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Claudio Fogu
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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
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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
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as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it by net-
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graphs and edited collections that explore these new fields, from the span
of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary.
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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)
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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 expres-
sion of thanks for the grace of his thinking, his friendship, and his guid-
ance. 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 illumi-
nated 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).
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
of the modern Mediterranean. Closer to home, my scholarly collaboration

with Lucia Re, and her writings, disclosed perspectives and angles of inter-
pretation that I am certain she will recognize in this book. Equally pre-
cious 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 read-
ing 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 yearn-
ing 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 conceptual-
izing my practice as a historian. Crucially, he has kept me on track by
invoking the memory of our common maestro, Hayden White, and push-
ing me to always think in terms of the practical past.2 I hope my explora-
tion 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 pres-
ent. I see no more urgent task today than to reframe the question of col-
lective 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 hypoth-
eses 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 vii
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-of-
duty 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 particu-
lar 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 stim-
ulation 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 rela-
tions 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
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Cratere del naufragio (The Shipwreck Cup). (Courtesy of the
Museo Archeologico di Villa Arbusto (Ischia, Italy)) 34
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) 48
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) 48
Fig. 3.4 The two busts positioned above the entrance of n. 11 Salita di
San Leonardo, Procida (Naples). (Photographed by Donatella
Pandolfi)50
Fig. 3.5 Donna procidana (Procidan Woman), colored lithograph, Gatti
& Dura (1835). Private collection. (Photographed by
Donatella Pandolfi) 53
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) 54
Fig. 3.7 The Corricella harbor in Procida (Naples). (Photographed by
Donatella Pandolfi) 56
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) 57
xi
xii List of Figures
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) 58
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) 79
Fig. 4.1 The lighthouse of the Fatherland, Rome (1911).
(Photographed by Oscar Canham) 84
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) 171
Fig. 7.1 Adalberto Libera e Curzio Suckert Malaparte, Villa Malaparte
(Capri, 1942). © Alamy 206
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 211
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 212
Fig. 7.4 The Façade of the Fiera del Levante (1931). In Saverio La
Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante, Bari, Favia, 1931 214
Fig. 7.5 Commercial pavilions at the Fiera del Levante (1931). In
Saverio La Sorsa, La prima fiera del levante, Bari: Favia, 1931 215
Fig. 7.6 Futurist-inspired cover of the Fiera del Levante. Periodico
mensile (1934) 216
Fig. 7.7 The logo image of the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante.
Periodico mensile IV, 2, 1934 217
Fig. 7.8 The Quartiere orientale at the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del
Levante. Periodico Mensile, II, 4 1932 223
Fig. 7.9 The Suk at the Fiera del Levante. Fiera del Levante. Periodico
Mensile, II, 4 1932 224
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) 228
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) 229
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) 231
List of Figures xiii
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) 232
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) 233
Fig. 7.15 MTO 1941, Enrico Prampolini, Plastico murale.
(Photographed by the author. Courtesy of Mostra d’Oltremare) 233
Fig. 7.16 Enrico Prampolini, Paesaggio di Capri (1932). (Courtesy of
Futur-ism.it)234
Fig. 8.1 The Costa Concordia sinking off the coast of the Giglio island.
© Alamy 236
Fig. 8.2 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 pro-
tagonist 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 misinter-
preted 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 1

C. Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, Mediterranean
Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0_1
2 C. FOGU
and found itself haunted by the constitutional “liquidity” of its referent.2

As he remarks, one cannot help but notice a “certain inflation of dis-
courses 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 progres-
sively 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 contribu-
tions, 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 “asym-
metry” 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 elu-
siveness, or the asymmetrical qualities of contemporary discourse about
the Mediterranean. It unapologetically accepts and departs from the prem-
ises 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.
1 INTRODUCTION: MEDITERRANEAN IMAGINARIES 3
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 configura-
tions of mental, verbal, or visualized images that refer explicitly or implic-
itly 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, mentali-
ties, 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 coast-
lines. 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 immedi-
ately, 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 sym-
metry between the idea of the “Mediterranean” and that of the “imagi-
nary.” 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 mediter-
ranean (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 con-
struction of a specifically “Mediterranean” other by Franco-British anthropology in the post-
war 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 substan-
tives first in romance languages, and then, also in English.
4 C. FOGU
What this book is not, is a general theory of “the” Mediterranean imag-

inary. 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” pred-
icated 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 unifi-
cation is among the most-well-studied phenomena in Italian cultural stud-
ies. 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.
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 hierarchi-
cal 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, cul-
tural, 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 prolifer-
ating, 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.
6 C. FOGU
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 trans-
figured 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 prin-
cipal 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 ques-
tion, of the South-Mediterranean, consists in the confrontation resulting
between Imperium forms of imaginary that have aimed at “making south-
erners 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 alter-
native 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 mas-
sive 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).
modern Italy from a perspective that challenges mainstream interpreta-

tions of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete, but also rejects
the polarizing logic of identifying southern-ness and southerners exclu-
sively 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 imperi-
alization, and centrifugal ones that reject the Imperium logic and oppose
to it counter-hegemonic imaginaries of emporion. It is the perpetual oscil-
lation 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 politi-
cal 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 ide-
ations 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 subordi-
nation of the “national” to other affective communities.
16
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
8 C. FOGU
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 institutional-
ization 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 creden-
tials, 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 hybridiza-
tion 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 flock-
ing of Northern European tourists to Italian beaches and islands, the iden-
tification 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 transfigura-
tion 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 char-
acterizations 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 particu-
lar, 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.
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 prin-
cipal figure of reference for the making of Italians seems to have defini-
tively 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 con-
clusion 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,
18
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 19 and 35.
19
Ibid., 16.
10 C. FOGU
and Iain Chambers, one can readily identify the most sustained elabora-
tion 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 lin-
guistic 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, inter-
pret 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 read-
ing, the last European nation to be created in the second half of the nine-
teenth 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

