—except one dedicated to the difesa saniataria della stirpe (Defense of Racial Health) in 1938—within the FL, and the insistence of late 1930s commentators that it was the quintessential “expression of the economic and commercial policy of the Second Roman Empire,”149 or the realized “experiment of a corporate market,”150 suggests a far lower degree of discontinuity between pre-empire and post-empire activities, discourse, and goals, than in most other contexts. To cite only the most glaring of anti-­ conformist examples, one of the states that was most assiduous in sending both official delegations (1931–1924; and 1937–1938) and unofficially affiliated producers, merchants, or import–export consultants (1931–1939)  Wanda Gorjux, “La fiera,” GM (September 9,1932).  Giovanni Gorio, “La vantaggiosa azione della Fiera di Bari sui mercati orientali e levantini,” FDLPM 3: 8 (May 1933): 3. 147  Carlo Curcio, GM (September 17, 1936). 148  Michele Viterbo, GM (August 2, 1937). 149  Ibid. 150  “Lineamenti di mercato corporativo,” La fiera [LF] (1935): 31. 145 146

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was Palestine, that is, in the majority, Jewish-Zionist traders.151 This is not to say that (some or even all) FL organizers were not racist, imperialists, anti-Semites, or at least supportive of racial discourse and colonial acquisitions. They probably were. But what is remarkable in the history of Bari’s Fair is the independence with which local elites could maneuver, and the consistency with which they subordinated all other goals to realizing a Mediterranean emporion in Bari. Chief among the means by which the FL organizers aimed at giving economic form to the ancient emporion matrix under Fascism was their commitment to reconceptualize the very institution of the “fair” in the “era of financial capital.”152 Beginning with the second FL (1931) the organizers instituted an Ufficio Cambi (Exchange Office) with tax experts, lawyers, and enough personnel to assist the average of 3000 commercial operators and 5000 operations that took place during the two weeks of each September in which the fair remained open.153 The next year (1932), they added a proper Reparto commerciale (Commercial Office), a sort of ante litteram Convention Center, where traders could convene to conduct business during the newly instituted giornate della contrattazione (Bargaining Days), organized for each industry represented at the Fair.154 Finally, in 1933, the FL introduced separate areas dedicated to the exhibition of samples divided by nations, to commercial pavilion arranged according to product-types, and to the retail-sale of merchandise to the many visitors who were not interested in import– export negotiations. These original commercial innovations were copied or absorbed by other European fairs (including Bari’s main rival, Milan’s Fiera campionaria),155 but for commentators, in Bari, they maintained some unique characteristics. Firstly, in Bari, bargaining sessions took place not only between Italian firms and foreign firms, but also among foreigners. In some editions, in fact, the volume of foreign to foreign business was even greater than that between Italians and foreigners.156 Some commentators  Panorama statistico, 6 and 9.  Sergio Panunzio, “La Fiera del Levante nell’economia nazionale,” GM (September 1, 1937). 153  LFDLPM (October–November, 1932): 17. 154  LFDLPM (February, 1933): 25. 155  Ibid. 156  LFDLPM (December 1932–January 1933): 3. 151 152

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therefore went so far as hailing the FL as the most effective response to the 1929 crisis, not only in Italy, but on a European scale. For the ex-leader of the National Syndacalist movement, Sergio Panunzio, the FL was “an untimely and almost unreal feat of economic imagination.”157 More prosaically, most commentators praised the way in which the fair had successfully, and incrementally, increased its “commercial” value over its representational and exhibition value. Secondly, over and above the quantitative aspects of the fair’s success, commentators continued to insist on certain qualitative traits. In an article published on September 1, 1937, Viterbo contextualized the FL within the Fascist “spiritual revolution” as having responded and gone beyond both the “autarchic” doctrine of the regime and the destruction of “the human value of exchange” by financial capitalism.158 The destruction of the latter had made prices no longer responsive to “supply and demand in the market” but to “trusts, and cartels,” thereby destroying the “human factor […] for the benefit of stocks.”159 Quite aside from the anticapitalist rhetoric, Viterbo’s argument was that the fair had succeeded because it had always aimed at “reciprocity.”160 This is why organizers had not been concerned by years in which the balance between operations of export and import at the fair had been negative. In fact, Viterbo concluded, the greatest success of the FL was in having attracted not only the whole Orient and Mediterranean, but also exhibitors and national exhibitions from the “US, Brazil, and Argentina.”161 However indirect, these references to the value of reciprocity, and to the three countries of greatest emigration from southern Italians in the late nineteenth century, cannot but conjure up the image of La più grande Italia that was still to be realized despite the presence of Empire. Viterbo was neither an antifascist nor an anti-imperialist, but he certainly oscillated—like almost everyone else that orbited around the FL—between realizations of Fascist Imperium and dreams of Mediterranean emporion. The pendulum of this oscillation markedly swung toward the emporion pole in the discursive area of negotiation between inorientamento and  Sergio Panunzio, “La Fiera del Levante nel 1932,” GM (August 7, 1932).  Michele Viterbo, “Le fiere e la Fiera del levante nell’economia nazionale,” GM (September 1, 1937): 3. 159  Ibid. 160  Ibid. 161  Ibid. 157 158

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Mediterranean expansion. In an article published in August 1932 on the Gazzetta del mezzogiorno, Sergio Panunzio discussed the choice of the word Levante over Oriente (both equally meaning “east”) in the name of the fair, praising the organizers for choosing the former because “Orient” is “a poetic and mythical term that evokes enchanted worlds and kingdoms” and is therefore a “synthetic whole” a “vast, distant, and removed other.” “Levant,” instead, was a more “epic word” that referred both to the “charm of the unknown to be conquered” and to a world that is not “monolithic” but “more immediate, intensive, and hot” than that of the Orient.162 This terminological disquisition did not discourage the widespread use of the term Orient by organizers and commentators alike, but Panunzio’s qualifications of the Levant as non-monolithic, immediate, intensive, and hot squared far more with qualifications associated with southern Mediterranean-ness than with stereotypes of the East. The implicit suggestion was that the FL was an opportunity for Bari and the Italian meridione to connect the West with its own internal other, that is, the hot, intensive, immediate, and multifaceted Levant-South. This point was eloquently made architectonically inside the fairgrounds with the construction, in 1932, of the quartiere orientale (Oriental quarter). On a surface of 4000 square meters rose seven buildings, each “tuned to the forms and the folklore of the countries of reference,” and comprising also a “suk” (a covered Middle Eastern and North African market commonly called a bazaar) (Figs. 7.8 and 7.9). These pavilions were the only ones that remained dedicated to a specific ensemble of nations. All others saw changes of destination almost on a yearly basis. But not so the quartiere orientale, which not only hosted the Italian colonies (including Ethiopia after 1936), and the Mediterranean Levant—namely, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt— but also the Far East of China, Japan, and India.163 What the guide did not add, however, is that, visually, the oriental quarter was not separated by another of the great attractions of the fair: the three reconstructed trulli— ancient conical constructions characteristic of Bari’s countryside that hosted the local fondaco of Bari. Facing the exhibitions of “Rhodes, the Dodecanese, and the Tripolinian suk [sic],” the trulli marked a “Mediterranean world.”164 In the FL, the South and the Mediterranean  Sergio Panunzio, “La Fiera del Levante nel 1932.”  “Novità architettoniche alla terza Fiera del Levante,” FDLPM 2, 9 (June 1932): 23. 164  FDLPM 1: 5–6 (July–August 1931): 8. 162 163

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Fig. 7.8  The Quartiere orientale at the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico Mensile, II, 4 1932

were clearly part of a Levant, itself in expansion toward the Orient. The metaphor of expansion, in fact, was foundational to the fair’s rhetoric of self-presentation: every year, the opening article in its monthly magazine would announce and celebrate an “expansion” of the fairground space, its buildings, and its visitors. In this respect, Gorio was quite right in calling the FL a graph of southern development: its expanding fairground mimicked and appropriated the movement of commercial expansion that it also aimed to stimulate. While the architecture of the FL’s fairgrounds framed the Italian south, and the Mediterranean itself, within a Levant on its way to becoming an Orient, the rhetoric of the commentators expanded explicitly on the fair’s Mediterranean function. Viterbo inserted the FL in the context or what he called a “Mediterranean recovery,” which he identified with the fact that, in 1930, the volume of commercial traffic passing through Suez had surpassed Panama, reinstating the Mediterranean as the greatest site

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Fig. 7.9  The Suk at the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico Mensile, II, 4 1932

of  commercial traffic in the world “including North America.” Having been established in that same year (1930), and being the only “European fair lying on the sea,” the FL had rapidly grown into “the most important Mediterranean market,” and played a primary role in maintaining the momentum of the recovery. In fact, it had given Italy the boost it needed to become the “second maritime-commercial power in the Mediterranean,” and the leader in all “oriental-Mediterranean ports.”165 In charting the history of the FL, its director, Antonio Larocca, declared that the “Mediterranean dream” of its organizers had been fulfilled in 1933, when “all of the nations touched by that sea had participated in the fair,” and these included also the French colonies of “Algeria and Tunisia.” But having also registered an exponential increase from 79 to 1527 exhibitors 165  Michele Viterbo, “Nuovo ciclo mediterraneo e Fiera del Levante,” GM (September 20, 1933).

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from the Mediterranean area between its first (1930) and third editions (1933), “the Fiera del Levante,” he concluded, “had also gone beyond [Mussolini’s] orders of peaceful expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean, by extending them to the entire Mediterranean.”166 Significantly, the appeal to the FL’s Mediterranean mission did not subside with the declaration of Empire. While the quartiere orientale endured after 1936, adjusting itself to host an exhibition of Ethiopian products in 1937, commentators like Gorjux exalted the FL’s “Mediterranean accomplishment” for having turned “autarchy upside down” by turning itself into a market that “favored nations […] that wanted to contribute to the betterment of Mediterranean life.”167 Viterbo and Gorjux were among the most sophisticated commentators of the FL, but their words, of course, should not be taken at face value any more than Mussolini’s. There are, however, some significant data backing some of their claims. Overall, the volume of trade between Italy and oriental markets grew between 1922 and 1937 from 18% to 30%, and, indisputably, the FL played a key role in this increase.168 More counterintuitive is what the data reveal about the relationship between the number of exhibitors from the (European) west and (non-European) east. Both groups grew exponentially between the first edition (1930) and the last (1939), the easterners increasing only from 79 to 538, while the number of westerners soared from 55 to 1080.169 Most strikingly, English, French, and American exhibitors continued to show up at the FL every year, even after sanctions were passed against Fascist Italy by the League of Nations in 1935. In fact, the years 1937–1939, registered the three highest absolute numbers of foreign nations participating in the fair (39–41–46) and the highest numbers of exhibitors from the west (the majority, however, from Nazi Germany).170 These data suggest that even Carlo Curcio was correct in indicating that the FL was less pivotal in opening the West to the East than in bringing the West into contact with the East-South, that is, Mediterranean-area nations and territories. Equally suggestive, although not as dramatic, are the data regarding Italian exhibitors from the south 166  Antonio Larocca, “Storia e ideali della Fiera del Levante,” FDLPM 4, 1 (January–April 1934): 12. 167  Wanda Gorjux, “Italia imperiale. VIII Fiera del Levante,” GM (August 28, 1937). 168   Archivio Storico della Camera di Commercio Italo-Orientale: Antonio Larocca, Relazione morale in consuntivo 1939, typewritten document, 69. 169  Panorama statistico, 1–2. 170  Ibid., 7.

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compared to those from the center-north. The two groups were almost consistently split in half, with the southerners being more numerous in the first three editions (1930–1933), while center-northerners regularly outnumbered them after 1935, without any decline in the number of southerners.171 Northern Italians seem to have found more reasons to flock to Bari in the years of autarchy, and a possible explanation might be that, in those years, the FL maximized its Mediterraneanist agenda by organizing trading sessions solely with specific Mediterranean-area countries: Albania, Egypt, Greece, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey.172 The Fiera del Levante held in Bari between 1930 and 1939 could have easily  been named Fiera del Mediterraneo—a title that would not have been undeserving, or the product of customary Fascist self-­aggrandizement. This title, in fact, may have rendered justice to the component that made the FL most popular as an exhibition: its maritime pavilions. From the beginning, FL commentators pointed out that “the sea constituted the only means of communication worthy of the attention of our producers and traders.”173 In the first three FLs the maritime world was represented by a Mostra della pesca (Fishing Exhibition) and an aquarium. Both exhibits, however, attracted the greatest number of visitors to the fair, and commanded the attention of commentators. Each of the seven issues of the monthly fair magazine in its first year of publication (1931) contained an article on the fishing exhibition, the aquarium, or the conditions of fishing in Italy and abroad. Then, in 1933—and henceforth—the maritime exhibits were renamed Mostra del mare (Exhibition of the Sea) and greatly expanded by including the “largest naval exhibition ever installed” in Italy, as well as annual exhibits dedicated to each of the major Italian ports.174 This 1933 maritime expansion was also explicitly connected to the completion of the commercial renovation of Bari’s port, which had begun on the very day the FL had opened in 1930.175 With its new port completed, Bari itself was finally ready to participate fully in the development of fishing, seafaring, and commercial activities stimulated by the FL, and the combination of new Exhibition of the Sea and new harbor was itself celebrated by a choreographed spectacle entitled Marinaresca (sea-like) that  Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 10. 173  FDLPM 1, 1 (March 1931): 29. 174  GM (August 13, 1933). 175  “Le mostre speciali e lo sviluppo della Fiera di Bari,” FDLPM 3, 7 (April 1933): 10. 171 172

