LAMPEDUSA: A MEDITERRANEAN HISTORY

Dionigi Albera

(Le Seuil, 256 pages, 2023)

From the castaways of today to those of yesterday, the captivating history of Lampedusa, border island between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

Today, Lampedusa’s name evokes the ongoing humanitarian crisis fueled by the arrival of thousands of migrants who survived the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, and the tragedy of those who died in shipwrecks before reaching the gates of Europe. In recent decades, Lampedusa has also become an island where mass tourism has greatly developed. Due to its strategic location between Sicily and Tunisia, Lo Scolgio (The Rock) as its inhabitants call it, is a place of convergence between those who come from the south and those who come from the north: men, women, and children fleeing Syria, Libya, or Eritrea; tourists, journalists, NGO members, UN officials; and military personnel now that the island has unofficially become the southernmost bastion of fortress Europe.

But as Dionigi Albera’s captivating microhistorical exploration reveals, Lampedusa has always been a crossroads and border between the Christian and the Muslim worlds—a contact zone characterized by rare forms of mutual assistance and exchange between enemies, practiced in a cave/sanctuary where a virgin image coexisted with the tomb of a Muslim saint. Amid a sea rife with violence and warfare, Lampedusa, long deserted, then inhabited by hermits, was for centuries accessible to many—a medieval king on his way to the Holy Land, castaways, pirates, adventurers, priests, and fugitive slaves. In the sixteenth century, it was a fortress and a transit zone between the Spanish and Ottoman empires and a major theater of religious wars. In the eighteenth century, “Lampedouse” was for philosopher Denis Diderot the dream place of the ideal society.

Albera, immersing himself in this Lilliputian space of barely twenty square kilometers, offers a richly nuanced and inspired portrait of a tiny island populated today by a flurry of actors who incarnate the dilemmas, tragedies, and contradictions of our times. As he recounts the long history of paradoxical relationships between Christians and Muslims, made up of clashes and encounters, violence and mutual conversions, he reveals the vicissitudes of Lampedusa as a concentrate of Mediterranean history.

Dionigi Albera is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based at the Institute of European Mediterranean and Comparative Ethnology, Aix-Marseille University. His research has focused on Europe and the Mediterranean, covering migration, kinship and family, pilgrimage and interfaith mixing. He co-edited a number of works translated into English, including New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies (with John Eade; Routledge, 2017), Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries (with Maria Couroucli; Indiana University Press, 2012); Reframing the History of Family and Kinship: From the Alps towards Europe (with Luigi Lorenzetti and Jon Mathieu; Peter Lang, 2016) as well as the Dictionnaire de la Méditerranée (with Maryline Crivello and Mohamed Tozy; Actes Sud, 2016).