1
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

12 C. FOGU
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 com-
munities that imagined themselves—and were imagined by those around
them—as the embodiment of a civiltà italiana (Italian civilization) com-
prising “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, art-
ists, and politicians, does not attest to a rapid normalization or resolution
of the poiesis gap between a “made” nation-state and the creative national-
ization of Italians; rather, it points to a far darker side of Italian nation-
building, 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 con-
structed and turned into a trope by Ferdinando Martini, a friend of
D’Azeglio, several decades after the publication of its reputed source, fol-
lowing 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
2
Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2000).
3
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 MAKING ITALIANS, MAKING SOUTHERNERS 13
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 ana-
lyze capitalist processes of libidinal investment, divestment, and reinvest-
ment.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.
14 C. FOGU
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 patri-
ots 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 unifica-
tion 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 territo-
rial fragmentation that had characterized the peninsula and its surround-
ing 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.
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 vio-
lence 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 cre-
ation 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 dis-
cursive field of “making Italians” as being separate from the so-called ques-
tione 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.
16 C. FOGU
the country. To the poiesis of making Italians—which was largely the prov-
ince of public intellectuals, poets, and other literary figures—meridional-
isti 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 meridio-
nalismo 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 meridional-
ismo 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 reaf-
firmed the poietic premises of nation-building rather than problematizing
them, and showed little concern for the territorializing logic that under-
pins 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 moder-
nity, 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.
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 epistemo-
logical power: that is, on the hierarchizing of difference.17 The first episte-
mological 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 “back-
ward.” 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 modali-
ties and finalities.
The earliest and most cogent exemplification of the Meridionist frame-
work 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 “bub-
bling” 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 vol-
ume, 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 gram-
mar of de-coloniality,” 449–514.
17
Cazzato, “Fructured Mediterranean,” 28.
18
Ibid., 29.
19
Ibid., 39.
18 C. FOGU
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 sub-
ject 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 itali-
ana, 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 pic-
turesque 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 litera-
ture 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).
accompanied her in public, feigning effeminate (homosexual or unthreat-

ening) 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 emascu-
lated, morally deprived, and sexually permissive people: “Italians,” con-
cluded a non-Italian observer of the age, “had ceased to be men.”24 Italian
patriots could not agree more: while spurring his countrymen toward uni-
fication 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 “tem-
porary 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 industri-
ousness 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 discur-
sive 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
24
Patriarca, Italian Vices, 36–45.
25
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).
20 C. FOGU
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 rein-
forced by, the long-standing connotation between effeminacy and indo-
lence 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 par-
allel logic of Meridionism. As Patriarca has again perceptively argued, the
very tendency to reiterate the same stereotype of female laziness over and
30
Ibid., 60–65.
31
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).
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 polar-
ization 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
34
Ibid., 72.
35
Moe, The View, 113–120.
36
Ibid., 13–36.
22 C. FOGU
the resurgent nation.37 For Villari, the ruling political class that had tack-
led 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 domi-
nated 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 weak-
ened 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
37
Ibid., 224–249.
38
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.
positivism and combatting the ascendency of idealism in the cultural wars

of fin-de-siècle Italy.44 Finally, the influence they exercised over the genera-
tions 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, partici-
pation 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 intellectu-
als 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 princi-
pally 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,
44
Ibid., 224–249.
45
See, for example, Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance. Rethinking Nationalism
through the Italian Diaspora (London: Associated University Presses, 1997).
46
47
Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity,” 169.
24 C. FOGU
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 post-
colonial 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 cen-
tral concern of this book.
The Mediterranean Question

The criminalization of southern opposition to the Italian state was accom-
panied 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 establish-
ment 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 any-
thing 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).
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 sur-
rounded 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 epi-
demics, 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 signifi-
cantly, not even the epic and successful spedizione dei mille (Expedition of
the Thousand) would give the resurrected Italian nation a maritime imagi-
nary: 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 mediter-
raneo, 18.
50
Paolo Frascani, Il mare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008).
26 C. FOGU
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 posi-
tion 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 uni-
fication. 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.
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 mon-
strous pescecani (sharks), which in several versions of the tale become
whales or, more precisely capodogli (sperm whales): that is, species of oce-
anic 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 van-
ished picturesque vision of the social and natural balance, in which the
clandestine love between the two protagonists is accompanied by the mel-
odies 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 authentic-
ity that disappears instantly under the weight of social roles and conven-
tions 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 pro-
portions in his masterpiece, I Malavoglia (1881), in which the tragic
56
Ibid., 12.
57
Marc Choate, Emigrant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008).
58
28 C. FOGU
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 mari-
time 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 neigh-
borhood 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 nar-
rative focuses on the social microcosm of the boat, on its chaotic swarm-
ing, 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 conti-
nent.” In a book that is virtually devoid of metaphors—a literary trade-
mark 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.
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 for-
mer’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 unchar-
acteristically 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 peda-
gogy of nation-making and the all-too-real anxieties of emigration.
Both literally and literarily, the Mediterranean Sea did not just disap-
pear 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
61
Ibid., 309.
62
Vittorio Sarti, Nuova bibliografia salgariana (Milan: Sangottardo, 1994). On Salgari,
see Ann Lawson Lucas, Emilio Salgari. Una mitologia moderna tra letteratura, politica, soci-
età, 4 vols. (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2017).
30 C. FOGU
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 lati-
fondo (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.
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 com-
ing from the island of Euboea. It is justly famous for two exceptional rea-
sons: 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 liter-
ary 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 antici-
pated 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.

