After looking at the Mediterranean as a zone characterized by the movement of goods, people and ideas, this chapter examines the sea as the element from which hybrids arise, such as Skylla, Nereus, the Nereids and monsters of Hesiod’s Theogony. These hybrids give expression to the anxieties of Greek speakers on the move. Contact zones like Sicily stimulated a powerful response from Greek speakers, who were constantly faced with other people, other tongues and other habits. Hybridity emerges as a useful mechanism for envisaging otherness and rendering it manageable, either as monstrous threat or as something in a more muted register: similar, yet at the same time different. It is this polarity of similarity and difference that is the pendulum swinging through Archaic Greek culture. Two places of particularly rich cultural encounters, Naukratis and Samos, illustrate how the categories of exotic and hybrid overlap. Even more complicated is Cyprus, demonstrating the most intense cultural layering in the eastern Mediterranean. Here where EteoCypriots, Mycenaean Greeks, Assyrians and Phoenicians all mingle, hybridity was a recurring feature of the island’s culture.

Like Europe, the Mediterranean is a British imaginary and a geographical reality. The term ’Mediterranean’ signifies the narrative of cultural origin and the history of maritime trade, militarism, and diplomacy. The chapter begins with an account of a neoclassical rotunda in Ickworth House, Suffolk, which exemplifies the interfused, recursive narratives and traditions which constitute Greco-Roman antiquity, before tracing those traditions across the medieval Troy narrative and the Romantic response to the Elgin Marbles. The theme tying the cases together, as a means of traversing the immense distances between the Homeric epics and the ongoing debate over the Parthenon sculptures, is the metonymic relationship between totality and fragmentation, which Keats calls ‘the shadow of a magnitude’. The fragment triggers the imaginative reconstruction of the whole, and, by claim of cultural heritage, informs the ambition to possess the whole. The emphasis on the dialectic of unity/fragmentation confirms the narrative of a shared, antique, Mediterranean monoculture to be riven with competing, contested or colonial histories – as expressed by the cultural patchwork of the Ickworth rotunda.

This chapter illustrates how the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. It argues that departure and arrival reified the networks on which the Italian community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government avoided repatriation out of fear that the displaced population would disrupt the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. Seeking to locate themselves in this Cold War Mediterranean, Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the camps and holding centres. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community.

This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

This chapter examines the departure from Egypt from the perspective of oral history and personal collections. It shows how repatriated Italians remembered their departures, and their reception and integration in Italy. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of imperial nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate how departure and arrival evoked different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. Considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and the reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership for repatriated Italians in relation to other migrant departures to and from the Mediterranean.

This chapter draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

The Introduction proposes that a microhistorical lens on the departure of over 40,000 Italians from Egypt after the Second World War helps us to understand how historical temporalities and political membership shape migrant departures. It takes as its starting point the question of the memory of Italian departures from Egypt among Egyptian migrants in contemporary Italy. It frames the book’s argument in relation to ideas about historical time and conflicting notions of the Italian population in Egypt as ’out of time’, demonstrating that a history of temporalities which focuses on the future, present, and past can shed new light on processes of migration in the Mediterranean. It then articulates how political membership, as an encompassing concept functioning within these temporal frameworks, illustrates the construction of the categories normally ascribed to migrants and migrant communities in and beyond the Mediterranean. Finally, it draws these theoretical and methodological threads together to rethink periodisations of European and Mediterranean empires and decolonisation.

This chapter shows how extraterritorial jurisdiction facilitated the coexistence of nationalist and imperialist projects in colonial Egypt. The safeguards proffered by Ottoman-era extraterritoriality had been either adapted to European colonial administrations or cancelled by the early twentieth century. In Egypt, they remained in effect until 1937, playing a formative role when Mussolini announced an aggressively imperialistic project in the Mediterranean in 1933. Cultural institutions, state schools, and Italian consulates became crucial sites of encounter and propaganda dissemination for the regime. Rome’s focus on building a national community coincided with a steady rise in unemployment among Italian subjects. Italians in Egypt became dependent upon Italian state structures just as the they became vital to Rome’s propaganda in the region. Notwithstanding the efforts of the fascist government to convince Egyptian nationalists that Italy’s imperial ambitions posed no territorial threat, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty set the stage for the end of extraterritoriality and discourse around ’repatriation’ emerged to mitigate tensions between nationalist and imperialist projects.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

Chapter 3 shows that in the Mediterranean novel, food becomes a powerful tool through which Mediterranean writers deconstruct homogeneous national identities and celebrate transculturality in the Mediterranean area. In spite of significant differences, some common traits emerge. These include the representation of eating and drinking habits as a collective practice that involves an extended family, including non-national individuals often belonging to the Mediterranean basin; the portrayal of meal sharing as an event that facilitates communication among different cultures, and a way to celebrate a more extensive Mediterranean culture and identity; the use of food as a tool to present a critique of assumed formulations of regional and national identities; and finally, through the contrast between tradition and modernity, food is used to express anxiety for cultures perceived to be under threat from external, and often global, forces. The chapter concludes that food in Mediterranean crime fiction celebrates unity and a common culture in the Mediterranean area, bringing down national borders and expressing once more the transcultural nature of Mediterranean crime fiction.

The Conclusion highlights that there are common characteristics and trends that allow us to talk about ‘Mediterranean crime fiction’. Partially belonging to the family of European crime fiction, Mediterranean crime fiction is more exclusive, because it excludes northern and central European crime fiction. At the same time, it is more inclusive because it includes northern Africa and the Middle East. This book's approach considers southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly gives each component equal significance. It avoids suppressing cultural diversity and contributes to a decentred crime fiction universe by creating a centreless map that does not point at specific countries or cities but at the liquid mass of the Mediterranean Sea. Finally, it shows how Mediterranean crime fiction contributes to the development of the crime genre at large with a concern for environmental issues, a complex discourse on identity and historical responsibilities, and a celebration of transculturality in a genre known for portraying conflict, violence and divisions.