On Italy's Sea

This book is much more interesting than I expected it to be. I picked it up because I’m really interested in Italian colonialism in the Mediterranean, but my interest waned when I discovered that it was about Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands. However, there are some really good ideas in here, and they kept me invested in the work.

At the center of this book is McGuire’s claim that the Dodecanese were critical to constructions of “Mediterraneanism,” or mediterreanità. Like Italian constructions of romanità, which based identity around the Roman Empire; latinità, which constructed an identity for Latin peoples; and italianità, which was a sense of identity for Italian peoples; the Italian state sought to construct a sense of mediterreanità to be shared by—ostensibly—all peoples of the Mediterranean, although it was used more to bind Italians and Greeks together.

Essential to the idea of mediterreanità is the slogan, Una faccia, una razza, or “One face, one race.” Through empire-building in the Dodecanese, Italians constructed a shared sense of identity between Greeks and Italians to the point that, even today, Greeks of the Dodecanese still view the period of Italian colonization rather positively.

By looking at the case of the Aegean, McGuire emphasizes similarities between the Liberal and Fascist eras, under which Mussolini’s administration expanded the necessity of italianità to include the entire Mediterranean. Moreover, McGuire highlights the value of “thalassological” approaches, which spend less time on metropole-colony relationships and emphasize shared experiences of given seas (in this case, the Mediterranean).

While the substantive content on the Dodecanese was interesting, I find this book far more valuable for McGuire’s approach to the Italian Mediterranean—a topic that I discuss quite heavily in my own writing on Tunisia. I’m going to mull this one over a bit more, and see what interventions I can pick out for my own uses.