34 C. FOGU
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 insepara-
ble 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.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
leggi, per i giudizii — Foro Civile
Pompejano — Foro Nundinario o
Triangolare — Le Nundine —
Hecatonstylon — Orologio solare
CAPITOLO X. — La Basilica. — Origine

della denominazione di Basilica — Sua
destinazione in Roma — Poeti e cantanti
— Distribuzione della giornata — Interno
ed esterno delle Basiliche — Perchè
conservatone il nome alle chiese cristiane
— Basiliche principali cristiane — Basilica
di Pompei — Amministrazione della
giustizia, procedura civile e penale —
Magistrati speciali per le persone di vil
condizione — Episodio giudiziario di Ovidio
— Giurisprudenza criminale — Pene —
Del supplizio della croce — La pena
dell’adulterio — Avvocati Causidici 323
CAPITOLO XI. — Le Curie, il Calcidico, le

Prigioni. — Origine ed uso delle Curie —
Curie di Pompei — Curia o Sala del Senato
— Il Calcidico — Congetture di sua
destinazione — Forse tempio — Passaggio
per gli avvocati — Di un passo dell’Odissea
d’Omero — Eumachia sacerdotessa
fabbrica il Calcidico in Pompei —
Descrizione — Cripta e statua della
fondatrice — Le prigioni di Pompei —
Sistema carcerario romano — Le Carceri
Mamertine — Ergastuli per gli schiavi —
Carnifex e Carneficina — Ipotiposi 365
VOLUME SECONDO
CAPITOLO XII. — I Teatri — Teatro
Comico. — Passione degli antichi pel
teatro — Cause — Istrioni — Teatro
Comico od Odeum di Pompei —
Descrizione — Cavea, præcinctiones,
scalae, vomitoria — Posti assegnati alle
varie classi — Orchestra — Podii o tribune
— Scena, proscenio, pulpitum — Il sipario
— Chi tirasse il sipario — Postscenium —
Capacità dell’Odeum pompeiano — Echea
o vasi sonori — Tessere d’ingresso al
teatro — Origine del nome piccionaja al
luogo destinato alla plebe — Se gli
spettacoli fossero sempre gratuiti —
Origine de’ teatri, teatri di legno, teatri di
pietra — Il teatro Comico latino — Origini
— Sature e Atellane — Arlecchino e
Pulcinella — Rintone, Andronico ed Ennio
— Plauto e Terenzio — Giudizio
contemporaneo dei poeti comici — Diversi
generi di commedia: togatae, palliatae,
trabeatae, tunicatae, tabernariae — Le
commedie di Plauto e di Terenzio materiali
di storia — Se in Pompei si recitassero
commedie greche — Mimi e Mimiambi —
Le maschere, origine e scopo —
Introduzione in Roma — Pregiudizi contro
le persone da teatro — Leggi teatrali
repressive — Dimostrazioni politiche in
teatro — Talia musa della Commedia 5
CAPITOLO XIII. — I Teatri — Teatro 53

tragico. — Origini del teatro tragico —
Tespi ed Eraclide Pontico — Etimologia di
tragedia e ragioni del nome — Caratteri —
Epigene, Eschilo e Cherillo — Della
maschera tragica — L’attor tragico Polo —
Venticinque specie di maschere —
Maschere trovate in Pompei — Palla o
Syrma — Coturno — Istrioni —
Accompagnamento musicale — Le tibie e i
tibicini — Melpomene, musa della Tragedia
— Il teatro tragico in Pompei — L’architetto
Martorio Primo — Invenzione del velario —
Biasimata in Roma — Ricchissimi velarii di
Cesare e di Nerone — Sparsiones o
pioggie artificiali in teatro —
Adacquamento delle vie — Le lacernæ, o
mantelli da teatro — Descrizione del Teatro
Tragico — Gli Oleonj — Thimele —
Aulaeum — La Porta regia e le porte
hospitalia della scena — Tragici latini:
Andronico, Pacuvio, Accio, Nevio, Cassio
Severo, Varo, Turanno Graccula, Asinio
Pollione — Ovidio tragico — Verio, Lucio
Anneo Seneca, Mecenate — Perchè Roma
non abbia avuto tragedie — Tragedie
greche in Pompei — Tessera teatrale —
Attori e Attrici — Batillo, Pilade, Esopo e
Roseio — Dionisia — Stipendj esorbitanti
— Un manicaretto di perle — Applausi e
fischi — La claque, la clique e la
Consorteria — Il suggeritore — Se l’Odeo
di Pompei fosse attinenza del Gran Teatro
CAPITOLO XIV. — I Teatri — L’Anfiteatro. 103

