The Fishing Net and the Spider Web

This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or 'making of' Italians. While previous scholarship on the construction of Italian identity has often focused too narrowly on the territorial notion of the nation-state, and over-identified Italy with its capital, Rome, this book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. From this perspective, this book re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and thereby challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete. Ultimately, it argues that Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the solidification of a 'national' Italian identity, and still constitute alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.

Explores the role of the Mediterranean and associated imaginaries in the formation of Italian identity Moves beyond the focus on the nation-state that has characterized much previous scholarship Reinterprets key processes and episodes in Italian history, from the Kingdom of Naples through to the twentieth century

Auteur
Claudio Fogu is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Résumé
"The fishing net and the spider web provides us with a detailed and broad study on the genesis and development of two fundamental models whose movements have been central since the Risorgimento in order to make Italians. This volume is a highly valuable contribution to the understanding of Italy's diasporic and colonialist entanglement ... ." (Anna Finozzi, Annali d'italianistica, Vol. 39, 2021)

"Well-researched and highly elaborated argument ... . welcome and valuable additions to the field of Italian and Mediterranean studies. They deserve high praise for their interdisciplinarity and for providing useful tools for addressing the issues with which they are concerned. ... The most fascinating parts in Fogu's book are not where he delves into theory but where he considers specific historical episodes, sites, persons, or objects." (Konstantina Zanou, Italian American Review, Vol. 11 (2), 2021)

Contenu

1. Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries.- 2. Making Italians, Making Southerners.- 3. The Fishing Net and the Spider Web.- 4. Homo Mediterraneus .- 5. Epiphanic Mediterraneanism.- 6. Between Imperium and Emporion.-
   7. Fascist Mediterraneanism.- 8. From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum.-
      9. Coda: The Mediterranean Quest(ion).