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climaxed in the new harbor with a splashdown of a seaplane that had just crossed the Atlantic. But this was not all: on exhibit next to the pavilion were also two relics of D’Annunzio’s epic gestae: the aircraft from which he had dropped pro-Italy leaflets over the city of Vienna in February 1918, and the small submarine with which he had accomplished the famous Buccari mockery in August of the same year. Of course, neither of these two vehicles was directly related to Fiume, but, by 1933, the name of D’Annunzio was forever connected to that revolutionary festival. On the plane of its emporion imaginary, Bari’s fair had inherited and developed Fiume’s epiphanic Mediterraneanism. It might not be pure coincidence, in fact, that, early on, one of Alceste De Ambris’ principal collaborators, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, identified in the FL the kernel of a true “corporate market” infused by the spirit of syndicalism.176 The Fiera del Levante was of course permeated by Imperium elements, and not only after 1936, but the emporion matrix in this locally southern enterprise is so evident that it cannot be ignored. It speaks to a reactivation of an ancient form of Mediterranean imaginary that may help to explain the popular and lasting support Fascism enjoyed not only in Bari but throughout the Italian South. Still today, the Mussolinian sentence “l’italia è un’isola che si immerge nel mediterraneo. Se per gli altri il mediterraneo è una strada per noi è la vita” (Italy is an island immersed in the Mediterranean. For others the Mediterranean is a path, for us it is life itself) is faintly visible on the façade of a palace in the main square of Monreale (Sicily) facing its famous Norman Cathedral (Fig.  7.10). The imperial and colonial solutions Fascism proposed in response to the “southern question,” including the offers of fertile lands to southern peasants in Libya and Ethiopia, may have generated part of that lasting support, but the recoding of Italian identity as “Mediterranean” in so many sectors of Fascist official culture evidently opened a space for its southern-­ emporion inflection to emerge in cultural, economic, and socio-­identitarian forms. Nor was this limited to purely local initiatives in which either the 176  Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, “La Fiera del Levante e il corporativismo,” FLDPM 1, 1 (March 1931): 29. In 1935, the now annual periodical of the fair, declared Olivetti correct by indicating in the FL a model corporative market in its having dispelled and counteracted the mythical capitalist notion of the “spontaneous” market by mobilizing each corporate sector of the economy, and inviting its members to convene their national meetings at the FL. In addition, from 1935, all national exhibits were made permanent and open year-round and the exchange office created a “market for private compensations” that constituted a glorified form of barter. “Il mercato delle compensazioni private,” La fiera (1935): 30.

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Fig. 7.10  “L’italia è un isola,” Mussolinian phrase appearing on a building facing the Cathedral of Monreale (Sicily, Italy). (Photographed by the author)

Fascist party or state had little input or control, as was the case with the FL. The same oscillation between Imperium and emporion can be observed in the Mostra Triennale delle terre d’oltremare (MTO; Triennial Exhibition of African Colonies) the last grand political exhibition organized by the regime in Naples in 1940. It was the intention of the Fascist Party, which initially commissioned it, to use the MTO to celebrate the Fascist Empire with a display of both historical and symbolic effects that would trace the Italian right to Imperium from Roman times to the present. The architectural prominence of the PNF tower and the six pavilions dedicated to the documentation of Italian expansion in the Mediterranean were an eloquent reminder of these intentions (Fig. 7.11). But if one compares the actual space covered by the permanent-symbolic installations—60 rooms in total—with the 150 temporary or semi-permanent installations aimed at documenting the economic activities connected to the expansion of Italy in the terre d’oltremare (literally “the oversea lands,” a euphemism for Italian colonies), the impression one gets is that the MTO was much closer to the FL

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Fig. 7.11  Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’Oltremare, 1940. Main entrance and PNF Tower. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare)

than to more overtly political exhibitions such as the Autarchic Exhibition of Italian Minerals held in Rome in the preceding year.177 In fact, more than celebrating and legitimizing the Roman origins of Fascist Imperium, the MTO ended up documenting Fascism’s debt to the Mediterranean imaginary cultivated by Italian modernists and Futurists in particular throughout the ventennio. This intention was announced by the organizers in defining the guiding criterion of the exhibition’s esthetics as an “architettura a sorpresa,” an explicit reference to Cangiullo’s principle of the “surprise effect,” and a criterion that still resonates with the analyses of contemporary scholars who have remarked on the unusually “unplanned” character of the exhibition’s urbanistic development.178 It was, in fact, surprising that the austere 177  A preliminary appreciation of the parallels between the fiera del levante and the MTO is in Enrico Crispolti, “Nella Fiera del Levante a Bari, 1935 e nella Mostra d’Oltremare a Napoli, 1940,” in Futurismo e meridione, 115–117. 178  Archivio Storico Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare (ASMTO), Naples: advertising pamphlet (1941) and Alessandra Ferlito, “Re-inventare l’italianità: la Triennale delle Terre italiane d’Oltremare di Napoli,” Roots & Routes. Research on Visual Culture 6, 23

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stile littorio dominating the entrance to the expo gave way in the surrounding areas to a potpourri of architectural styles that was truly without precedent in the history of regime or colonial exhibitions.179 These ranged from the daringly rationalist arena, a “theater for the masses” designed by the 26-year-old Neapolitan architect, Giulio De Luca, to the orientalist “Marco Polo Tower” designed by Vittorio Calza Bini (Fig. 7.12), to Di Fausto’s Libyan pavilion in which the quintessential “Mediterranean architect” inverted the traditional relationship between metropole and colony by casting it in the most “monumental” form of Libyan architecture, that is, in the shape of an imposing white building resembling a mosque (Fig. 7.13).180 Equally surprising in a political-themed exhibition such as this one were the 26 pavilions dedicated to all aspects of Mediterranean production and consumption built behind the symbolic center of the exhibition by another young Neapolitan architect, Stefania Filo Speziale. Among them was the celebrated pavilion dedicated to the electrotechnical industry decorated by futurist master Enrico Prampolini (Fig.  7.14), as well as the purely emporion-pavilions such as the “Torre pubblicitaria” (advertising tower), and two other towers containing exhibitions of fashion and tourism. Above all, the surprise effect was captured in the urban planning of the exhibition itself, which enveloped an entertainment park, a zoo, as well as several green areas and houses, and a spectacular funicolare (suspended cable) that connected the MTO with the top of Naples’ Posillipo hill. More theme-park than thematic exhibition, the MTO was governed by a keen interest in local tourism—hence the funicolare, the terrace on top of the PNF tower, and the restaurant–Olympic-swimming-pool complex designed by Naples’s foremost futurist master, Carlo Cocchia. Alongside its commercial goals, however, was the undeniable objective of the expo’s organizers to offer una faccia una razza (one face one race) and an Italiani brava gente (Italians, good folks) version of Fascist (September–December 2016), https://www.roots-routes.org/re-inventare-litalianita-la-triennale-delle-terre-italiane-doltremare-napoli-alessandra-ferlito/ (accessed on October 27, 2019). See also Umberto Siola, La Mostra d’Oltremare e Fuorigrotta (Napoli: Electa, 1990), Gianni Dore, “Ideologia coloniale e senso commune etnografico nella mostra delle terre italiane d’oltremare,” in L’Africa in vetrina. Storie di musei e di esposizioni coloniali in Italia, Nicola Labanca ed. (Treviso: Pagus, 1992), 47–68, and Lidio Aramu, Dal Borgo di Fuorigrotta al Rione Flegreo (Napoli: Denaro Libri, 2003). 179  See Antonella Russo, Fascismo in Mostra (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999). 180  MTO, Guida (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940), 12.

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Fig. 7.12  Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940. Vittorio Calza Bini, Torre Marco Polo. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare)

colonization—hence the innumerable ethnic spectacles of African dances and music, and the ever-present delegations of imperial subjects in local costume roaming the exhibition—in order to produce in the visitor a “living experience of the Mediterranean man”—as an advertising pamphlet put it.181 The MTO, we might summarize, adapted Marinetti’s image of  ASMTO: advertising pamphlet (1941).

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Fig. 7.13  Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940. Florestano Di Fausto, Padiglione Libia. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare)

Capri as a geological bridge between Europe and Africa to the whole Italian peninsula, thereby projecting the notion of the Fascist Mediterranean both as an extension of the fatherland—destined to live and die with it—and a hinterland between the real north and the deep African south to which the exhibition dedicated various pavilions. This, at least, seems to be the message we still garner today from the only surviving decoration of the exhibition: Prampolini’s mural situated on the north side of Cocchia’s restaurant. This work literalized, and simultaneously inverted, Marinetti’s image of Capri as a “piece of that pier that once connected Europe to Africa” by shaping the African continent—represented to the left of a quintessentially Mediterranean image of dancing natives, white and black—as the Capri Prampolini had loved and depicted repeatedly since the 1920s (Figs. 7.15 and 7.16). Identifying Africa with Capri, Prampolini closed the analogic chain of Mediterranean identifications that Marinetti initiated in his early poetry, by finally and irrevocably subsuming

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Fig. 7.14  Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940. Enrico Prampolini, Padiglione dell’electrotecnica. In Guida. Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare (Naples: Mostra delle Terre d’Oltremare, 1940). (Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare)

Fig. 7.15  MTO 1941, Enrico Prampolini, Plastico murale. (Photographed by the author. Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare)

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Fig. 7.16  Enrico Prampolini, Paesaggio di Capri (1932). (Courtesy of Futur-ism.it)

Imperium to emporion. It would be misleading to read into this picture any conscious or latent anti-imperialist message. And yet, one cannot escape the impression that Prampolini’s mural not only encapsulated the emporion imaginary that Futurism had cultivated before and during the regime, but also celebrated and foreshadowed the survival of this imaginary in the postwar era.

CHAPTER 8

From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum

In the evening hours of January 13, 2012, the cruise ship Concordia hit a bank of submerged rocks, ran aground, and overturned off the coast of the Giglio island (Tuscany, Italy), resulting in 32 deaths and dozens of injured passengers (Fig. 8.1). But the initial shock for an accident that had no precedent in recent memory, and for the dramatic images of panic-­ stricken passengers, did not last long. Rumors that the ship had been wrecked because of a risky maneuver ordered by its captain, Francesco Schettino, and that the same captain had jumped onto a lifeboat before many of the passengers had been taken to safety, rapidly transformed the public reaction into a national outcry of indignation.1 Few, however, could have predicted how this outcry would take visible form in the aftermath of the accident. Almost overnight, and in the days immediately following the accident, there appeared online and on the streets of many an Italian village, city and town, T-shirts reproducing the peremptory sentence: “Vada a bordo cazzo!” (“Get the f*** back on board!”). The sentence was extrapolated from a recorded phone conversation posted online, in which an enraged Chief of the local Coast Guard, Gregorio De Falco, had ordered

1  In this 2017 video, Captain Schettino defends himself from those accusations. https:// www.ilgazzettino.it/italia/primopiano/schettino_la_verita_un_video_non_potevo_risalire_ sulla_nave-2311273.html (Last accessed on June 1, 2020).

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_8

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Fig. 8.1  The Costa Concordia sinking off the coast of the Giglio island. © Alamy

Schettino to return to the ship.2 On the face of it, the T-shirts elicited the universally known refrain that the captain is the last to abandon ship. But, in light of the Mediterranean imaginaries exposed in this book, the production and wearing of these T-shirts by thousands of Italians cannot be passed off merely as an act of histrionic indignation. It revealed a collective, if largely subconscious experience of national shame; a powerful mixture of resentful impotence and collective resignation. Schettino’s crime was not merely individual. He was guilty of the capital crime of brutta figura (making oneself look bad) perpetrated at the expense of the whole nation, for the accident could not but elicit the memory of the famous Mussolinian motto that identified all Italians as a “nation of sailors” (popolo di navigatori).3 Vada a bordo T-shirts, therefore, testified that, over 60 years after its demise, echoes of the fascist Mare Nostrum were still alive in the Mediterranean imaginary of Italians. In fact, if the Mussolinian motto   Conversations retrievable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VkIEWKmO_8 (Last accessed on June 1, 2020). 3  The motto was extracted from a speech delivered by Mussolini on October 2, 1935. 2

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likely constituted a subconscious referent for this national display of shame, another Fascist period icon may have also encoded public reactions to the accident. For many Italians the image of the rapidly sinking Concordia may have functioned as the Scylla to the Charybdis or its heroic double: the cruise liner Rex built in 1931 to project a Grand Tour image of the Fascist Mare Nostrum. Although it is highly improbable that any Italian who has seen the Rex in person was alive in 2011, the majestic liner was known to most Italians as it had been immortalized in an unforgettable scene of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1979) in which ordinary Italians are shown spending the night at sea waiting to salute the ship’s passage. Serendipitously, the Rex and the Concordia were also related by their birth sites, and by having suffered an almost identical death: both had been the largest ships ever built in Italy in their times; both had been assembled in Sestri Levante near Genoa; both ended up capsized in shallow waters—though the Rex was sunk by British war planes on September 8, 1944 (Fig. 8.2). The uncanny parallels between the Rex and the Concordia thus offer a tempting allegory to conclude the exploration of Mediterranean imaginaries conducted in this book. They trace the descending parabola of Imperium—the dominant matrix of the Mediterranean imaginary of twentieth-century Italians—from its Fascist apotheosis in the 1930s, to its military demise in World War II, its immortalization in cinematic memory, and its belated, global humiliation. At the same time, looking more closely at the circumstances surrounding the Concordia accident helps us see that the public reactions to the episode were no mere return of a repressed emotional attachment to Mare Nostrum. As mentioned above, the sentence printed on the T-shirts was taken from a phone call between Schettino and De Falco that had been recorded and diffused online.4 The recorded voices of the protagonists were key to encode this dialogue as belonging to the history of the “Southern Question.” Here was a representative of the state (De Falco), speaking in correct Italian, and sternly apostrophizing a gibbering Schettino who spoke with a recognizable Neapolitan accent. Their dialogue came very close to a picture-perfect confrontation between the Northern (Italian) sense of civic duty and the moral turpitude of an Ur-Southerner. This reception was reinforced by what had emerged in the press regarding the circumstances of the shipwreck, including the alleged fact that Schettino 4

 See footnote 2.