— Introduzione in Italia dei giuochi circensi
— Giuochi trojani — Panem et circenses
— Un circo romano — Origine romana
degli Anfiteatri — Cajo Curione fabbrica il
primo in legno — Altro di Giulio Cesare —
Statilio Tauro erige il primo di pietra — Il
Colosseo — Data dell’Anfiteatro
pompejano — Architettura sua — I Pansa
— Criptoportico — Arena — Eco — Le
iscrizioni del Podio — Prima Cavea — I
locarii — Seconda Cavea — Somma
Cavea — Cattedre femminili — I Velarii —
Porta Libitinense — Lo Spoliario — I
cataboli — Il triclinio e il banchetto libero —
Corse di cocchi e di cavalli — Giuochi
olimpici in Grecia — Quando introdotti in
Roma — Le fazioni degli Auriganti —
Giuochi gladiatorj — Ludo Gladiatorio in
Pompei — Ludi gladiatorj in Roma —
Origine dei Gladiatori — Impiegati nei
funerali — Estesi a divertimento — I
Gladiatori al Lago Fucino — Gladiatori
forzati — Gladiatori volontarj —
Giuramento de’ gladiatori auctorati —
Lorarii — Classi gladiatorie: secutores,
retiarii, myrmillones, thraces, samnites,
hoplomachi, essedarii, andabati,
dimachæri, laquearii, supposititii,
pegmares, meridiani — Gladiatori Cavalieri
e Senatori, nani e pigmei, donne e matrone
— Il Gladiatore di Ravenna di Halm — Il
colpo e il diritto di grazia — Deludia — Il
Gladiatore morente di Ctesilao e Byron —
Lo Spoliario e la Porta Libitinense — Premj
ai Gladiatori — Le ambubaje — Le Ludie
— I giuochi Floreali e Catone —
Naumachie — Le Venationes o caccie —
Di quante sorta fossero — Caccia data da
Pompeo — Caccie di leoni ed elefanti —
Proteste degli elefanti contro la mancata
fede — Caccia data da Giulio Cesare —
Un elefante funambolo — L’Aquila e il
fanciullo — I Bestiarii e le donne bestiariæ
— La legge Petronia — Il supplizio di
Laureolo — Prostituzione negli anfiteatri —
Meretrici appaltatrici di spettacoli — Il
Cristianesimo abolisce i ludi gladiatorj —
Telemaco monaco — Missilia e Sparsiones
CAPITOLO XV. — Le Terme. — Etimologia

— Thermae, Balineae, Balineum, Lavatrina
— Uso antico de’ Bagni — Ragioni —
Abuso — Bagni pensili — Balineae più
famose — Ricchezze profuse ne’ bagni
publici — Estensione delle terme — Edificj
contenuti in esse — Terme estive e jemali
— Aperte anche di notte — Terme
principali — Opere d’arte rinvenute in esse
— Terme di Caracalla — Ninfei — Serbatoi
e Acquedotti — Agrippa edile — Inservienti
alle acque — Publici e privati — Terme in
Pompei — Terme di M. Crasso Frugio —
Terme publiche e private — Bagni rustici —
Terme Stabiane — Palestra e Ginnasio —
Ginnasio in Pompei — Bagno degli uomini
— Destrictarium — L’imperatore Adriano
nel bagno de’ poveri — Bagni delle donne
— Balineum di M. Arrio Diomede —
Fontane publiche e private — Provenienza
delle acque — Il Sarno e altre acque —
Distribuzione per la città — Acquedotti 183
CAPITOLO XVI. — Le Scuole. — Etimologia 231

— Scuola di Verna in Pompei — Scuola di
Valentino — Orbilio e la ferula — Storia de’
primordj della coltura in Italia — Numa e
Pitagora — Etruria, Magna Grecia e Grecia
— Ennio e Andronico — Gioventù romana
in Grecia — Orazio e Bruto — Secolo d’oro
— Letteratura — Giurisprudenza —
Matematiche — Storia naturale —
Economia rurale — Geografia — Filosofia
romana — Non è vero che fosse ucciditrice
di libertà — Biblioteche — Cesare incarica
Varrone di una biblioteca publica — Modo
di scrivere, volumi, profumazione delle
carte — Medicina empirica — Medici e
chirurghi — La Casa del Chirurgo in
Pompei — Stromenti di chirurgia rinvenuti
in essa — Prodotti chimici —
Pharmacopolae, Seplasarii, Sagae —
Fabbrica di prodotti chimici in Pompei —
Bottega di Seplasarius — Scuole private
CAPITOLO XVII. — Le Tabernæ. — Istinti 271

dei Romani — Soldati per forza —
Agricoltori — Poca importanza del
commercio coll’estero — Commercio
marittimo di Pompei — Commercio
marittimo di Roma — Ignoranza della
nautica — Commercio d’importazione —
Modo di bilancio — Ragioni di decadimento
della grandezza romana — Industria — Da
chi esercitata — Mensarii ed Argentarii —
Usura — Artigiani distinti in categorie —
Commercio al minuto — Commercio delle
botteghe — Commercio della strada —
Fori nundinari o venali — Il Portorium o
tassa delle derrate portate al mercato — Le
tabernae e loro costruzione — Institores —
Mostre o insegne — Popinae, thermopolia,
cauponae, anopolia — Mercanti ambulanti
— Cerretani — Grande e piccolo
Commercio in Pompei — Foro nundinario
di Pompei — Tabernae — Le insegne delle
botteghe — Alberghi di Albino, di Giulio
Polibio e Agato Vajo, dell’Elefante o di
Sittio e della Via delle Tombe —
Thermopolia — Pistrini, Pistores, Siliginari
— Plauto, Terenzio, Cleante e Pittaco Re,
mugnai — Le mole di Pompei — Pistrini
diversi — Paquio Proculo, fornajo,
duumviro di giustizia — Ritratto di lui e di
sua moglie — Venditorio d’olio — Ganeum
— Lattivendolo — Fruttajuolo — Macellai
— Myropolium, profumi e profumieri —
Tonstrina, o barbieria — Sarti —
Magazzeno di tele e di stofe — Lavanderie
— La Ninfa Eco — Il Conciapelli —
Calzoleria e Selleria — Tintori — Arte
Fullonica — Fulloniche di Pompei —
Fabbriche di Sapone — Orefici — Fabbri e
falegnami — Praefectus fabrorum — Vasaj
e vetrai — Vasi vinarj — Salve Lucru
CAPITOLO XVIII. — Belle Arti. — Opere 345

