In a famous sequence from Il postino (The Postman, 1994), the film’s protagonist Mario Ruoppolo (played by Massimo Troisi) sits on a beach of an unnamed Italian island next to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (played by Pilippe Noiret) who recites his Ode to the Sea.¹ Mario responds to the poem by declaring that he felt “sea sick” like a “boat rocked by the words” of the poem. “Bravo, Mario” Neruda applauds him: “you have just made a metaphor!” “Really?” Mario responds with bewilderment, and then adds: “So the world, and everything in it, is a metaphor for something else?” Neruda’s startled face makes Mario think he has naively misinterpreted the poem: “Ho detto una stronzata?” (Was that bullshit?) he asks. Neruda promises an answer, but the poetic economy of the film requires Pablo’s Latin(-American) humanitas to pay its respects to the humble Mediterranean genius of Mario, so the answer comes from Mario himself with a poem consisting solely of recorded sounds from the sea. The viewer is left with an undeletable image of the Mediterranean Sea as the mother of all metaphors whose infectious liquidity confounds the boundaries between image and reality, sensory experience and internal imagery, the word and the world. Roberto Dainotto has perceptively noted that, since the early 1990s, academic discourse on the Mediterranean grew unbounded and found itself haunted by the constitutional “liquidity” of its referent.² As he remarks, one cannot help but notice a “certain inflation of discourses about the Mediterranean,” when a catalogue search in any American university library returns “more than 107 books with Mediterraneo in their title, 229 with Méditerranée, and 1260 with Mediterranean—more than two thirds of which were published in the last fifteen years.”³ The conversation, Dainotto also observes, has progressively expanded far beyond the Mediterranean basin. Contrary to the physical inbound-ness that characterizes the Mediterranean Sea, the worldwide conversation on “the Mediterranean” seems to have grown so rapidly and so extensively as to make even an account of its participants, let alone a comparative evaluation of common themes and key contributions, an impossible enterprise. The Mediterranean, he concludes, has become a “global business,” and “liquidity” has also become its discursive modus operandi.⁴ In so doing, it has concealed the fundamental “asymmetry” between European and non-European gazes on the Mediterranean.⁵ As he starkly puts it:

any Italian may write about the Mediterranean […] without bothering with citing Abdelkebir Khatibi, Albert Memmi, or Taieb Belghazi. For a Turkish or Algerian author it is instead impossible (or suicidal) not to confront the “Mediterranean” canonized in European literature—provided, of course, that said author wishes to reach a Mediterranean audience beyond its national borders.⁶

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

What this book is not, is a general theory of “the” Mediterranean imaginary. As a study emerging from my primary field of research, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web explores the preeminent trope of Italian cultural history, namely, the “making of Italians,” from a postcolonial perspective that looks beyond the confines of the nation as an “imagined community” and identifies Mediterranean imaginaries as the principal source from which ideas of Italian-ness have been constructed, challenged, and even internally deconstructed. As Benedict Anderson famously argued, “nation-ness” is a “cultural artifact of a particular kind” for it holds “emotional legitimacy.”⁹ In the case of nineteenth-century European nations, this emotional legitimacy was connected, according to Anderson, to the rise of “print-capitalism” and the replacement of script-languages by national languages.¹⁰ On this score, Italy was no exception. As Alberto Mario Banti, among others, has shown, the nation-ness of the Italian Risorgimento was created by a select minority of early nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals who gave Italy its “symbols, images, figures, and values” to solicit patriotic militancy.¹¹ The imagined community that emerged from this Risorgimento was stillborn, however. Neither Anderson’s nor Banti’s study can explain away the emotional weakness demonstrated by the Risorgimental nation in the post-unification era. Turning the fiction of a national community on its head, the idea that Italians had to be made after unification, mobilized entirely different emotional forces from those indicated by Anderson and Banti. Among them, as I argue in Chap. 2, the principal force was the “meridionist” construction of Italy’s “south” predicated on the extraction of the ex-Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the imagined community of the Mediterranean continent to which it had belonged for centuries.¹²

The discursive construction of Italy’s “south” in the aftermath of unification is among the most-well-studied phenomena in Italian cultural studies. Its connection to the contemporaneous discourse on “making of 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, wo...