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Fig. 8.2  The Rex sinking off the coast of Trieste on September 8, 1944. (Courtesy of Imperial War Museum)

had caused the accident because he wanted to impress the young Eastern European woman he was entertaining in his cabin, by performing a so-­ called bow—a maneuver designed to pay homage to a fellow captain by taking the ship off its standard course and passing very close to his island of residence.5 The episode, then, seemed almost scripted for a return to the discourse of the Two Italies, one, civilized and law-abiding, in the North, the other, in the South, oversexed, criminal, and deprived of any moral and civic compass (see Chap. 4).6 But what is most remarkable about the events surrounding the sinking of the Concordia is the fact that 5  See for example https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/07/13/concordia-motivazioni-condanna-schettino-quando-lascio-per-passeggeri-no-salvezza/1870301/ (Last accessed on June 1, 2020). 6  See editorial in La Repubblica (January 21, 2012).

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the public pillorying of Schettino was not at all divisive, polarizing, or overtly racist. It was, we might say, truly national and collective. Reactions to the events were uniform across the peninsula, and not divided between Northerners and Southerners. Vada a bordo T-shirts appeared in Milan, as in Naples, Reggio Calabria, and Palermo. Southerners were at one with Northerners in siding with De Falco and shouting from their chests “Get the f*** back on board!” (Captain Schettino). In fact, in view of the origins of Chief De Falco, it soon became clear that the episode was a perfect emblem for the successful completion of the century-and-a-half-old project of making Italians. De Falco was born in Naples, and was therefore, like Schettino, a native Southerner. Yet, he had clearly not remained one, for he no longer had any Neapolitan inflection when he spoke, and he had pursued his studies in Milan. There, supposedly, he had not only lost his accent, but also absorbed a stern sense of state, and a law-abiding, conscientious, and indignant attitude toward the lack of civic conscience displayed by his paesano Schettino. The latter, instead, was the most perfect embodiment of the cowardly, irresponsible, and disloyal terrone (Southern Italian hick), whose allegiance to a maritime code of “honor,” and disregard for the sacred “law of the sea,” had made him responsible for the death of 32 people, and a brutta figura of international proportions. At first sight, then, we could register in the collective identification of even southerners with De Falco the sign of a successful conclusion to the key component of the project of “making Italians” explored in the first chapters of this book: the making of southerners into northerners. And yet, a closer look at the dialogue also confirms that the matrix underpinning the reaction of Italians to this tragic episode remained far more meridionista than meridionalista. Whatever the circumstances that determined Schettino’s abandonment of the ship, when he spoke with De Falco he was on land, hundreds of meters away from the Concordia. De Falco’s orders were clearly inappropriate—to say the least. His instructions to Schettino were to take a boat to reach the bow of the sinking ship, and then use the same ladder, which passengers were descending to safety onto rescue boats beside the wrecked ship, to mount the vessel. Once on board, Schettino was supposed to “count the remaining passengers” and report their total number, as well as their relative numbers, categorizing them by “men, women, and children” to De Falco, as if any of these disciplined actions could have made a difference in securing the safety of the remaining passengers rather than

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becoming an obstacle to their safety.7 And yet, not a word was written in the press or uttered in public reactions to the blatant absurdity of De Falco’s orders. Italians were clearly transfixed by the iconic status of the expletive that was meant to return Schettino to play his part in the tragicomic demise of Mare Nostrum, as if the blot on the national honor of Italians could only be only expunged by the captain going down with his boat. Below this act of collective national blindness clearly lurked the meridionism that had colored the rise and development of Mediterranean imaginaries since the Risorgimento. De Falco’s words paid no more than lip service to a supposedly “northern” sense of duty, accountability—and accounting—but, all the same, they were sufficient to make an entire nation disregard the contextual evidence before them: the feasibility of De Falco’s commands, and the adverse consequences of executing them. In other words, De Falco’s act of numerology latched onto the logic of coloniality by which—as Quijano puts it—“cultural Europeanization” had been transformed into an aspiration for all postwar-era Italians.8 Ordering Schettino to board a sinking ship was no longer an act of domestic racism or national division. Figuratively, it aimed at solidifying a new imaginary boundary between Euro-Italians and Mediterranean others, thereby separating Europeanized Italy from a much more threatening south. As indirectly as it elicited Mussolini’s motto and the building and sinking of the Rex, the image of the sinking Concordia also called to mind, and in more immediate ways, the macabre spectacle of the near-weekly shipwrecks that, from the late 1990s onward (and most intensely since the Arab Spring of 2011) had transformed the Mediterranean sea into a “watery grave” for thousands of people seeking asylum in Italy from Albania to North Africa.9 In so doing, the sinking of the Concordia and the extraordinary public reaction it elicited, plainly testified to the dramatic transfiguration of the Mediterranean from figurative forge for the making of Italians, to menacing gateway for the daily assault of foreigners on the ever-weakening “national” identity of Italians.

 See footnote 2.  Anibal Quijano, and “Coloniality and modernity / rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (March/May 2007): 168. 9  Alessandro Dal Lago, “Watery Graves,” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010). Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/60k4w27j. 7 8

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Beginning in the years following the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), southern Italian ports registered the arrival of ships packed with thousands of Eastern Europeans—mostly from Albania—seeking refuge and political asylum in Italy.10 On March 7, 1991, 27,000 disembarked in Brindisi; 20,000 on August 8, in Bari. In 1997, the influx of Albanian refugees resumed with 17,000 arriving on unseaworthy vessels. On March 28, one of these dilapidated boats collided with a ship belonging to the Italian Coastguard and rapidly sank: only 34 out of 100 refugees survived, the remainder trapped in the boat and never recovered. The 1990s thus registered both the first attempts by Italian governments to pass comprehensive immigration legislation (1990 and 1998), and the rise of a public debate on the costs and consequences of immigration. In 2001, for the first time, Italian political elections were dominated by the theme of immigration, and since then, anti-immigrant sentiment and overtly racist discourse have been on a steady rise in the Italian public sphere. Yet, it was in the convulsive aftermath of the Arab Spring (2011) that the Mediterranean Sea began to acquire a new configuration and centrality in the Italian imaginary. The progressive and uninterrupted stream of men, women, and children from Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, arriving (on increasingly unsafe vessels) at the Sicilian islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa, or on the coasts of Calabria—and dying by the thousands in the attempt—yielded a damaging image of the Meditteranean sea from which many Italians begun to feel that they not only had to extricate, but also defend, themselves. Along with the Concordia, the image of Mare Nostrum had capsized and revealed its underbelly: a mare aliorum (a sea of others).11

10  See Michele Colucci, Storia dell’immigrazione straniera in Italia. Dal 1945 ai giorni nostri (Rome: Carocci, 2018). 11  It is with no small tinge of irony that the major operation of containment of unauthorized landings of migrants by the Italian military in 2013 was named operation Mare Nostrum. On the image of mare aliorum, see my “From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum: Mediterranean Theory and Mediterraneanism in Contemporary Italian Thought,” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010). Permalink http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vp210p4, and Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme, Italy and the Mediterranean. Words, Sounds and Images of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Palgrave, 2013).

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Fiat Europa I have indulged in a detailed exploration of the Concordia accident because it offers a compendium of the main themes treated in this book as well as an appropriate reminder of the central role that Mediterranean imaginaries continue to play in the making of Italians. In particular, the episode suggests that, despite succumbing to the military defeat of Fascism, and disappearing from the mental horizon of postwar Italians for decades, the Imperium matrix of Mare Nostrum has resurfaced over the past 20 years in the discourse around the threatening image of a “sea of others.” Implicit references to this mare aliorum, and more explicit ones to its companion image of mare monstrum (monster sea)—born of the alliteration of Mare Nostrum—remain ubiquitous in the contemporary Italian press, and in the pronouncements of both leaders and followers on the populist side of the political spectrum.12 Furthermore, blatantly racist denunciations of the “assault” of refugees arriving at the coasts of Italy have clearly had an impact on vast strata of the Italian population. Suffice to cite a 2018 study that found Italians to be the people with the most skewed perception of the presence of immigrants on their territory among all European national groups. On average, Italians overestimated the number of immigrants and refugees coming from the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Middle East to be 25% of the entire Italian population, when in reality they represent only 8%.13 While the explanation for this  data eludes the competence of this researcher and the boundaries of this study, this book may contribute a relevant context to interpret them, and thereby illuminate the contemporary moment in Italy, and possibly in the European super-state. The main suggestion emerging from my reading of the Concordia affair is that the path from “our sea” to the “sea of others” has been paved by the Europeanization of Italian identity. To put it starkly, World War II not only put an end to the dominant position that Imperium had acquired in the Mediterranean imaginary of Italians for a half century, but also set the stage for a wholesale replacement of Mediterranean-ness by European-­ness at the imaginary fulcrum of making Italians. In fact, the ideological kernel of this substitution can be found at the very origin of European unification. As well known, the idea of United Europe first took root on the tiny 12  Cristina Giudici, Mare Monstrum, Mare Nostrum: migranti, scafisti, trafficanti. Cronache dell’immigrazione clandestina (Turin: UTET, 2015). 13  See https://www.thelocal.it/20180829/italians-overestimate-number-of-immigrantsin-italy-more-than-any-other-europeans-study (Last retrieved June 1, 2020).

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Tyrrhenian island of Ventotene, where in 1941, two antifascist leaders, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, wrote their manifesto Per un Europa libera e unita (For a Free and United Europe).14 The Mediterranean location of the Manifesto had nothing to do with its connection to the replacement of Mare Nostrum by Europe. This connection is elicited  instead by  the political-intellectual context from which  Spinelli and Rossi’s ideal  had  emerged. According to Spinelli’s testimony, the path that led them from reflecting on “the relationships among nation states” to the idea of a United States of Europe, had  came from pondering  upon the failures of the “League of Nations” to contain the aggressive spread of Fascism.15 Whether or not they began their reflections from a specific consideration of the economic sanctions that the League had imposed on Fascist Italy for the brutal conquest of Ethiopia, the idea that any postwar order needed to eliminate any fantasy of Fascist Imperium must not have been far from their minds. In fact, the core tenet of their Ventotene Manifesto was that “the absolute sovereignty of the nation state has led to a generalized wish to dominate all other states and to consider vaster and vaster territories as part of their ‘vital space’.”16 Fascist states were therefore the most “coherent” expression of the nation-state’s “absolute” sovereignty; hence, they argued, the point of intersection for all antifascist groups in Italy—and Europe-wide—could only be the creation of a United States of Europe modeled after the federation of the United States of America. Rossi and Spinelli were short on specifics regarding the constitutional shape of their project, but their manifesto remained both Magna Charta and litmus test for the processes of European unification that followed in the decades after the war’s end. Spinelli himself went on to create a European Federalist party. Although neither he nor his party exercised much influence on the direction of Italian foreign policy—or European unification processes—it could be argued that the greatest continuity between the antifascist ideals and contemporary Italy is to be found in the progressive Europeanization of Italian politics, culture, and economy. The political and economic milestones of this process are well known. In 1957, the signing of the “Trattati di Roma” (Roman Agreements) that 14   Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, Per un’Europa libera e unita. Il manifesto di Ventotene (1944). Retrieved at https://www.senato.it/application/xmanager/ projects/leg18/file/repositor y/relazioni/libreria/novita/XVII/Per_unEuropa_ ibera_e_unita_Ventotene6.763_KB.pdf. 15  Altiero Spinelli, Come ho tentato di diventare saggio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984), 307. 16  Spinelli and Rossi, Per un’Europa, 15.

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instituted the European Economic Community (EEC) confirmed the key role that Italy intended, and went on, to play in the economic and political unification of Europe. On the left side of the political spectrum, “Eurocommunism” was first conceptualized by the leader of the Italian Communist Party Enrico Berlinguer to spread Europe-wide between the mid-1970s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Finally, the ensuing demise of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s has led in Italy to a new political culture rotating around the question of the desirable degree of Italy’s integration within the nascent European Union, and the concurrent rise of the mare aliorum imaginary. The uncomfortable suggestion emerging from the previous paragraphs is that the Europeanization of Italian identity in the postwar era has effectively realized the antifascist deconstruction of Mare Nostrum imaginary, but also supported the belated externalization of the Mediterranean as a “sea of others.” While there is no question that neither Spinelli nor Berlinguer could have predicted this development, the transfiguration of Mare Nostrum into mare aliorum in the past two decades, has effectively translated the Imperium mission of the former from making “southerners into northerners” into making “Italians into Europeans.” In fact, this shift is eloquently revealed by the evolution of the most important populist party that was founded in 1991—Lega Nord (Northern League), simply renamed Lega (League) in 2018. The party was created on the basis of a secessionist solution to the Southern Question. The separation of Northern Italy from a resource-sucking center-south in the hands of a cast of Roman politicians, who had supposedly kept themselves in power by allowing the south to take advantage of the wealth produced in the north, was the fundamental goal of the original leghisti (league followers), coated in a thin veneer of federalist demands. The Northern League unequivocally asserted that the Southern Question was still the central issue to be resolved after 140 years of unity—the answer to the question being reminiscent of Leopoldo Franchetti’s projections of amputation (Chap. 2). And within this context, the legendary leader of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, did not lose any opportunity to articulate a compendium of antinationalist, regionalist, and Europeanist federalism, even citing Spinelli among his inspirations.17 Over the past decade, however, the recently renamed and rebranded Lega has all but reversed its original stance. The 17  Marco Reguzzoni, Gente del nord. L’avventura della Lega vissuta dall’interno (Milan: Rizzoli, 2011), 16.