sulle Arti in Pompei — Contraffazioni —
Aneddoto — Primordj delle Arti in Italia —
Architettura etrusca — Architetti romani —
Scrittori — Templi — Architettura
pompeiana — Angustia delle case —
Monumenti grandiosi in Roma — Archi —
Magnificenza nelle architetture private —
Prezzo delle case di Cicerone e di Clodio
— Discipline edilizie — Pittura — Pittura
architettonica — Taberna o venditorio di
colori in Pompei — Discredito delle arti in
Roma — Pittura parietaria — A fresco —
All’acquarello — All’encausto —
Encaustica — Dipinti su tavole, su tela e
sul marmo — Pittori romani — Arellio —
Accio Prisco — Figure isolate — Ritratti —
Pittura di genere: Origine — Dipinti
bottegai — Pittura di fiori — Scultura —
Prima e seconda maniera di statuaria in
Etruria — Maniera greca — Prima scultura
romana — Esposizione d’oggetti d’arte —
Colonne — Statue, tripedaneae, sigillae —
Immagine de’ maggiori — Artisti greci in
Roma — Cajo Verre — Sue rapine — La
Glìttica — La scultura al tempo dell’Impero
— In Ercolano e Pompei — Opere
principali — I Busti — Gemme pompejane
— Del Musaico — Sua origine e progresso
— Pavimentum barbaricum, tesselatum,
vermiculatum — Opus signinum —
Musivum opus — Asarola — Introduzione
del mosaico in Roma — Principali musaici
pompejani — I Musaici della Casa del
Fauno — Il Leone — La Battaglia di Isso —
Ragioni perchè si dichiari così il soggetto
— A chi appartenga la composizione —
Studj di scultura in Pompei
VOLUME TERZO
CAPITOLO XIX. — Quartiere de’ soldati, e 5

Ludo gladiatorio? — Pagus Augustus
Felix — Ordinamenti militari di Roma —
Inclinazioni agricole — Qualità militari —
Valore personale — Formazione della
milizia — La leva — Refrattarj — Cause
d’esenzione — Leva tumultuaria —
Cavalleria — Giuramento — Gli evocati e i
conquisitori — Fanteria: Veliti, Astati,
Principi, Triarii — Centurie, manipoli, coorti,
legioni — Denominazione delle legioni —
Ordini della cavalleria: torme, decurie. —
Duci: propri e comuni — Centurioni —
Uragi, Succenturiones, Accensi,
Tergoductores, Decani — Signiferi —
Primopilo — Tribuni — Decurioni nella
cavalleria — Prefetti dei Confederati —
Legati — Imperatore — Armi — Raccolta
d’armi antiche nel Museo Nazionale di
Napoli — Catalogo del comm. Fiorelli —
Cenno storico — Armi trovate negli scavi
d’Ercolano e Pompei — Armi dei Veliti,
degli Astati, dei Principi, dei Triarii, della
cavalleria — Maestri delle armi — Esercizj:
passo, palaria, lotta, nuoto, salto, marce —
Fardelli e loro peso — Bucellatum —
Cavalleria numidica — Accampamenti —
Castra stativa — Forma del campo —
Principia — Banderuole — Insegne —
Aquilifer — Insegna del Manipolo —
Bandiera delle Centurie — Vessillo della
Cavalleria — Guardie del campo —
Excubiæ e Vigiliæ — Tessera di consegna
— Sentinelle — Procubitores — Istrumenti
militari: buccina, tuba, lituus, cornu,
timpanum — Tibicen, liticen, timpanotriba
— Stipendj militari — I Feciali, gli Auguri,
gli Aruspici e i pullarii — Sacrifici e
preghiere — Dello schierarsi in battaglia —
Sistema di fortificazioni — Macchine
guerresche: Poliorcetiæ: terrapieno, torre
mobile, testuggine, ariete, balista,
tollenone, altalena, elepoli, terebra,
galleria, vigna — Arringhe — La vittoria,
Inni e sacrificj — Premj: asta pura, monili,
braccialetti, catene — Corone: civica,
morale, castrense o vallare, navale o
rostrale, ossidionale, trionfale, ovale —
Altre distinzioni — Spoglia opima — Preda
bellica — Il trionfo — Veste palmata —
Trionfo della veste palmata — In
Campidoglio — Banchetto pubblico —
Trionfo navale — Ovazione — Onori del
trionfatore — Pene militari: decimazione,
vigesimazione, e centesimazione,
fustinarium, taglio della mano,
crocifissione, fustigazione leggiera, multa,
censio hastaria — Pene minori — Congedo
CAPITOLO XX. — Le Case. Differenza tra le 57

