The early modern Mediterranean is a cultural free zone in which the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Italy coexist. Interactions, emulations, gifts and offers link the Italian courts to the 'Sublime Porte'. This book can also be read as a phenomenology of the gift: a profound historical analysis that studies the relationships between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, through their artefacts, their artists, their works.

By Alireza Naser Eslami.

17 x 24 cm, 184 pp. with 75 figs. nt of which 56 in color. Hardcover.

Introduction:

The historical-political conception developed by 20th century historians has been progressively superseded by a new methodological approach, which increasingly sees historians engaging in a Mediterranean history understood as a place of meetings and exchanges. The contribution provided by external disciplines, such as cultural anthropology and the history of culture, has then offered these recent studies the most suitable investigative tools to develop a strong propensity for comparative studies. The result of this complex process is appreciable first of all in the innovation of the horizons of interpretation, which now frame the cultural borders between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire as a complex area of ​​permeability and interdependence.
Furthermore, the individual vision of the two civilisations, the Islamic-Ottoman and the Western one, also changes, which in the face of a proven practice of exchange can no longer be considered homogeneous entities and always equal to themselves. On the contrary, they are necessarily changeable in the space-time of history: the image we receive of these civilizations from the present cannot be understood without thinking that it reaches us through a continuous process of transformation given by mutual conditioning, by continuous exchanges and different phases of contamination matured in the Mediterranean context. Certainly, as Braudel stated, the Mediterranean is «a vast corridor from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean of maritime and caravan circulation». But it is equally right to state, now with Horden and Pur-cell, that the Mediterranean can be conceptualized by identifying it with a certain number of regions with specific and diversified characteristics, whose internal and reciprocal relationships outline the dense web of Mediterraneanity. '