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new party platform has replaced the discourse of the Two Italies with a virulently anti-immigration stance, and an “Italy first” nationalism that its new leader, Matteo Salvini, unabashedly adapted from the slogan of US President Donald Trump. On the basis of this sovereigntist agenda, Lega has won as much consensus in the North as in the South, thereby entirely reversing its former separatist, regionalist, and antinationalist agenda. And along with these original traits of Lega Nord, Salvini’s roundabout has also involved the repudiation of the League’s prior support for European federalism. What are we to make, then, of this anti-Europeanist stance by one of the principal ideologues of the mare aliorum? Salvini’s Lega is among the harshest critics of the European Council, European policies, and the European Union in general. But this anti-­ Europeanism is not a rejection of the imaginary project of making Italians into Europeans. On the contrary, the first suggestion emerging from the considerations given in this study to the history of Mediterranean imaginaries in the making of Italians is that the coalescence of a mare aliorum imaginary in the first decades of the new century should be considered among a primary factor in the political transformation of leghismo (league-­ related populism). Salvini and sovereigntists like him are the last breed of ideological meridionists whose defense of “Padanian” (from Padano Valley), or Italian “identity,” is rooted in the same territorialist agenda that pits Europa against the “sea of others,” while at the same time attacking— in the name of sovereignty—European institutions for not being sovereigntist enough. What is at stake, then, in the unholy alliance of mare aliorum and the Europeanization of Italian identity is the territorialization of Europe itself; the entrapment of the latter in a meridionist utopia in which even the term Mediterranean is appropriated to define southern European nations. This de-Mediterraneanized image of European-ness has become hegemonic not only in Italy but across Europe. It has driven hard wedges between normative Europe and “Mediterranean Europe” (Spain, Italy, and Greece), and externally, of course, between a European union institutionalized along a West to East axis and the Mediterranean “of others.” And yet, this Imperium Europe is not the only image that has emerged from the demise of Mare Nostrum. In fact, to appreciate fully the legacies of pre-war Mediterranean imaginaries on the making of post-­ Fascist Italians, we need only return to the primal scene of the birth of Europe in the tiny island of Ventotene to observe how the Manifesto also drew its primary inspiration from the emporion matrix of the Mediterranean imaginary.

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In discussing how he and Rossi had arrived at the “discovery of federalism” and the idea of a United States of Europe,  in his memoir Spinelli refers very specifically to an article written by Luigi Einaudi on the League of Nations in 1919.18 In this article, the liberal ideologue and author of the Principe mercante (see Chap. 4) harshly criticized the formation of the League for what he saw as the reinforcement of the ultimate cause of the war: the principle of national sovereignty.19 Alternatively, Einaudi proposed a United States of Europe as the first step toward a United States of the World, which for him was “the sole concrete and serious ideal that could replace the old one of the sovereign and independent nation state.”20 Most surprisingly, Einaudi saw in the solution of the “questione di Fiume” (the question of Fiume) the opportunity for such a leap into the future.21 Denouncing the Anglo-American design for assigning the port city to the newly formed Yugoslavian state, he argued that, of all the options on the table, this was the worst because it assigned sovereignty on the basis of the “territorial contiguity” of Fiume with the State of Yugoslavia. “Wasn’t Germany moved to wage the war we just concluded,” asked Einaudi “by the very idea that a state cannot call itself free and sovereign unless it controls the ports that are necessary to its traffics (Anvers), and the straits through which its fleet needs to pass (Calais on the English Channel”22 To privilege Yugoslavia’s sovereignty over Fiume was, for Einaudi, a reaffirmation of the territorializing logic of nation-states not only against the principle of “nationality and self-determination” (favorable to Italy) but also against an “economic logic” according to which sovereignty over Fiume should have been assigned to “Hungary, or Bohemia, or Austria, or Rumania,” precisely because none of these had any port on the 18  Luigi Einaudi, “Fiume, la Società delle Nazioni e la sovranità,” in Lettere politiche di Janus (Bari: Laterza, 1920): 159–167. In Altiero Spinelli, Come ho tentato di diventare saggio, 307. There can be little doubt that Spinelli meant to ascribe the origin of his turn toward federalism to the reading of this article. On the same page he refers to the Latin saying “habet sua fata libelli” (books have their own destiny) and deliberately contrast the fact that the article “had fallen on dead ears when it was published, and the author himself had put it aside since he had felt no interest in deepening his understanding,” to the fact that “those pages had not been written in vain” because they were now “giving fruits” in the minds of “two readers who had lived for over ten years segregated from the world but were now reflecting on the fate of Europe.” 19  Ibid., 159. 20  Ibid., 162. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid., 164.

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Mediterranean, while Yugoslavia already had several. To this acceptable option, however, Einaudi preferred another, namely, the establishment of an “international government” for Fiume, which would be the first flower of a budding “United States of the World.” Along with Fiume, he advocated that all Mediterranean straits of “Suez, the Bosporus, the Dardanelles, and Gibraltar,” should also be put under international authority “in order to ensure access to the sea to Russia, Armenia, Anatolia, etc….”23 Only by securing unfettered access to the Mediterranean sea by all the lands that were not directly bathed by its waters, he concluded, we will be able to “create the mechanism that will gather all the people of the world into a single network, which, by depriving them little by little of parts of their sovereignty, will get them used to the idea of a United States of the World.”24 For the reader of this book, it should not be all that surprising that Einaudi would develop such a daring thesis in the confrontation that pitted Fiume against the League of Nations. His proposals lined up quite comfortably with the political forms that the emporion imaginary had assumed since the end of the nineteenth century—including Sergi’s celebration of the nomadic civilization of homo mediterraneus (Chap. 4), and his own celebration of la più grande Italia (Chap. 4) in the first decade of the twentieth century. By the same token, elements of Einaudi’s proposals can be traced in both D’Annunzio’s idea of a Fiuman League of People to oppose the League of Nations, and in Spinelli-Rossi’s elaboration of the Manifesto and European federalism. The connectivity among all these proposals partakes of the fractal nature of the emporion imaginary. Each of them articulated a form of counter-territorializing, anti-meridionist, and anti-identitarian be-longing that worked in networking ways (emigration as expansion of Mediterranean civilization, Fiuman League of People, federalism as opposition to nation-state sovereignty), referred itself implicitly or explicitly to the social history of the Italian-Mediterranean south, and was refracted even in modernist-fascist forms of Mediterraneanism. At the same time, a coherent emporion vision of a united Europe never materialized either in the aftermath of the Great War or in that of World War II. Neither D’annunzio—who was probably not even aware of Einaudi’s writing on Fiume—nor Spinelli, who attributed explicitly to the reading of these articles his conversion to federalism, developed in any consistent way Einaudi’s ideas in that direction. European-ness emerged as an  Ibid., 166.  Ibid., 167.

23 24

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independent guiding star to replace Mare Nostrum. But so did emporion. Unencumbered by oscillation and subordination, and long before European-ness asserted its hegemonic hold on the imaginary horizon of Italians, the Mediterranean fishing net found its most autonomous and coherent expression in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Emporion ENI Along with the Ventotene Manifesto, another document surfaced from the Catholic side of the antifascist experience to guide the postwar reconstruction of Italian society and its economy. Written in August 1943, the so-­ called Camaldoli Code, inscribed a number of principles for a post-Fascist Catholic-democratic party that would not only separate it from the legacy of Catholic compromises with Fascism, but would do so by affirming the “social mission” of both State and industry.25 The document was instrumental in bringing the leadership of the newly formed Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy party) to support the creation of a nationalized energy sector in the immediate postwar era, which expanded on the same sector that operated under Mussolini. The key component of this nationalization was the transformation of AGIP (The Italian Agency for Oil) into ENI (National Hydrocarbons Authority), a company that was put in charge of preparing, organizing, and executing every aspect related to research, extraction, refinery, and distribution of oil, natural gas, and chemical derivatives, to support the economic development of the country. Under the leadership of its first President, Enrico Mattei, ENI became as important as the Marshall Plan both to Italian recovery and the ensuing “economic miracle,” but its impact on the construction of the Italian imaginary in the postwar era far outstripped that of the Marshall Plan, notwithstanding the latter’s film productions, which were designed to tie Italians to Nato, American capitalism, and the West, in general.26 Mattei’s ENI was quite conscious of its double  ideological role  as champion of European decolonization and “Neoatlanticist” antagonist to the “Americanization” of Italian culture and economy.27 The group did not 25  Elisabetta Bini, La potente benzina italiana: guerra fredda e consumi di massa tra Italia, Stati Uniti e terzo mondo, 1945–1973 (Rome: Carocci, 2013). 26  Regina M. Longo, “Marshall Plan Films in Italy, 1948–1955: Cinema and Soft Power” (PhD dissertation. University of California Santa Barbara, 2012). 27  Luca Peretti, “Neocapitalist Realism: ENI’s Industrial Films in the Anticolonial Era” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2018).

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only exert enormous political influence on the formation of Italian governments, the choice of economic ministers, and the direction of economic investment by the Italian state, it also directly sought to influence public opinion. It founded and financed a national daily, Il giorno, and produced dozens of films on its activities. In the words of its critics, ENI became “a state within the state.” According to a recent study, it was even more than that: it became “a nation within a state.”28 Both definitions refer to the combination of foreign and internal policy initiatives pursued by ENI, particularly during Mattei’s tenure as president between April 1945 and October 1962. Initially, it was the discovery and extraction of oil and gas in the northern regions of the Po Valley that ignited the hopes of Italian industrialists for energy autonomy. Soon, Mattei’s plans grew in the more ambitious direction of challenging the monopolistic policies of the “seven sisters”—the seven companies that made up the Anglo-American oil cartel, so named by Mattei in parodic reference to the “seven sins.”29 But the ideological core of Mattei’s strategy derived from two interlocking agendas: firstly, to employ the extraction and refinery of oil and gas in the southern regions of Basilicata and Sicily as the engine for the economic development of Italy’s south, and, secondly, to restore this developed south to its rightful place at the center of a renewed Mediterranean economy. Almost a 150 years after its conception, the Bourbon dream of a “second Sicily” (Chap. 3) functioning as an industrializing “north” for the economic development of the Mediterranean basin, seemed to have finally found a historical agent for its realization. Yet, instead of separating the two Sicilies from the rest of Italy through an artificial canal, ENI’s fishing net of pipelines, ports, and “artificial islands”—offshore extraction platforms—did more than any previous actor to nationalize the image of emporion extending its hold on the imaginary of Southerners to the cultural consciousness of all Italians. ENI’s emporion strategy was not merely the dream of an isolated, if brilliant, manager. It was shared by the bulk of the Christian Democratic Party in power, and found a public arena in the Mediterranean Colloquia that, between 1958 and 1964, provided Mattei with an international audience for his ideas and plans.30 Most importantly, it was a strategy held  Ibid., 67–68.  Paul Frankel, Mattei. Oil and Power Politics (Westcost, Conn.: Praegher, 1966), 20. 30  Bruna Bagnato, “La Pira, de Gaulle e il primo Colloquio mediterraneo di Firenze,” in Giorgio La Pira e la Francia. Temi e percorsi di ricerca. Da Maritain a de Gaulle, Pier Luigi Ballini ed., (Florence: Giunti, 2005), pp. 99–134. 28 29

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together by a single ideological thread: the decolonization of the Italian South, of Italy, and of the Mediterranean North African and Asian shores from the yoke of the Anglo-American oil cartel. As early as 1953, in Naples, Mattei illustrated his plans to “redress the disequilibrium between North and South on the plane of pro capita state investment and industrial development” not only by focusing on the extraction of oil and gas in the south, but also by producing chemical fertilizers in the south that were needed to mechanize its agriculture, and by instituting a delivery service of natural gas that would reach the remotest southern area, providing access to energy for the first time.31 Several years later, he authorized the building of a behemoth extraction-refinery-chemical station at Gela in Sicily, which became the area of “greatest concentration of oil probes and perforation stations in the whole Mediterranean and Middle Eastern basins.”32 And, in Gela, ENI inaugurated the first offshore mobile platform for the extraction of oil in Europe. By 1958, the company had largely concentrated in the mezzogiorno its research for new energy resources, and invested two-thirds of its research budget to that end. Mattei’s southernist strategy was, in equal parts, neoatlanticist, Mediterraneanist, and counter-­ European insofar as it was decisively decolonialist. ENI’s “press office” in Tunis functioned as a de facto secret cell for financing the Algerian liberation front (FLN).33 And ENI-backed Mediterranean seminars in Florence became one of the principal stages for the voices of advocates for North African decolonization to be heard in Europe.34 Mattei himself made no secret of the transcolonial (see Chap. 7)  connections he saw between meridionism and colonialism. Speaking in Tunis in June 1962, he characterized Italy as being “like all North African nations,” in having to “valorize its own resources,” and spelled out his support for the decolonization process across North Africa, analogizing it explicitly with the experience of the Italian south “which had been colonized by the north.”35 ENI translated this transcolonial agenda into what came to be called the “Mattei formula,” from the first contract he negotiated with Iran in 1955, from which the Iranians received 75% rather than the customary 50% of profits  Enrico Mattei, Scritti e discorsi. 1945–1962 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2012), 379 and 574.  Ibid., 648. 33  Mario Pirani, Poteva andare peggio. Mezzo secolo di ragionevoli illusioni (Milan: Mondadori, 2010), 295. 34  Bagnato, “La Pira,” 101–102. 35  Mattei, Scritti, 730. 31 32