case pompejane e romane — Regioni ed
Isole — Cosa fosse il vestibulum e perchè
mancasse alle case pompejane — Piani —
Solarium — Finestre — Distribuzione delle
parti della casa — Casa di Pansa —
Facciata — La bottega del dispensator —
Postes, aulæ, antepagamenta — Janua —
Il portinajo — Prothyrum — Cavædium —
Compluvium ed impluvium — Puteal — Ara
dei Lari — I Penati — Cellæ, o contubernia
— Tablinum, cubicula, fauces, perystilium,
procœton, exedra, œcus, triclinium —
Officia antelucana — Trichila — Lusso de’
triclinii — Cucina — Utensili di cucina —
Inservienti di cucina — Camino: v’erano
camini allora? — Latrina — Lo xisto — Il
crittoportico — Lo sphæristerium, la
pinacoteca — Il balineum — L’Alæatorium
— La cella vinaria — Piani superiori e
recentissima scoperta — Cœnacula — La
Casa a tre piani — I balconi e la Casa del
Balcone pensile — Case principali in
Pompei — Casa di villeggiatura di M. Arrio
Diomede — La famiglia — Principio
costitutivo di essa — La nascita del figlio —
Cerimonie — La nascita della figlia —
Potestas, manus, mancipium — Minima,
media, maxima diminutio capitis —
Matrimonii: per confarreazione, uso,
coempzione — Trinoctium usurpatio —
Diritti della potestas, della manus, del
mancipium — Agnati, consanguinei —
Cognatio — Matrimonium, connubium —
Sponsali — Età del matrimonio — Il
matrimonio e la sua importanza — Bigamia
— Impedimenti — Concubinato — Divorzio
— Separazione — Diffarreatio —
Repudium — La dote — Donatio propter
nuptias — Nozioni sulla patria podestà —
Jus trium liberorum — Adozione — Tutela
— Curatela — Gli schiavi — Cerimonia
religiosa nel loro ingresso in famiglia —
Contubernium — Miglioramento della
condizione servile — Come si divenisse
schiavo — Mercato di schiavi — Diverse
classi di schiavi — Trattamento di essi —
Numero — Come si cessasse di essere
schiavi — I clienti — Pasti e banchetti
romani — Invocazioni al focolare —
Ghiottornie — Leggi alla gola — Lucullo e
le sue cene — Cene degli imperatori —
Jentaculum, prandium, merenda, cœna,
commissatio — Conviti publici — Cene
sacerdotali — Cene de’ magistrati — Cene
de’ trionfanti — Cene degli imperatori —
Banchetti di cerimonia — Triumviri
æpulones — Dapes — Triclinio — Le
mense — Suppellettili — Fercula —
Pioggie odorose — Abito e toletta da tavola
— Tovaglie e tovaglioli — Il re del
banchetto — Tricliniarca — Coena recta —
Primo servito — Secunda mensa —
Pasticcerie e confetture — Le posate —
Arte culinaria — Apicio — Manicaretto di
perle — Vini — Novellio Torquato milanese
— Servi della tavola: Coquus,
lectisterniator, nomenclator, prægustator,
structor, scissor, carptor, pincerna,
pocillator — Musica alle mense —
Ballerine — Gladiatori — Gli avanzi della
cena — Le lanterne di Cartagine — La
partenza de’ convitati — La toletta d’una
pompejana — Le cubiculares, le cosmetæ,
le calamistræ, ciniflones, cinerarii, la
psecae — I denti — La capigliatura — Lo
specchio — Punizioni della toaletta — Le
ugne — I profumi — Mundus muliebris — I
salutigeruli — Le Veneræ —
Sandaligerulæ, vestisplicæ, ornatrices —
Abiti e abbigliamenti — Vestiario degli
uomini — Abito de’ fanciulli — La bulla —
Vestito degli schiavi — I lavori del gineceo
CAPITOLO XXI. — I Lupanari. — Gli ozj di 165

Capua — La prostituzione — Riassunto
storico della prostituzione antica —
Prostituzione ospitale, sacra e legale — La
Bibbia ed Erodoto — Gli Angeli e le figlie
degli uomini — Le figlie di Loth — Sodoma
e Gomorra — Thamar — Legge di Mosè —
Zambri, Asa, Sansone, Abramo, Giacobbe,
Gedeone — Raab — Il Levita di Efraim —
David, Betsabea, la moglie di Nabal e la
Sunamite — Salomone e le sue concubine
— Prostituzione in Israele — Osea profeta
— I Babilonesi e la dea Militta — Venere e
Adone — Astarte — Le orgie di Mitra —
Prostituzione sacra in Egitto — Ramsete e
Ceope — Cortigiane più antiche —
Rodope, Cleina, Stratonice, Irene,
Agatoclea — Prostituzione greca —
Dicterion — Ditteriadi, auletridi, eterìe —
Eterìe celebri — Aspasia — Saffo e l’amor
lesbio — La prostituzione in Italia — La
lupa di Romolo e Remo — Le feste
lupercali — Baccanali e Baccanti — La
cortigiana Flora e i giuochi florali — Culto
di Venere in Roma — Feste a Venere
Mirtea — Il Pervigilium Veneris —
Traduzione — Altre cerimonie nelle feste di
Venere — I misteri di Iside — Feste
Priapee — Canzoni priapee — Emblemi
itifallici — Abbondanti in Ercolano e
Pompei — Raccolta Pornografica nel
Museo di Napoli — Sue vicende — Oggetti
pornografici d’Ercolano e Pompei — I
misteri della Dea Bona — Degenerazione
de’ misteri della Dea Bona — Culto di
Cupido, Mutino, Pertunda, Perfica, Prema,
Volupia, Lubenzia, Tolano e Ticone —
Prostituzione legale — Meretrici forestiere
— Cortigiane patrizie — Licentia stupri —
Prostitute imperiali — Adulterii — Bastardi
— Infanticidi — Supposizioni ed
esposizioni d’infanti — Legge Giulia: de
adulteriis — Le Famosæ — La Lesbia di
Catullo — La Cinzia di Properzio — La
Delia di Tibullo — La Corinna di Ovidio —
Ovidio, Giulia e Postumo Agrippa — La
Licori di Cornelio Gallo — Incostanza delle
famosæ — Le sciupate di Orazio — La
Marcella di Marziale e la moglie —
Petronio Arbitro e il Satyricon — Turno —
La Prostituzione delle Muse — Giovenale
— Il linguaggio per gesti — Comessationes
— Meretrices e prostibulæ — Prosedæ,
alicariæ, blitidæ, bustuariæ, casoritæ,
copæ, diobolæ, quadrantariæ, foraneæ,
vagæ, summenianæ — Le delicatæ —
Singrafo di fedeltà — Le pretiosæ —
Ballerine e Ludie — Crescente cinedo e
Tyria Percisa in Pompei — Pueri meritorii,
spadones, pædicones — Cinedi — Lenoni
— Numero de’ lupanari in Roma —
Lupanare romano — Meretricium nomen
— Filtri amatorii — Stabula, casaurium,
lustrum, ganeum — Lupanari pompejani —
Il Lupanare Nuovo — I Cuculi — Postriboli
minori
CAPITOLO XXII. La Via delle tombe. — 285

