The Mediterranean Effect

There are some “objects” that seem completely unproblematic in our everyday discourses, our encyclopedias, our teaching programs. One of these is the Mediterranean. From primary school on, we study its borders, its conflicts, its culture; then we learn to traverse it as touristic space, and we start to sense its political dimension. Nonetheless, precisely through its diverse declinations, it is easy to realize how, in one and the same expression form /Mediterranean, we can actually mean quite different things.In short, we are facing a geographical and anthropological reality that is fairly heterogeneous, and corresponds to an apparently non-equivocal reality linguistically speaking – from tourism to Mediterranean Studies and other institutions, there are numerous social discourses that refer to the Mediterranean as if it were something well defined and distinct.