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from the operation. This was a model of profit-sharing, and co-­ responsibility in research, production, refinery, and distribution that was intended to undercut the monopolistic practices of the Anglo-American cartel, and the attempt by the French state to transform colonization into postcolonial dependency on the territories France had colonized (parts of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia). In the words of Mattei, his formula was based on replacing all “vestiges of colonial relations” with the sole principle of “mutual advantage” applicable to all aspects of the deal.36 In the following years, ENI applied the Mattei formula to all of its contracts with Middle East and Mediterranean-region parties: Iran (1955), Egypt (1955), Libya (1957), Morocco (1958), Algeria (1958), Sudan (1959), Tunisia (1961), Nigeria (1962).37 In this way, for a time, Mattei successfully broke the monopolistic stranglehold of the seven sisters on Middle Eastern and North African hydrocarbons, as well as contributed to a process of decolonization that also involved Italy’s former colonies (Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia).38 In so doing, Mattei spurred hopes for the formation of a “loose Mediterranean federation” of oil-producing and oil-consuming nations, which was officially backed by King Mohammed V of Morocco.39 ENI’s gas stations, along with its logo of a black dog with a fiery tongue and six legs, became ubiquitous throughout Mediterranean-area countries in the early 1960s.40 Integrating research, extraction, refinery, and distribution, ENI provided a model and a stimulus for independent oil companies to emerge in the basin. Their number rose from 9 in 1949, to 19 in 1956, and to 81 in 1970.41 Naturally, all this was initiated by Mattei not out of Christian charity or for altruistic reasons, but in order to “build a new Mediterranean role for Italy.”42 Furthermore, from the perspective of today’s global climate crisis, a network of pipelines, refineries, and drill stations does not make ENI’s fishing net any more appealing than the piracy and slave-trading networks of centuries past. The fact remains, however, that in the activities of Mattei’s ENI the emporion imaginary that we have seen emerging in so many cultural forms (Chaps. 3, 4, 5 and 6) and  Ibid., 600  Nico Perrone, Enrico Mattei (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 84. 38  Ibid., 130. 39  Ibid., 118. See also Mattei, Scritti, 731. 40  Ibid., 133. 41  Pinella Di Gregorio, “Eni: agente speciale della decolonizzazione” Meridiana 83, (2015): 197. 42  Ibid., 196. 36 37

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also regional-economic initiatives (Chap. 7) in the long history of making Italy and Italians, finally found a hegemonic national-political expression. Filling the void left by the demise of Mare Nostrum, emporion ENI explicitly tied the valorization of Italy’s south to the establishment of a fishing net model of mutuality with Mediterranean-basin peoples and governments. What’s more, this message was not limited to the Italian political class, a few Catholic intellectuals, or foreign dignitaries. It received support from the full spectrum of Italian political forces, including the Communist opposition, and it percolated through the wider imaginary of everyday Italians. Propaganda was considered important enough for ENI’s leadership to justify the establishment of an in-house film production unit. Visual traces of emporion ENI were thus diffused by dozens of newsreels and documentaries produced to advertise and illustrate the activities of the group in the Mediterranean basin. Some, like “Pozzi a mare,” (Wells in The Sea, 1959) and “L’isola del petrolio” (The Island of Gasoline, 1962), are still capable of transmitting the emotional charge associated with ENI’s Mediterraneanism—from the likening of drilling platforms to islands connected by a “net” of pipelines that function like the “canals” of yesterday, to the characterization of the social world of the platform as “leveling all differences between men of the north and men of the south.”43 ENI’s Mediterranean emporion did not survive intact the dramatic death of its founder in a 1962 airplane “accident”—still largely considered a mandated murder.  44 According to one of his closest collaborators, by 1965, Mattei’s “Mediterranean dream of a Euro-Maghrebian energy politics” had already  been all but destroyed.45 Successive presidents of the company ceded much of the ground that Mattei had gained from Anglo-­American interests, and in time, the company lost much of its international stature as primus inter pares due to rampant corruption in the Italian political system. Still, a sliver of Mattei’s Mediterraneanism has lived on in the imaginary of 43  Peretti, “Neocapitalist realism,” 72. Pozzi a mare can be viewed at https://archiviostorico.eni.com/aseni/it/explore/audiovideo/IT-ENI-AV0001-000819?r=audiovideo; L’isola del petrolio can be retrieved at https://archiviostorico.eni.com/aseni/it/explore/ audiovideo/IT-ENI-AV0001-001065?r=audiovideo. Courtesy of Archivio Storico ENI. 44  Well-founded suspicions that Mattei’s death was not the result of an accident but of sabotage by the hands of the CIA or Italian mafia (or the one via the other) have fueled an entire cottage industry of publications as well as a first rate film by Francesco Rosi, Il caso Mattei (1972). 45  Pirani, Poteva, 354.

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ENI’s corporate culture, and the company’s pipelines have continued to “grid the seafloor of the Mediterranean” from “South to North and across” until the present day.46 The Italian fishing net of Mediterranean pipelines remains the largest in Europe, and the fourth largest in the world. Most significantly, starting with the 1958 construction of the first oil pipeline from the port of Genoa to Bavaria in Germany, and continuing with the pipeline of natural gas built between Algeria, Sicily, and France, ENI’s fishing net has been rightly defined as “transmediterranean” for its role in bringing “the Mediterranean directly into the heart of Europe.”47 The legacy of Mattei’s ENI is therefore not only enduring, but, given the context in which it took place, also a double legacy. ENI filled the void left by the demise of Mare Nostrum with the most cogent, consequential, and institutionalized articulation of Mediterranean emporion. But, by doing this, it also posited a counter-pole to the territorializing forces that operated in the Europeanization of Italian politics. It articulated a model of Mediterranean be-longing that contrasted with the institutionalization of a Euro-Italian identity. The latter, however, was already independently  at work in constructing a brand new Euro-Mediterranean imaginary for Italians.

Mediterranean Prêt-à-Porter The previously explored connection between the gradual Europeanization of Italian political culture from the mid-1960s to the present, and the return of the Mare Nostrum in the transmuted image of the mare aliorum, tells us how the story ends. It gives us a snapshot of a definitive polarization between Europe and the Mediterranean in which the former becomes hegemonic in the political imaginary of contemporary Italians. Mare aliorum allows Euro-enthusiasts and Euro-skeptic to have their Mediterranean cake and eat it too. The sea of the others isolates Italians from the figure of reference (the Mediterranean) from which they have derived most inspiration in the first century and a half. Like every snapshot, however, this one leaves out vast swaths of semiotic territory, fixing our gaze on the overly dichotomic polarization of Europe versus the Mediterranean. The path between the most cogent institutionalization of the fishing net imaginary in emporion ENI and the definitive subordination of the Mediterranean to Europe in the image of mare aliorum was paved instead by a bridge  Ibid., 356.  Mattei, Scritti, 844.

46 47

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form of imaginary that may have constituted—and still constitutes—the most socialized form of Mediterranean imaginary to surface since the end of the nineteenth century. Commonly referred to as Italia balneare (seaside Italy), a consumer image of Mediterranean-ness has emerged from the physical summer-time transfer of masses of Italians to the coastal communities and islands of the peninsula.48 This new Mediterranean imaginary is the quintessential product of the “economic boom” and of the financial resources that postwar Italian governments poured into the Italian south through the so-called Cassa per il mezzogiorno (National Found for the South). Seaside Italy has spurred a minor geo-demographic revolution. Since 1951, coastal municipalities have seen a residential increase of 36.4%, three times higher than that registered in non-coastal communities, and largely autonomous from the processes of urbanization, and south to north exodus, which have taken place in the same period.49 Most significantly, the population of many coastal centers and islands has consistently more than doubled during summers, and not solely due to the influx of Italians, but, in almost equal measure, to foreign tourism, and, specifically, northern Europeans. Seaside Italy can be safely identified as the icon of what Stephanie Malia Hom has aptly defined as the age of “Italy-as-destination.”50 From the perspective developed in this study, however, the image of the seaside Italy is specifically designed to attract Northern Europeans to a neo-­ Mediterranean Grand Tour. Accordingly, this Europe-driven Mediterranean imaginary represents a radical departure from the logic of Mediterraneanist oscillation and the discourse of be-longing associated with emporion. With Italia balneare, and in analogy with other consumer forms of nation-­ building imaginary, Mediterranean-ness enters a phase of globalized branding that carries the stamp “Made in Italy.” Since its inception, in fact, seaside Italy has been accompanied by a number of cultural phenomena that have Mediterraneanized Italian-ness from the outside. Suffice to mention the global identification of Italian cuisine with the notion of the “Mediterranean diet,” and the Hollywood passion for Mediterranean-­ flavored movies like Cinema Paradiso (1988), Mediterraneo (1991), Il postino (1994), and La vita è bella (1997), which have replaced the  Paolo Frascani, Il mare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), 167–198.  Ibid., 185. 50  Stephanie Malia Hom, The Beautiful Country. Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 48 49

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traditional cinema d’autore as Italian winners of Best (Foreign) Picture Oscars. For the past five decades, Italia balneare has stood for a globalized identification of Italian-ness with a Mediterranean-ness prêt-à-porter that has paralleled the ascendency of “Italy-as-style” at the imaginary core of postindustrial society itself.51 At the same time, this image has also continued to refer to the ritual flocking of northern Europeans onto the beaches of Rimini, Riccione, and Milano Marittima, and, more generally, to a momentous blurring of imaginary boundaries between European-ness and Mediterranean-ness. With its implicit invitation to Northern Europeans to return to their “Mediterranean passion” (Chap. 2), Italia balneare has provided an image of the Mediterranean as a sea for (European) others. In so doing, it has constituted a middle ground between the long durée pull of emporion on the Italian imaginary, and the Europeanization of Italian identity in the postwar era. Put another way, it has creolized the de-territorializing matrix of emporion with the meridionist logic of Imperium thereby providing a hybrid form of Mediterranean imaginary, between the institutional apex of emporion in Mattei’s ENI and the transfiguration of Mare Nostrum into mare aliorum. This uncomfortable hybridity is on full display on the island of Lampedusa. For years, Lampedusa’s spiaggia dei conigli (Beach of Rabbits) has been celebrated as “one of the 10 best beaches in the world” by the international travel press, irrespective of its contiguity with the mare aliorum. The weekly tragedies taking place few miles off its shore, and the equally frequent arrival of thousands of migrants rescued by the Coast Guard in the summer months, do not seem to register on the appreciation barometer of La Repubblica readers, or those of Trip Advisor and Forbes.52 The complementarity of Italia balneare and mare aliorum thus speaks of a smooth passage from the sea of (European) others to the sea of the (Mediterranean) others. And it testifies to the increasing subordination of the Mediterranean to the hegemonic pull of Europe on the political imaginary of postwar and contemporary Italians. This subordination, however, does not seem to have extended to the realm of the cultural imaginary of Italians, and very specifically, of southern Italians.  Claudio Fogu, “Fascismo-Stile,” Spectator 21, 2 (Spring 2001): 56–67.  See La Repubblica. Viaggi (February 26, 2019). Retrieved at https://www.repubblica. it/viaggi/2019/02/26/news/spiaggia_dei_conigli_e_la_piu_bella_d_italia_dal_brasile_ai_ paesi_baschi_tutti_gli_oscar_di_tripadvisor-220159317/. 51 52

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As Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme have recently shown, the Mediterranean has never been as central to the definition of Italian thought and culture as “in the post-cold war era.”53 And quite significantly, it has never been as multiformly present as in the “words, sounds, and images” produced by southern Italian authors in the same period.54 Including in their cultural-intellectual survey the voices of the Genoese songwriter Fabrizio De Andrè, along with those of Neapolitan blues icon Pino Daniele—among many other artists, musicians, and filmmakers— Bouchard and Ferme account for the specific ways in which, over the past three decades, the Mediterranean has been articulated from a southern-­ Mediterranean perspective, irrespective of whether it is voiced by southern or northern Italians. Their readings of southern-inflected Mediterranean texts, songs, movies, and writings (both fictional and non-fictional) have demonstrated that another Mediterranean imaginary, quite separate from the consumer-image of Italia balneare, and quite opposite to the mare aliorum, has developed in post-1989 Italy. Readers of their work can fully appreciate how the Mediterranean has become both a question, and a quest, in contemporary Italian culture. Their study, however, does not explore the affiliations of this “Mediterranean Quest(ion)” with the deep history of Mediterranean imaginaries highlighted in this book; nor does it analyze its relationship with its own counter-image, mare aliorum, or, with the hegemonic status that Europeanness has acquired in the political imaginary of Italians. This analysis, instead, is of central concern for a final assessment of the contribution that Mediterranean imaginaries have made, and continue to make, to the making of Italians. Leaving the reader to explore the wealth of cultural imagery in Bouchard and Ferme’s book, the final coda of this study will focus exclusively on the geophilosophical articulation of the “Mediterranean quest(ion)” in contemporary Italian thought.55

 Bouchard and Ferme, Italy and the Mediterranean, 2.  Ibid., 1. 55  Ibid., 72–94. 53 54

CHAPTER 9

Coda: The Mediterranean Quest(ion)

Delivered in a lecture at the University of Turin in 1990, the seminal conceptualization of the “Mediterranean Quest(ion)” does not belong to an Italian thinker but to the Algerian-born father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. In that lecture, Derrida elaborated an idea of Europe as “a cape” and “an ‘appendix’ to the body of the ‘Asian continent’” with a single cultural-geographical predicament: “heading” toward the North African shore of the Mediterranean.1 Confronting the twin historic events of his times, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the impending unification of Europe, Derrida refused to celebrate the victory of capitalism and continental unity by calling for a “European cultural identity” that would be “responsible for itself, for the other, and before the other, to the double question of le capital, of capital, and of la capitale, of the capital.”2 In what may turn out to be one of the most timely meditations of that fin de siècle, Derrida advocated for the discursive consolidation of a European form of Mediterraneanism, which would consist in the exploration, at once, of the Mediterranean as “a negative limit and a chance,” that is, an “opening of identity towards its very future,” and of Europe as “opening onto a

1  Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 19 and 35. 2  Ibid., 16.