Estremi officii ai morenti — La Morte —
Conclamatio — Credenze intorno all’anima
ed alla morte — Gli Elisii e il Tartaro —
Culto dei morti e sua antichità — Gli Dei
Mani — Denunzia di decesso — Tempio
della Dea Libitina — Il libitinario —
Pollinctores — La toaletta del morto — Il
triente in bocca — Il cipresso funerale e
suo significato — Le imagini degli Dei
velate — Esposizione del cadavere — Il
certificato di buona condotta —
Convocazione al funerale — Exequiæ,
Funus, publicum, indictivum, tacitum,
gentilitium — Il mortoro: i siticini, i tubicini,
le prefiche, la nenia; Piatrices, Sagæ,
Expiatrices, Simpulatrices, i Popi e i
Vittimari, le insegne onorifiche, le imagini
de’ maggiori, i mimi e l’archimimo, sicinnia,
amici e parenti, la lettiga funebre — I
clienti, gli schiavi e i familiari — La rheda
— L’orazione funebre — Origine di essa —
Il rogo — Il Bustum — L’ultimo bacio e
l’ultimo vale — Il fuoco alla pira — Munera
— L’invocazione ai venti — Legati di
banchetti annuali e di beneficenza —
Decursio — Le libazioni — I bustuari —
Ludi gladiatorii — La ustrina — Il sepolcro
comune — L’epicedion — Ossilegium —
L’urna — Suffitio — Il congedo —
Monimentum — Vasi lacrimatorj — Fori
nelle tombe — Cremazione — I bambini e i
colpiti dal fulmine — Subgrundarium —
Silicernium — Visceratio — Novemdialia —
Denicales feriæ — Funerali de’ poveri —
Sandapila — Puticuli — Purificazione della
casa — Lutto, publico e privato —
Giuramento — Commemorazioni funebri,
Feste Parentali, Feralia, Lemuralia, Inferiæ
— I sepolcri — Sepulcrum familiare —
Sepulcrum comune — Sepolcro ereditario
— Cenotafii — Columellæ o cippi, mensæ,
labra, arcæ — Campo Sesterzio in Roma
— La formula Tacito nomine — Prescrizioni
pe’ sepolcri — Are pei sagrifizj — Leggi
mortuarie e intorno alle tombe — Punizioni
de’ profanatori di esse — Via delle tombe
in Pompei — Tombe di M. Cerrinio e di A.
Vejo — Emiciclo di Mammia — Cippi di M.
Porcio, Venerio Epafrodito, Istacidia,
Istacidio Campano, Melisseo Apro e
Istacidio Menoico — Giardino delle colonne
in musaico — Tombe delle Ghirlande —
Albergo e scuderia — Sepolcro dalle porte
di marmo — Sepolcreto della famiglia
Istacidia — Misura del piede romano — La
tomba di Nevoleja Tiche e di Munazio
Fausto — Urna di Munazio Atimeto —
Mausoleo dei due Libella — Il decurionato
in Pompei — Cenotafio di Cejo e Labeone
— Cinque scheletri — Columelle — A Iceio
Comune — A Salvio fanciullo — A Velasio
Grato — Camera sepolcrale di Cn. Vibrio
Saturnino — Sepolcreto della famiglia Arria
— Sepolture fuori la porta Nolana —
Deduzioni
CONCLUSIONE 371
Appendice Prima. I busti di Bruto e di

Pompeo 383
Appendice Seconda. L’Eruzione del Vesuvio
del 1872 391
Sonetto a P. A. Curti di P. Cominazzi 419
Indice delle Incisioni sparse nell’opera 421
Indice Generale 423
FINE DELL’INDICE.
NOTE:
1. Saturn. I, 1.
2. Pompeja. Pag. 136.
3. Pag. 9.
4. Sat. 6:
O villa, e quando io rivedrotti?

Trad. Gargallo.
5. Lib. 3. 22:
Terra nata dell’armi all’alta gloria

Non al crudo terror.
Trad. Vismara.
6. Ann. 2-14. «Quelle targhe e pertiche sconce de’ barbari fra le macchie e
gli alberi non valere, come i lanciotti e le spade e l’assettata armatura.
Tirassero di punta spesso al viso.» Tr. di Bernardo Davanzati.
7. Lib. IX, 5.
8. Tit. Liv., lib. XXXV, 2 e 23.
9. Rosini, Antiquit. Roman. Lib. X, cap. 4.
10. Lib. VII, cap. 4.
11. Plin. Nat. Hist., lib. X, 5.
12. Sc. II. 16. — «Osserva dapprima qual regime abbiano gli eserciti nostri,
quindi qual fatica e quanta cibaria portino in campo per mezzo mese ed
attrezzi d’uso; perocchè il portar il palo, lo scudo, il gladio, e l’elmo i
nostri soldati non contino nel peso, più che gli omeri, le mani e le altre
membra, afferman essi le armi essere le membra del soldato, le quali
così agevolmente portano, che dove ne fosse il bisogno, gittato il
restante peso, potrebbero coll’armi, come colle membra proprie
combattere.»
13. Ep. 57.
14. Nelle nostre provincie, massime nella Bresciana, esiste un pane dolciato
che si chiama bussolà, dal bucellatum romano, ma il bucellatum, come
esprime il nome, era nel mezzo bucato, onde portarlo all’uopo sospeso
o infilzato, viaggiando, sull’asta.
15.
Ed aste scisse in quattro parti, e pali

