History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic
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Название: History of the Adriatic

Автор: Egidio Ivetic

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия:

isbn: 9781509552535

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ to the Gulf of Venice. Undoubtedly, it is a cultural proceeding and model. The very monde méditerranéen, the Mediterranean region, was created first by geographers (Carl Ritter, Friedrich Ratzel, Alfred Philippson) and then by historians (Henri Pirenne, Fernand Braudel), later followed by the concept of a Mediterranean cultural region, a mixture of archaeology, imaginaries, mentalities, customs, lifestyles – a common place.8 For decades, cultural anthropologists have unsuccessfully attempted to decipher what characterized the people of these areas as being ‘Mediterranean’.9 Horden and Purcell’s enormous study attempts to provide an answer to the question ‘What is the Mediterranean?’ Hence, by implication, the question arises as to ‘What is the Adriatic?’. There certainly exists a widespread geographic awareness, even amongst the people who inhabit the coasts. Individual scholars and studies have attempted to open up a dialogue between the coasts, yet the concept of a common Adriatic history has never really emerged; there is the lack of a sense of a shared past. The valuable cultural histories of each segment of coast, on which are layered the national histories of the seven Adriatic states, are naturally not the history of the Adriatic. On the other hand, it is not easy to trace a historical vision of this sea. There has been a thematic fragmentation in terms of histories and historiographies right from medieval times, and this partition has continued up to contemporary times in an increasingly national perspective. For the history between the seventh and nineteenth centuries, there exist a dozen regional histories in which are interlaced at least seven national perceptions of the past. This is a long period of time during which the east coast gradually defined itself as an area of multiple political, religious and civilization frontiers, a bulwark of Christendom, an Antemurale Christianitatis, while the west coast lived the history of two or three Italies: communal and feudal Italy; or the Mezzogiorno (southern Italy), the Papal States and Venice. In contemporary historical studies, there has been a return to a unitary concept of the Adriatic as a fundamental geopolitical place for the national states that belong to it.10 However, these are a common set of problems in the history of the Mediterranean.

      To move beyond the divergences and unambiguous perspectives, it is necessary to consider the Adriatic as a single cultural context, as a historical region, a Geschichtsregion, by extension a smaller geographical space than the continent but larger than a single state. A space with a series of connotations and social, economic, cultural and political structures, perhaps counterposed but nonetheless converging, connected; transnational structures such as, for example, the Balkans, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean itself. Within the Mediterranean, the Adriatic stands out for its own physiognomy and personality. The Mediterranean is undoubtably a historical region, and the Adriatic is a part of it. Yet it can be considered an independent historical region, midway between historical and geographical regions, between the Balkans, Italy and central Europe.

      To understand the specific role that the Adriatic plays within the Mediterranean requires comparison with other seas. In the Western Mediterranean, for example, there is the Arco latino (Latin Arch) initiative, which aims to enhance the Romance linguistic and cultural dimension between Andalusia and Calabria. It is one of the most interesting organizations in the Western European Mediterranean whose uniformity lies in its being Latin and Catholic; it is one way of interpreting a part of the Mediterranean. In comparison, the Adriatic is not a space of uniformity but of the meeting of diversities. Like the Mediterranean, it is the place where differences converge. It is the place in which Italian (Italian dialects) meet the southern Slavic languages: Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian, as well as Albanian.

      When the sea becomes a concept rather than a physical place, this is the result of an old and inherited perception of the maritime dimension, as well as of geography and thus of scientific thought; it is the product of our need to identify a space. When attempting to narrate a sea, there is the advantage that it eludes ideological frameworks intrinsic to categories of a nation and of a state. Geography’s determinism, which attempts to contemplate the whole context of a place, stems from Braudel’s thought, a determinism that frees up historical narration, in this case of a sea, from the determinisms of political histories and their defined length, and national histories, which are in themselves historicist and ideological. The sea is therefore a historical object and an extraordinary text through which the past can be read.11 The sea becomes a historical character, an alternative to canonized historical narrations. Its geography in historical time, as a place where events, dynamics and specific experiences took place, makes it an object formed by diversities and therefore by comparisons. Hence it is a physical place, a reality but also a historical entity, a vehicle of historical knowledge and experience.