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history for which the changing of the heading, the relation to the other heading or to the other of the heading, is experienced as always possible.”3 Along with the mother of all Mediterranean musings, namely, Predrag Matvejević’s Breviario mediterraneo (1987), Derrida’s call to Mediterraneanize Europe might be considered the most influential piece of writing to have inspired a spectacular and global rise of interest in all things Mediterranean in the past three decades.4 This revival, however, has not always gone in the direction of articulating a Mediterranean vision for Europe; nor has it been contained within the horizon of a deeper European self-interrogation. As Roberto Dainotto has aptly remarked, Mediterranean discourse has itself undergone globalization; it has become a “global business” in which “books sell, research centers spring up, and Mediterranean Studies [migrate] from Tunis and Bari to Ottawa, Durham (North Carolina), Sidney, and Katmandu.”5 Hence, Dainotto has further contended, the foundational metaphor of Mediterranean discourse, namely, “liquidity,” has also become its discursive modus operandi. Mediterranean discourse has reproduced the very “logic of the market, of competition, of the free circulation of goods and labor,” namely, the logic of that “Westernization” of the world that—following Derrida—the new Mediterranean discourse was supposed to have opposed, stopped, or transformed from the inside.6 Dainotto’s critique of New Mediterraneanism is quite accurate and biting. By celebrating Mediterranean “liquidity,” he charges, “first-world intellectuals” situated in the hegemonic institutional sites of European and North American universities—whatever their “good or utopian intentions”—have concealed the fundamental “asymmetry” between the European and non-European gazes on the Mediterranean, by “selling the contemporary Mediterranean as the best of all possible worlds.” Naturally, Dainotto has explicitly included Italian intellectuals (and hence himself) in his critique of the new Mediterranean discourse. As he starkly puts it: any Italian may write about the Mediterranean […] without bothering to cite Abdelkebir Khatibi, Albert Memmi, or Taieb Belghazi. For a Turkish or  Ibid., 17.   On the impact of Matvejević’s Breviario mediterraneo see Anna Botta, “Pedrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean Breviary: Nostalgia for an ‘Ex-World’ or Breviary for a New Community?” California Italian Studies 1, 1 (2010). Permalink https://escholarship.org/ uc/item/7qs4x1v0. 5  Roberto Dainotto, “Asimmetrie mediterranee. Etica e mare nostrum,” NAE 3 (2003): 5. 6  Ibid., 7. 3 4

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Algerian author it is instead impossible (or suicidal) not to confront the “Mediterranean” canonized in European literature—provided, of course, that said author wishes to reach a Mediterranean audience beyond its national borders.7

From a postcolonial perspective, Dainotto could not be more correct, but his critique risks obfuscating the impact that Mediterranean discoursing has had on the cultural history of modern Italy, and the transcolonial framework within which it has taken place. This framework could not be more relevant in assessing the contributions that Italian thinkers have made to the global discourse on the Mediterranean, because it is specifically in the writings of Italian intellectuals that Derrida’s call for a Mediterranean heading has received most attention and geophilosphical elaboration. It is in no way coincidental that the clearest voice to respond to Derrida’s “Mediterranean Quest(ion)” in the post-cold war era is that of a sociologist based in Bari, the port city of the Fiera del levante (Chap. 7), but also the harbor where the first wave of Albanian refugees began to arrive in staggering numbers in the first half of the 1990s. Franco Cassano’s Pensiero meridiano, published in 1996, proposed itself as antidote to the still incipient rise of a mare aliorum imaginary by offering an articulation of identity between Mediterraneanness and Southernness that has remained both unsurpassed and canonical.8 “Southern Thought” as the book’s title has been translated, is, for Cassano, “Mediterranean thought” tout cour, because “thinking the Mediterranean” has become the cipher of a Mediterranean-area-born discourse among Mediterraneanborn intellectuals and artists aimed at rescuing the image-­concept of the “South”—not the Mediterranean per se—from any meridionist inflection of Mediterraneanism. Mediterranean thought is the expression of an “autonomous South” that has regained “the dignity of being subject of its own thinking, and interrupted its being a mere ‘object’ of thought for Northern Europeans.”9 Accordingly, the first “theoretical move” enacted by Pensiero meridiano is that of challenging head-on the meridionist vision

 Ibid.  Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano (Roma e Bari: Laterza, 1996). Edited and translated in English by Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme with the title: Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean (New York: Fordham UP, 2012). 9  Cassano, Southern Thought, xxxviii, 1–6. 7 8

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of the South-Mediterranean as a “not-yet,” an “incomplete North.”10 This vision, Cassano charges, situates the Italian South “between a paradise for tourists and an archaic hell dominated by the mafia,” while at the same time subjecting it to a teleological “conception of historical time” by which the promise to the South to become a North is simultaneously affirmed and negated.11 We have, of course, encountered these connotations of meridionism in previous chapters, and in discussions of the Imperium form of Mediterranean imaginary. It couldn’t have been otherwise because the intellectual origins of this book are rooted in the terrain fertilized by Cassano’s “Southern Thought” and developed by his compatriot from Bari, Luigi Cazzato. But the Mediterranean thought designed by Cassano goes far beyond the articulation, and rejection, of meridionism. Southern Thought aims at rescuing the Mediterranean from its identification with nostalgia and the premodern in order to offer a prescription of Mediterraneanness to counter the Western-Atlantic direction of Europe’s heading, which has been hegemonic for the past four centuries. The most distinguishing trait of Cassano’s work, therefore, is not his conceptual denunciation of the meridionist Mediterranean, but the imaginary fertility of his Mediterraneanization of Europe and the West. At its core, Southern Thought proposes a radical reworking of the Western ideas of time and space rotating around the chronotope of Odysseus’s voyage: the going out to sea in order to return to land. From this chronotopical principle, Cassano derives the three essential elements of Mediterranean-Southern thinking: first, the rejection of all forms of “fundamentalism,” but in particular that of capital(ism), intended as an unrestrained drive toward the abstraction and dematerialization of all values; second, the anchoring of history to an idea of “slow time,” radically different from the Faustian-Hegelian time of indefinitely accelerating progress endorsed by the West in its Atlantic phase, and symbolized by Melville’s Ahab;12 and third—and above all—a “sense of measure” in all things that prevents the Mediterranean imaginary from pursuing the Atlantic path of transcending both time and space.13  Ibid., xxxv.  Ibid., xxxix. 12  Slow Mediterranean time, by contrast, is symbolized for Cassano by Odysseus, the hero of “return.” 13  Franco Cassano, “Southern Thought,” Thesis Eleven 67 (2001): 3, 7, 10. 10 11

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Unmistakably, Cassano’s Mediterranean-Southern thinking responds to Derrida’s call by ordering a frontal attack on Europe’s long-­standing heading toward the Atlantic and capital. His own “Mediterranean Quest(ion)” asks Europe to remember that migration is always a dialectic of leaving for returning, that modernity is not a transcending but an owning of time, and that human life thrives only within a bounded horizon. In the same breath, Pensiero meridiano also challenges Derrida’s singling out of the “other” in Europe’s heading. For Cassano, the Mediterranean is an irreducible “multiverse” that opposes any form of “universalism,” including that of the transcendental single Other, be it Mediterranean or southern. Mediterranean multiversalism is predicated on “reciprocal translation.”14 This is a metaphor, to be sure, but also a practice that pertains to the formation of Mediterranean-Southern discourse itself. Pace Dainotto, Cassano’s articulation of southern thought has developed into a conscious effort to invite the voices of the non-European others into the Mediterranean dialogue.15 This multiversal trait of Cassano’s Mediterraneanism unveils the contiguity between the imaginary elicited by pensiero meridiano and that of its opponent: mare aliorum. Cassano’s Mediterranean is a transcolonial “sea of others” where the “of” does not stand for threatening territorialization, but for processes of de-­territorialized be-longing in a community of others. In the “sea of others” we thus find not only the reversed image of mare aliorum but the Ur-matrix of emporium. * * * With the “sea of others” we have finally reached the beginning of this scholarly journey. And here we find that, for as southern as Cassano’s Mediterranean thinking purported to be, it has not remained such, or isolated. Along with that of Cassano, the two names most identified with the Italian articulation of the “Mediterranean Quest(ion)” are those of the Venetian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, and of British-born postcolonial theorist Iain Chambers whose latest book is appropriately entitled La questione mediterranea (The Mediterranean Question).16 Cacciari and  Cassano, Southern Thought, 50  See part IV in Cassano, Southern Thought, 107–153. 16  Iain Chambers and Marta Cariello, La questione mediterranea (Milan: Mondadori, 2019). Chambers has been residing for many years in Naples where he teaches at the Università Orientale. 14 15

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Chambers prove that “Southern Thought” does not refer to the geographical origin of its authors, but to the geophilosphical exploration of Mediterraneanness in direct relation to Europeanness. In fact, in Cacciari’s geophilosophical explorations, the South itself recedes into the background and the Mediterraneanization of Europe assumes center stage. Adopting and adapting a single physical feature of the Mediterranean, Cacciari reconfigures Europe as an “archi-pélagos,” an ensemble of distinct islands “divided by the sea, and by the same sea intertwined; all nourished by the sea, and endangered by the same sea.”17 His Mediterranean is neither Europe’s other, nor Europe’s destiny toward its other (North Africa); it is closer to Europe’s shadow, an imprint left by the continent on the sand, which Cacciari reads as if it were composed of murky grains deposited on the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee. For Chambers, instead, Mediterranean means “fluidity.”18 He uses this geophilosophical image to highlight the way in which the land-bound, nation-bound foundations of modern historical consciousness have not only suppressed vast chunks of non-European hegemony in the Mediterranean, but also negated a Mediterranean “hearing” of history modeled after the plural “voices” and “rhythms” of its “polylinguistic and polycultural composition,” which are the “tributary histories that flow into the ‘modern’ framing of the world.”19 Against the gaze-driven, progress-driven, monotheistic “fundamentalism of Occidental historicism,” Chambers proposes the “baroque” notion of historical writing that looks into the (Deleuzian) “folds” of modernity in order to disavow the “empty, homogeneous continuum of historical time.”20 This suggests a historiography that relocates the gaze “in the historical swell of a tempestuous sea, where no single perspective is ever able to fully impose its view,” and thus produce a history “lost at sea,” “vulnerable to encounters,” a historical poetics of “pulsation” akin to the experimental prose of Walter Benjamin’s Passegenwerk.21 Cassano, Cacciari, and Chambers represent the tip of a geophilosophical Italian iceberg. Beginning with the publication of Pensiero meridiano in 1996, the discursive construction of the “Mediterranean Quest(ion)” has exploded among Italian intellectuals, and has all but replaced  Massimo Cacciari, Arcipelago (Venice: Adelphi, 1997), 71.  Ibid., 2. 19  Ibid., 32 and 15. 20  Ibid., 26. 21  Ibid., 33 and 27. 17 18

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traditional concerns regarding the Southern Question.22 As Bouchard and Ferme have highlighted, the names of Francesca Saffioti, Giuseppe Cacciatore, Mario Signore, Pietro Barcellona, Mario Alcaro—among many others—have joined those of Cassano, Cacciari, and Chambers as contributors to a geophilosophical discourse that is uniquely Italian and refracted in innumerable cultural images. Naturally, the articulations of the Mediterranean of others are not exclusive to contemporary Italian discourse or culture. On the contrary, this image may be considered the principal currency in the contemporary liquidity of Mediterranean discourse. What marks the significance of the Italian case in this now global context is neither its volume nor its capillarity per se—though they are significant. It is the fact that both discourses about, and cultural expressions of, the “sea of others,” in Italy, are embedded in the historical dialectic between cultural, social, discursive, and political forms of Mediterranean imaginaries, and the making of Italians. The contemporary sea of others is also the Mediterranean of Mattei’s ENI, and the sea of the Fiera del levante, of futurist theatrics and surprise effects, of Marinetti’s Mafarka, of the Carta del Carnaro, of the “Far Greater Italy,” of the nomadic civilization of homo mediterraneus, of the second Sicily, and of the fishing net of islands and harbors that has marked the Mediterranean as a liquid continent for millennia. What has changed dramatically from previous manifestation is the context of this imaginary oscillation. The “sea of others” and its obverse mare aliorum have replaced, respectively, the poles of emporion and Imperium, but their figural contiguity has also shortcircuited the traditional horizon of making Italians. To make Italians per se is no longer the primary objective of cultural politics in Italy. It is now a question of making them Europeans or of making both Italians and Europeans into Mediterraneans.

22  Most of them remain untranslated, which points to the specifically transcolonial position of Italian discourse on the Mediterranean vis-à-vis its liquidity: it took 16 years for Cassano’s seminal Pensiero meridiano to be translated in English. While it is true, as Dainotto contends, that non-European-born or -settled participants in Mediterranean discourse cannot avoid quoting French, or Anglo-American authors, this is not entirely the case with Italians whose constructed “Southern-Mediterranean” position is reflected also in the scarce availability of their work in translation.