Acuminati.
Georgica II, v. 25.
16. Hist. Rom. Lib. XXVII.
17.
Movendo aquile, insegne, aste latine

Contro latine insegne, aquile ed aste.
Lib. I. v. 7. Trad. del conte Franc. Cassi.
18.
Eran di fieno: ma quel fieno istesso

Da ciascun riscotea tanto rispetto,
Quanto l’aquila tua ne esige adesso.
Si stava in cima a lungo palo eretto
Un manipol di fieno, onde di fanti
Certo drappel manipolar fu detto.
Trad. di G. B. Bianchi.
19. Tacito, Ann. XV. 29.
20. Svetonio, In Vespasianum, 6.
21. Lib. I. 43.
22. De Bello Jugurt. LXV.
23.
«La tessera dà il segno

Ove di guardia scritte son le veci.»
Lib. X.
24. Just. Lips. De Milit. Rom. v. 9.
25. Lib. IV. II. 79:
Or del tardo pastore entro le mura

La buccina risuona.
26. Lib. XI. 475:
E già la roca
Tromba ne va per la città squillando
De la battaglia il sanguinoso accento.
Tr. Annibal Caro.
27.
Non la tuba diretta e non il corno

Di ricurvo metal.
28. v. 734:
Con il corno ricurvo

Il richiamo squillò e il lituo adunco
Colla stridula voce i suoni emise.
29. Thebaid. 2. 78;
S’udian per tutto rimbombare i vuoti

Bossi e di bronzo i timpani sonanti.
Trad. di Selvaggio Porpora,
pseud. del Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio.
30. Dion. d’Alicarn. II, 73.
31. Servio, X, 14.
32. Vol. I, cap. III.
33. Trad. di Felice Bellotti.
34. Così Cicerone nel Lib 2, Divin, 34: Attulit in cavæ pullos, is qui ex eo
nominatur pullarius. [35]

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The Fishing Net and the Spider Web:

Mediterranean Imaginaries and the

The Fishing Net

More information about this series at

The Fishing Net and

Cover illustration: Suture mediterranee, Costanza Ferrini (2019), photographed by Rosi

of the modern Mediterranean. Closer to home, my scholarly collaboration

Biblioteca Provinciale in Bari; of the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles;

1 Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries 1

2 Making Italians, Making Southerners 11

3 The Fishing Net and the Spider Web 33

6 Between Imperium and Emporion159

8 From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum235

9 Coda: The Mediterranean Quest(ion)257

Fig. 7.13 Mostra triennale delle terre italiane d’oltremare, 1940.

Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries

© The Author(s) 2020 1

and found itself haunted by the constitutional “liquidity” of its referent.2

its very object of inquiry. My interest is not in the “Mediterranean Sea” as

What this book is not, is a general theory of “the” Mediterranean imag-

Italians,” however, has remained largely unexplored. From a meridionist

formation.14 A network generating network-like forms of selfhood akin to

modern Italy from a perspective that challenges mainstream interpreta-

The confrontation between the Europeanization and

Making Italians, Making Southerners

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

© The Author(s) 2020 11

captures a discursive sphere of imaginings and reimaginings of the Italian

Making Northerners, Making Southerners

accompanied her in public, feigning effeminate (homosexual or unthreat-

character” by endorsing the British ideal of the “self-made” man.30 In fact,

positivism and combatting the ascendency of idealism in the cultural wars

meridionalismo inscribed the whole project of making Italians within the

The Mediterranean Question

make on American radio listeners in 1938. Il racconto del guardiano di

commander at sea.51 Even the Friulian-born Pacifico Valussi, perhaps the

symbolic horizon of the emigrants’ hopes and their unique experience of

criminalization of all dissent and insurrection in the triad of brigantaggio,

of those who were being “made” into southerners. Italian nation-­building,

The Fishing Net and the Spider Web

© The Author(s) 2020 33

CAPITOLO X. — La Basilica. — Origine

CAPITOLO XI. — Le Curie, il Calcidico, le

CAPITOLO XIII. — I Teatri — Teatro 53

CAPITOLO XIV. — I Teatri — L’Anfiteatro. 103

CAPITOLO XV. — Le Terme. — Etimologia

CAPITOLO XVI. — Le Scuole. — Etimologia 231

CAPITOLO XVII. — Le Tabernæ. — Istinti 271

CAPITOLO XVIII. — Belle Arti. — Opere 345

CAPITOLO XIX. — Quartiere de’ soldati, e 5

CAPITOLO XX. — Le Case. Differenza tra le 57

CAPITOLO XXI. — I Lupanari. — Gli ozj di 165

CAPITOLO XXII. La Via delle tombe. — 285

Appendice Prima. I busti di Bruto e di

2. Pompeja. Pag. 136.

O villa, e quando io rivedrotti?

Terra nata dell’armi all’alta gloria

1 Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries 1

2 Making Italians, Making Southerners 11

3 The Fishing Net and the Spider Web 33

6 Between Imperium and Emporion159

8 From Mare Nostrum to Mare Aliorum235

9 Coda: The Mediterranean Quest(ion)257

of those who were being “made” into southerners. Italian nation-building,