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Index1

A Abulafia, David, 35n4, 47 Acerbo, Giacomo, 195 I fondamenti della dottrina fascista della razza (1940), 195 Action Française, 129, 130 Adriatic Sea, 184 Afifi, Mohamed, 119, 119n19 Agrì, Alessandro, 154, 154n167, 155 Al-Andalus, 120, 121 Alcaro, Mario, 263 Alfieri, Dino, 213 Algérianisme, 129, 130 Al-Ṭ ahṭāwı̄, Rifāa Rāfi, 118, 119, 119n18 An Iman in Paris (1832), 118 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 4n9, 5, 7, 11, 11n1, 23 Imagined Communities (1983), 4n9, 11n1 Anderson, Sean, 200n92, 202 Angevins, 47, 52, 129 Antieuropa (1929), 187

Aragonese, 47 Aryans, 102–104, 106–108, 126, 128, 193, 194 Asplund, Gunnar, 198 Atavismo (atavism), 101, 102, 109, 111 Audisio, Gabriel, 116, 117n8 B Balbo, Cesare, 19, 21 Balla, Luigi, 178 Banti, Alberto Mario, 4, 4n11 Barbera, Piero, 93, 93n42, 97, 97n62 Barcellona, Pietro, 263 Barone, Enrico, 92, 92n35, 93, 97 Barrès, Auguste-Maurice, 129, 131 Basile, Gianbattista, 61, 62, 64, 68 Belcredi, Giacomo Gobbi, 88, 89, 89n21 Benedetto, Enzo, 177, 178 L’arte della reclame (The Art of Advertizing, 1927), 177

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0

285

286 

INDEX

Benzi, Fabio, 196, 196n75 Berghaus, Günter, 160, 160n7, 173n51 Berlinguer, Enrico, 244 Bernall, Martin, 166n32 Black Athena (1987), 166n32 Bertrand, Louis, 128, 130 Cagayous (1895), 128 Le sang des races (1899), 128 Les villes d’or (1907), 128 Bey, Hakim, 144, 145, 145n130 Beydoun, Ahmad, 118, 118n16 Blum, Cinzia Sartini, 161n11, 163 Boccioni, Umberto, 178 Bohn, Willard, 174, 174n56 Borboni (Bourbons), 51 Bossi, Umberto, 244 Bouchard, Norma, 241n11, 256, 259n8, 263 Braudel, Fernand, 36, 37n8, 49 Brigantaggio, 14, 15, 21, 30 Broca, Paul, 126–128 Bruni, Luigino, 75, 75n131 C Cacciari, Massimo, 9, 261–263 Cacciatore, Giuseppe, 263 Calderwood, Eric, 120, 120n25 Calleja, Eduardo González, 120, 121 Calza Bini, Vittorio, 230, 231 Camorra, 21, 22, 30, 77 Campigli, Massimo, 196 Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de, 124 Cangiullo, Francesco, 169, 169n41, 170, 170n42, 170n44, 173–178, 173n51, 173n53, 174n57, 229 Caffeconcerto: alfabeto a sorpresa (The Surprise Alphabet, 1916), 173n53, 174 Il teatro della sorpresa (The Theatre of Surprise, 1924), 170, 173, 175n58

Non c’è un cane Luce (1924), 176 Piedigrotta (1914), 174 Poesia pentagrammata (Pentagrammatical Poem, 1918), 174 Teatro di varietà (1914), 169n41, 170, 173 Canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song), 59 Capresi, Vittoria, 199n86, 203 Carli, Maddalena, 210, 210n127 Carminati, Lucia, 147, 147n142 Carnaro Charter, see De Ambris, Alceste Carta del Carnaro, see De Ambris, Alceste Caruso, Enrico, 100 Casabella, 199, 205, 208 Casavola, Franco, 178 Cassano, Franco, v, 9, 121n30, 259–263, 259n8, 260n12, 263n22 Pensiero meridiano (Southern Thought, 1996), v, 259, 259n8, 261, 262, 263n22 Cassa per il mezzogiorno (National Found for the South), 254 Castel Nuovo, 47, 48 Cazzato, Luigi Carmine, see Meridionismo (Meridionism) Chambers, Iain, v, 10, 261–263, 261n16 La questione Mediterranea (2019), 261, 261n16 Chevalier, Michel, 116 Système dela Méditerraneé (1832), 116 Choate, Marc, 27n57, 83n1, 88, 91 Ciccotti, Ettore, 23 Cifoletti, Guido, 65n90, 67 Cinema Paradiso (1988), 254 Circumvisionisti, 179

 INDEX 

Civiltà italiana (Italian civilization), 12, 18, 63, 65, 88 Cocchia, Carlo, 230, 232 Cogni, Giulio, 194, 194n68 Il razzismo (1936), 194 I valori della stirpe italiana (1937), 194, 194n68 Colajanni, Napoleone, 23, 30, 101 Settentrionali e meridionali (1889), 30 Collodi, Carlo, 20, 26, 27 Pinocchio (1883), 20, 26 Comandè, Giovanni, 134, 135n94 Commedia dell’arte, 59n66, 63–65, 64n84, 67 Concordia, Costa, 235–242 Shipwreck, 237, 240 Vada a bordo cazzo, T-shirts, 235 Coppa di Nestore (Nestor’s Cup), 33 Corra, Bruno, 171, 172n47 L’isola dei baci (The Island of kisses, 1918), 171, 172n47 Corradini, Enrico, 136, 137, 141, 142 La guerra lontana (1911), 141 Cratere del naufragio (The Shipwreck Vase), 34 Crispolti, Enrico, 161n8, 170n42, 178, 179, 229n177 Cumae, 36, 45, 46 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 62 Curcio, Carlo, 219, 225 D Dainotto, Roberto, 1, 2, 2n2, 2n3, 258, 259, 261, 263n22 Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 65, 65n90, 67 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 6, 131–136, 132n74, 132n77, 133n86, 134n89, 134n90, 139–157, 140n113, 148n147, 149n148, 151n157 Cabiria (1914), 132, 140

287

Canzone dei Dardanelli (1912), 141 Fiume, at, 132, 143–154, 156 Il fuoco (1900), 134, 134n89 La nave (1905), 134, 139–141 La penultima avventura. Scritti e discorsi fiumani (1974), 149n148 L’armata d’Italia (1888), 133 Laudi del cielo, del mare, della terra e degli eroi (1912), 140 Laus Vitae (1903), 133 Merope. Canti della guerra d’Oltremare (1912), 140 Naval Odes (1893), 133 Più che l’amore (1905), 133n86, 139–141 Rebirth of Tragedy (1897), 132, 133 Dante Alighieri Society, 98, 98n64 D’Azeglio, Massimo, 12, 12n4, 19–21 Ricordi (1866), 12, 20 De Ambris, Alceste, 144, 148, 148n147, 149, 151, 152, 154–156, 160n6, 162n16, 227, 263 Carta del Carnaro (1920), 149, 155 De Amicis, Edmondo, 20, 28, 29 Cuore (1870), 20 Sull’oceano (1889), 28 De Bonstetten, Victor, 18 The Man of the North and the Man of the South (1825), 18 De Chirico, Giorgio, 196–199, 197n77, 204, 207 De Donno, Fabrizio, 102n81, 188n36, 189n41, 194 De Falco, Gregorio, 235, 237, 239, 240 De Felice, Renzo, 134n87, 144n127, 148n147, 149, 149n148 De Jorio, Michele, 71 De Luca, Giulio, 161n8, 230

288 

INDEX

De Pisis, Filippo, 196 De Ribas, Giuseppe, 72 De Rivera, Carlo Alfan, 80, 80n154 De Stael, Madame, 18, 115 Corinne, ou l’Italie (1824), 115 De Vecchi, Cesare Maria, 141 Italy’s Civilizing Mission in Africa (1912), 141 Debussy, Claude, 131 Dell’Acqua, Enrico, 91 Depero, Fortunato, 178 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 9n18, 10, 257–259, 257n1, 261 The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (1992), 9n18, 257n1 Di Fausto, Florestano, 198, 200–205, 200n92, 201n93, 207, 213, 230, 232 Grande Albergo delle Rose (Grand Hotel of the Roses, Rhodes), 200 Libya Pavilion (see Fiera del Levante (Fair of the Levant)) Piazza Cattedrale (Tripoli), 202 Di Giacomo, Salvatore, 70 Di Liello, Vincenzo, 51 Dickens, Charles, 76, 78 Pictures from Italy (1846), 76 Dickie, John, 15, 15n9, 16 Dodecanese, 139, 139n108, 200, 209, 222 D’Ors, Eugenio, 121–123 Dragonetti, Giacinto, 75 Delle virtù e dei premi (1766), 75 Durango, Giacomo, 19 Della nazionalità italiana, 19 E Einaudi, Luigi, 4n11, 88n17, 90–93, 91n30, 97, 108, 246, 246n18, 247

“Fiume, la Società delle Nazioni e la sovranità” (1920), 246n18 Il principe mercante (1900), 90, 91, 93 Emigration in the Mediterranean, 29, 95 oltremare, 96–98, 100 to the Americas, 90 transmontana, 96, 97, 99 Empire State, 5, 7, 85, 116, 139, 156, 185, 195 Emporion (emporia), 6–10, 35, 37, 46, 68, 73, 150, 157, 159–179, 184, 195–210, 213, 214, 218, 220, 221, 227, 228, 230, 234, 245, 247–255, 263 Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI, National Agency for Hydrocarbons) L’isola del petrolio (The Island of Gasoline, 1962), 252 Mattei Formula, 250, 251 Pozzi a mare (Wells in The Sea, 1959), 252 Eurocommunism, 244 F Farini, Carlo, 15, 15n11 Faro della patria, 83 Fascism Fiera di Tripoli (Tripoli Trade Fair, 1927), 209 Imperium, 6, 157, 179, 181, 187, 195, 202, 208, 229 La difesa della razza, 195 living space, 189 Manifesto degli scenziati razzisti (Manifesto of Race, 1938), 190 Mare Nostrum, 156, 181, 188, 242, 243 Mediterranean expansion, 186

 INDEX 

Mostra augustea della romanità (Exhibition of Augustus’ Rome, 1937), 209 Mostra dell’aeronautica (1934), 209 Mostra della rivoluzione (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 1932-4), 209 Mostra delle realizzazioni, project of (Exhibition of Fascist Realizations, 1929), 213 Mostra del poster e della pubblicità commerciale (Exhibition of Poster and Commercial Advertising, 1936), 209 Mostra nazionale della moda (National Exhibition of Fashion, 1933), 209 Racial Laws (1938), 190 Triennali, 209 Fellini, Federico, 237 Amarcord (1979), 237 Ferme, Valerio, 121n30, 241n11, 256, 259n8, 263 Fiera del Levante (Fair of the Levant) difesa saniataria della stirpe, exhibition of (Defense of Racial Health, 1938), 219 giornate della contrattazione (Bargaining Days), 220 Mostra della pesca (Fishing Exhibition), 226 Mostra del mare (Exhibition of the Sea), 226 quartiere orientale Fondaco di Bari, 223, 225 Reparto commerciale (Commercial Pavilion), 220 Ufficio Cambi (Commercial Exchange Office), 220 Fiorini, Guido, 210 Fiume Endeavor arditi, 143 Cogne, 145

289

league, 147, 247 Persia, 145, 146 Reggenza del Carnaro, 149, 152 Scalmanati, 143, 149 uscocchi, 145 Florenzano, Giuseppe, 86, 87, 87n10 Fortunato, Giustino, 23, 30, 101–102 France, Anatole, 131 Franchetti, Leopoldo, 16, 21–23, 30, 90n27, 244 Inchiesta in Sicilia (1876), 30 Fucino Lake, 79 canal, 80, 94 Futurism Immaginazione senza fili. Distruzione della sintassi. Parole in libertà (Wireless Imagination. Destruction of Syntax. Words in Freedom, 1913), 168, 168n36 La pittura futurista. Manifesto Tecnico (Futurist Painting, Technical Manifesto, 1910), 162 Lo Splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914), 168, 168n36 Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912), 162, 168, 168n36 Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, 1913), 160 Vulcani, 169 G Gabaccia, Donna, 12, 88n17, 96 Galiani, Ferdinando, 60–63, 68, 69 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 14, 15, 25, 29, 70, 76, 83, 86 spedizione dei mille, 14, 25

290 

INDEX

Garigliano River, 61, 80 Gaudì, Antoni, 120–122 Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 218, 218n143, 222 Genovesi, Antonio, 74, 75 civil economy, 74, 75 Geophilosophical, 9, 256, 262, 263 Gide, André, 131 Gini, Corrado, 193 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 19, 21 del primate morale e civile degli italiani (1843), 19 Giulietti, Giuseppe, 145–149, 155, 183 Federazione italiana lavoratori del mare (F.I.L.M.), 145–147 Glissant, Édouard, 6 poetics of relation, 6 Gorio, Giovanni, 219, 219n146, 223 Gorjux, Wanda, 218, 225 Gramsci, Antonio, 23, 30 Grange, Daniel, 89n23, 94 Gravagnuolo, Benedetto, 200, 200n90 Greene, Molly, 43 Griffin, Roger, 131, 131n72, 159, 159n1, 160, 164 Gruppo 7, 198, 199 H Harrison, Olivia, v, 203, 203n108, 204 Hellenism, 130 Hellenization, 33, 39, 40, 46 Hom, Stephanie Malia, 12, 12n4, 13n6, 117n10, 254, 254n50 Homo Mediterraneus, 6, 83–113, 156, 165, 190, 247, 263 Horden, Peregrine, 5, 5n13, 36, 37n8, 37n11, 39–41, 42n31, 43, 43n33, 44, 60, 81 The Corrupting Sea (2000), 5n13, 37, 37n8, 39, 40, 42n31, 44

I Il postino (1994), 1, 2, 9, 254 Il racconto del guardiano di spiaggia, 25, 25n49 Imagined community, see Anderson, Benedict Imperium, see Fascism Impresa di Fiume, see Fiume Endeavor Irredentismo, 135 Isnenghi, Mario, 134n90, 135, 135n97 Italia balneare (seaside Italy), 8, 9, 254–256 Italianità, 88, 207 Italy-as-destination, 8, 254 J Jaffe-Berg, Erith, 64, 64n84 K Kazanzakis, Nikos, 119n20 Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham, 147 Kingdom of Naples, see Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 14, 29–31, 47, 52, 60, 61, 70, 71, 74, 78, 80, 81, 99 Kyme, see Cumae L La Pira, Giorgio, 249n30 Colloquio Mediterranei (1958–1964), 249n30 Labanca, Nicola, 137, 137n102, 182n1, 230n178 Labriola, Arturo, 142 Lago, Mario, 202, 210 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 123 Graziella (1852), 123

 INDEX 

Lampedusa, 24, 241, 255 La più grande Italia (The Far Greater Italy), 83, 83n2, 88, 90, 221, 247 Larocca, Antonio, 224, 225n168 Latinism, 65, 112, 130–132, 142, 156, 165, 183 Latinisme, 130 Latinità, 131, 141, 184, 191, 192, 199, 207 Latinitè, 129, 130 Latinity, 130, 183, 193 La vita è bella (1997), 254 Lazzari, 61, 65, 76 Le Corbusier, 198, 200n90, 207 Vers une Architecture (1923), 198 Le Félibrige, 129 Lebanon, 36, 118, 222, 226 Lega (League), 9, 244 Lega di Fiume, see Fiume Endeavor, league Lega Nord (Northern League), 9, 244, 245 Leopardi, Giacomo, 17, 59, 60, 138, 165, 165n28 All’Italia (To Italy, 1818), 165n28 La ginestra (The Broom, 1836), 17 Zibaldone (1898), 59 Lepanto, battle of, 43 Lewerentz, Sigurd, 198 Lingua franca, 37, 65–68, 65n90, 72 Lionnel, François, 203, 204n109 Lippi, Carlo, 78–80, 79n150 L’Italia coloniale, 88, 88n16, 89n21, 90n29 Locarno Treaty, 147 Lombroso, Cesare, 101–103 L’uomo delinquente (1876), 101 Loti, Pierre, 118 Lotto, 76–78

291

M Macry, Paolo, 76, 76n139, 76n141, 77 Mafarka le Futuriste. Roman Africain (1909), see Marinetti, F. T. Mafia, 21, 22, 30 Magna Graecia, 31, 33, 34 Maiocchi, Roberto, 188n36, 192 Making Italians (of), vi, 4–6, 9, 11–31, 85, 88, 90, 93, 100, 101, 131, 136, 138, 156, 167, 179, 181, 187, 190, 205, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 256, 263 Italy, 12–15, 12n4, 17, 19, 27, 30, 90, 93, 100, 184, 185, 218 Southerners into Northerners, 6, 23, 93, 239, 244 Malaparte, Curzio Suckert, 206 Villa Malaparte, 206 Malkin, Irad, 5, 6n14, 31n66, 36–39, 36n6, 39n17, 39n18 Mallett, Peter, 188 Marasco, Antonio, 179 Movimento futurista indipendente (Independent Futurist Movement), 179 Marcia di Ronchi, see Fiume Endeavor Mare aliorum, 8–10, 235–256, 259, 261, 263 Mare Nostrum, 6–9, 33, 40–42, 45n42, 85, 123, 132, 138n104, 139–141, 156, 181, 187, 188, 235–256 Marinetti, Benedetta Cappa, 170–172 Marinetti, F. T., 160–170, 160n6, 161n11, 169n37, 169n41, 170n44, 170n45, 172–177, 172n47, 172n49, 173n52, 173n53, 175n58, 179, 195, 197, 204, 205, 207, 231, 232, 263

292 

INDEX

Marinetti, F. T. (cont.) Come si seducono le donne (How to seduce women 1916), 171 Conquête des Ètoiles (The Conquest of the Stars, 1902), 169 Declamazione dinamica e sinottica (Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation, 1916), 170 Destruction (Destruction, 1903), 169 Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo (1909), 161 Il teatro della sorpresa (The Theatre of Surprise, 1924) (see Cangiullo, Francesco) L’alcova d’acciaio (The Steel Alcove, 1921), 171 Le Monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Monoplane, 1912), 169 L’isola dei baci (The Island of kisses, 1918) (see Corra, Bruno) Mafarka il futurista (1910), 160, 160n6 Mafarka le Futuriste. Roman Africain (1909), 161, 161n11 Prigionieri e vulcani (Prisoners and Volcanoes, 1927), 169 Scatole d’amore in conserva (Love in Tin Cans, 1927), 171 Teatro di varietà (1914) (see Cangiullo, Francesco) Zang Tumb Tumb (1912), 168, 169 Maritime republics, 42, 68, 88 Marselli, Nicola, 102, 103 La scienza della storia (1880), 103 Martin, Dean, 100 Marussic, Guido, 135 Mattei, Enrico, see Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI, National Agency for Hydrocarbons) Matvejević, Pedrag, 44, 44n38, 258, 258n4

Breviario mediterraneo (1987), 258, 258n4 Maurras, Charles, 129–131 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 14, 19–21, 137 Dei doveri dell’uomo (1860), 19 McKay, Sherry, 200, 200n91 McLaren, Brian, 200n92, 201 Mediterranean be-longing, 5–7, 253 civilization, 38, 70, 106–109, 111, 112, 125, 142, 156, 205, 247 discourse, 119, 258, 263, 263n22 fishing net, 42–44, 49, 66, 75, 100, 155, 248 imaginary, v, 3, 4, 6, 8, 26, 40, 81, 82, 94, 95, 99, 100, 112, 129, 142, 150, 157, 182, 184, 195, 197, 205, 218, 219, 227, 229, 236, 237, 242, 245, 254–256, 260 quest(ion), 6, 24–31, 110, 256–263 spider web, 6, 42, 44, 50, 58, 156 Mediterraneanism epiphanic, 6, 115–157, 227 programmatic, 6, 167 Mediterraneanization, 8, 260, 262 Mediterranean-ness, 3, 7, 8, 64, 65, 76, 102, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126–130, 130–131n68, 142, 150, 156, 157, 159, 165, 167, 169, 179, 196, 197, 199, 200, 200n92, 202, 203, 205, 207, 213, 222, 242, 254, 255 Mediterraneità, see Mediterranean-ness Mediterraneo (1991), 254 Meridionalismo (southernism), 15, 16, 21–24, 30 Meridionalisti, 16, 23, 30, 101, 142 Meridione, 5, 15, 72, 177, 178, 219, 222

 INDEX 

Meridionismo (Meridionism), 4n12, 8, 16, 16n14, 20, 23, 24, 26, 45, 59, 78, 165n27, 166, 204, 240, 250, 260 Merjian, Ara, 197, 197n77 Mezzogiorno, 5, 15, 31, 139, 150, 178, 219, 250 Miretti, Lorenza, 162–164, 162n12 Mistral, Frédéric, 129, 130 Coupo Santo (1867), 129 Modernism epiphanic, 131, 132, 139, 159 programmatic, 159–161 Modernisme, 120–122 Moe, Nelson, v, 16, 16n12, 18n22, 21, 23, 24, 93n40, 115n2 Mosse, George, 144, 144n124 Mosso, Angelo, 88n17, 98 Mostra coloniale (Colonial Exhibition, Paris, 1931), 209 Mostra delle terre d’oltremare (Exhibition of African Colonies, 1941), 229, 231–233 Murri, Romolo, 98 Mussolini, Benito, 137, 144, 145, 172, 181–189, 182n2, 182n5, 185n14, 186n24, 192, 194, 195, 201, 218, 225, 240, 248 early writings, 182 inorientamento, 184, 185, 201, 218 and Mediterraneanism, 181, 195, 201 “Navigare necesse” (1920), 183 Mysenum, 41, 45 N National Exhibition of Turin (1898), 90 Neoatlanticist, 248, 250 Neucentisme, 120–123, 129, 130

293

Niceforo, Alfredo, 23, 101, 101n77, 102, 107–111 L’italia barbara contemporanea (1898), 101 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 23, 30, 30n65, 74, 94n44 Napoli e la questione meridionale (1903), 30, 30n65, 94n44 Northerners, 6, 7, 13–24, 92, 93, 96, 122, 239, 244 Nuova Antologia, 88, 88n16, 88n17, 88n20, 89n24, 90n27, 90n28, 92n35, 93n42, 94n45, 97n62, 98n65, 102, 105 O Odessa, 72–74 O guarracino (The Damselfish), 60 Olivetti, Angelo Oliviero, 227, 227n176 Orano, Paolo, 193 P Pagano, Mario, 208, 209, 214, 218n140 Palamas, Kostis, 119 Songs of My Fatherland (1896), 119 Panunzio, Sergio, 221, 222 Pappalardo, Ferdinando, 132n78, 133 Parthenope, 36, 46 Pascoli, Giovanni, 137, 137n100, 138, 165, 165n28 La grande proletaria si è mossa (The Great Proletarian, She Moved, 1911), 137n100, 165n28 Patriarca, Silvana, 18n22, 20, 93n41 Pella y Forgas, Josè, 122 Pellegrini, Giovanni, 199, 199n86 Manifesto dell’architettura coloniale (Manifesto of Colonial Architecture, 1936), 199

294 

INDEX

Pemble, John, 117, 117n9 The Mediterranean Passion, 117, 117n9 Pende, Nicola, 191–193 Bonifica umana (Human Reclamation, 1933), 191 Persico, Edoardo, 205, 207, 208 Phlegrean islands, 33, 45, 49, 50, 78 middle ground, 37, 39, 40 Phoenicians, 36, 37, 39, 39n17, 39n18 Piccinato, Luigi, 199 Piedigrotta Festa di, 69, 70 Madonna di, 69 Santa Maria di, 70 Pirani, Mario, 250n33 Pisacane, Carlo, 25 Porto franco (Free port), 26, 72, 73 Procida Corricella, 56, 58 Procidan costume, 52, 54 Terra Murata, 58 Pullè, Francesco, 190–192, 194 Italia. Genti e favelle (Italy. Peoples and Languages, 1927), 190 Purcell, Dominick, see Horden, Peregrine Puteoli, 41, 45 Pythekoussai, 33, 35–37, 39, 39n17, 45, 46, 50–60 Q Quadrante, 200 Quarta sponda, 135, 142 Questione meridionale (Southern Question), 15, 21, 142 Quijano, Anibal, 17, 17n16, 24, 240

R Race, 6, 18, 92, 93, 101–112, 103n84, 115, 125–129, 136, 138–142, 147, 165, 172, 189–195, 192n52, 230 Rava, Carlo Antonio, 198 Razza, see Race Re, Lucia, vi, 133n86, 136–139, 161n11 Rex, 237, 238, 240 Ridgway, David, 35n3, 39 Risorgimento, 4, 5, 14, 15, 20, 25, 80, 83, 101, 137–139, 182n1, 240 and the Mediterranean, 139, 240 Rodogno, David, 188 Fascism’s European Empire, 189 Romanità, 196, 207, 210 Rossi, Ernesto, see Spinelli, Altiero Rudofsky, Bernard, 198 Russolo, Luigi, 179 S Saffioti, Francesca, 263 Saint-Vincent, Bory de, 124–127, 166, 166n30 Salaris, Claudia, 143n122, 144, 149, 149n148, 150, 160n6, 161n8, 167, 208n120 Salgari, Emilio, 29, 29n62 Salvemini, Biagio, 71n113, 72 Salvemini, Gaetano, 23, 142n120 Salvini, Matteo, 245 San Giuliano, Antonino di, 88n16, 88n17, 142 Sannazzaro, Jacopo, 68 Scarfoglio, Edoardo, 142 Il Mattino, 142 Sceneggiate, 99 Schettino, Francesco, 235–237, 239, 240

 INDEX 

Schneider, Jane, 16, 16n12, 16n15 Scuola romana Cagli, Corrado, 196 Capogrossi, Giuseppe, 196 Cavalli, Emanuele, 196 Sea of others, 7, 8, 10, 241, 242, 244, 245, 261, 263 Self-helpism, 20, 93 Serao, Matilde, 28, 28n59 Ventre di Napoli (1884), 28 Sergi, Giuseppe, 6, 102–113, 102n80, 103n84, 106n97, 112n114, 115, 125, 128, 139, 142, 142n118, 156, 156n174, 165, 166, 166n30, 190–192, 194, 195, 204, 205, 247 Arii e italici (1898), 105–107, 106n97, 112 La decadenza delle nazioni latine (1900), 112, 112n114, 142n118 The Mediterranean Race (1901), 104, 106 razza mediterranea (Mediterranean race), 102, 191 Serio, Luigi, 62–64, 62n76, 68, 69 Severini, Gino, 196 Shu-Mei Shih, 203, 204n109 Signore, Mario, 263 Sinn Fein, 146, 147 Smiles, Charles, see Self-helpism Sonnino, Sidney, see Franchetti, Leopoldo South (Italy’s), 15 Southerners, 6, 7, 11–31, 92, 93, 96, 102, 109–112, 136, 137, 178, 197, 226, 239, 244, 249 Spagnoletti, Ettore, 62 Spazio vitale, see Fascism, living space Spinelli, Altiero, 8n17, 243, 243n14, 243n15, 244, 246, 246n18, 247

295

Per un Europa libera e unita. Manifesto di Ventotene (For a Free and United Europe, 1941), 243 Stewart-Steinberg, Susan, 20, 20n33 Stirpe, see Race Suez Canal, 24, 40, 43, 80, 81, 94, 125 T Tabak, Faruk, 43, 43n35 Tamalet, Edwige, v, 128n61, 129 Tavola Strozzi (1472), 47, 48 Territorialization, 10, 13–15, 24, 25, 30, 141, 150, 245 Thompson, Ann, 126 Tino, Vittorio, 49n49, 74 Transcolonialism, 203 Transmigratory, 112, 142 Trattati di Roma, 243 Traversi, Ugo, 213 Turiello, Pasquale, 23 Tyrrhenian Sea, 5, 27, 73, 78, 81 Tyrrhenians, 35–37, 60, 70, 243 U Unione distruttivisti attivisti (Union of Desctructivist Activists), 179 V Valérian, Dominique, 41, 42n29, 44n39 Valussi, Pacifico, 26, 26n52, 135, 135n95, 147 Varietà, 100, 169, 173, 175 Ventotene Manifesto, see Spinelli, Altiero

296 

INDEX

Verga, Giovanni, 27, 28 Di là dal mare (1883), 27 I Malavoglia (1881), 27 Vergani, Orio, 193, 193n61 Villari, Luigi, 92n37, 97, 98n64, 99 Gli italiani negli Stati Uniti (1912), 97, 98n64 Villari, Pasquale, 16, 22, 23, 30, 30n63, 88n16, 88n17, 97 Viterbo, Michele, 218, 218n143, 219, 221, 221n158, 223, 224n165, 225

Viviani, Raffaele, 70 Von Hennenberg, Krystina, 209, 209n124, 210, 213 W White, John, 174, 174n56 Wick, Alexis, 119, 119n18 Z Zaghul, Saad, 148