An Unknown ‘Miracle’

Chapter 10 provides insight into Andrea Mustoxidi’s biography (1785–1860), focusing in particular on the way this largely forgotten Corfiot, who was famous in his own lifetime, inserted himself into the Italian and European intellectual scene with works on philology and history inspired by Neoclassicism and philhellenism. It also unearths the unknown adventure of this man’s involvement in Russian diplomacy and the 1821 revolution in Piedmont, as well as his subsequent transformation from a Russian diplomat into a Greek minister (the first ‘Ephor’ for culture and education in Greece) and into a liberal politician on the British Ionian Islands. By so doing, the chapter also studies the educational programme of Kapodistrias’s government, as well as the adventure of liberal politics in the British Mediterranean Empire.

Conservative Liberalism and Pan-Christian Utopianism in Post-Napoleonic Europe

Chapter 6 focuses on the mystical atmosphere created by the Holy Alliance (1815) and on the hopes invested on Tsar Alexander I’s allegedly liberal and constitutional venture in the years around the Congress of Vienna. It shows how deeply anti-revolutionary European liberalism was at this time and argues that no matter how conservative, Kapodistrias’s political outlook fell within—and not outside—the spectrum of liberal politics as these were understood in Europe in the post-Napoleonic period. By focusing on the Holy Alliance’s application of a political theology based on the principle of ‘Christian fraternity’, the chapter shows, in addition, how, in this circle of Ionian and Phanariot intellectuals, visions of Pan-Christian utopian ecumenism were combined with the emerging idea of the nation.

The Russian Adriatic

Chapter 4 explores Russia’s imperial ambitions and military conduct in the Mediterranean during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the endeavour of the ‘Septinsular Republic’ (1800–7), a constitutional aristocratic, semi-independent statelet, which put the Ionian islands under the sovereignty of the Porte and the direct political and military protection of Russia. It presents the main characters who staffed this short-lived polity—namely, Giorgio Mocenigo, Ioannis Kapodistrias, Spiridione Naranzi, Andrea Mustoxidi, and Bishop Ignatius—and argues that Russia’s political and military conduct in the Mediterranean, and particularly in the Ionian Adriatic, had a strong impact on the way national and liberal ideas were developing in the area.

Dionysios Solomos

Chapter 3 is a thematic biography of Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), Greece’s official ‘national poet’. It starts by narrating Solomos’s Italian education and his early attempts at composing Italian poetry. In following the poet’s return to his native Ionians Islands, it then focuses on his conscious but difficult decision to transform himself from an Italian into a Greek poet and an advocate of the principles of the Greek revolution and Byronic philhellenism. By bringing into attention the Italian matrix of Solomos’s Greek verses, as well as his return to Italian poetry-writing during the last years of his life, the chapter challenges idealized and teleological perceptions of the poet’s nationality and argues that Solomos was and remained a bicultural intellectual.

Andrea Papadopoulo Vretto between East and West

Chapter 9 narrates the life of Andrea Papadopoulo Vretto (1800–76), through his autobiographical manuscript. By illuminating the activities of this itinerant and adventurous man—in Naples, the Ionian Islands, Nafplio, St Petersburg, Venice, and Varna—the chapter offers a contribution to a number of issues in intellectual history, such as the creation of Albanian nationalism in the diasporic centres of southern Italy, the rise of interest in archaeology in the British Mediterranean, as well as the emergence of the modern Greek bibliographic tradition. It also provides insight into the consolidated links between Greece and Russia throughout the 1830s and illustrates the way Orthodox ecumenism was reshaped within the Greek kingdom.

A Life in Absence

Chapter 8 tells the story of Mario Pieri (1776–1852) and of certain other Ionian and Greco-Italian diaspora intellectuals with whom he was connected. Drawing both from his unpublished diary and his published autobiography, and by following Pieri’s steps from Russian-controlled Corfu to Napoleonic and Habsburg Padua, Treviso, and Venice, and from there to Restoration Florence and back to British-controlled Corfu, it explores the way this ex-Venetian subject and transnational patriot came to see himself as a diaspora Greek through his involvement in Italian, and more specifically Tuscan philhellenism. The chapter thus hopes to tell something about the perceptions of the war from a position far removed from the theatre of battle, as well as of the impact that the Greek revolution and the European philhellenisms had on the peoples of the ‘Greek diasporas’, reshaping even the very meaning of this notion.

Ugo Foscolo

Chapter 1 offers a thematic biography of Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), one of Italy’s canonical poets. It reconstructs the linguistic and literary landscape of Foscolo’s native Ionian Islands and follows the poet’s gradual Italianization as a man of letters and a political activist. By focusing on his celebrated work Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, it explores the role of exile both as a powerful motif of Risorgimento literature and as a driving force in the poet’s own biography and image-making. Lastly, the chapter investigates Foscolo’s transnational patriotism between Venice, Napoleonic Italy, the British Ionian Islands, and revolutionary Greece.

A Trans-Adriatic Programme for the Regeneration of Greek Letters

Chapter 12 sheds light on a trans-Adriatic intellectual programme for the regeneration of Greek letters, an endeavour orchestrated by Andrea Mustoxidi and carried out by a cohort of Ionian and Greco-Venetian men of letters in the period from the 1820s to the 1850s. This programme included themes hardly touched upon by other intellectuals in the realm of Greek letters up to then: the rehabilitation of local history, the reclamation of the Byzantine and Ottoman pasts, and the re-evaluation of Greek and Mediterranean folk poetry. The post-Venetian intellectual programme in which these people were involved was a continuation of the Venetian Adriatic Enlightenment of a previous period. To tell its forgotten story means to turn our gaze away from the one, all-encompassing ‘Neohellenic Enlightenment’ scheme to the multiple Greek and Mediterranean Enlightenments formed on the verge of the modern world.

The Greco- and Dalmato-Venetian Intellectuals after the End of the Serenissima

Chapter 11 encounters the endeavours of a group of Ionian and Dalmatian intellectuals who were enfolded in the decrepit embrace of the Greek community of Venice during the first half of the nineteenth century—namely, Spiridione Vlandi, Giovanni and Spiridione Veludo, Bartolomeo Cutlumusiano, Antimo Masarachi, Pier-Alessandro Paravia, Niccolò Tommaseo, and Emilio Tipaldo. It examines these men’s bicultural existence and multiple patriotisms, spanning as they did Venice, the Ionian Islands or Dalmatia, Italy, and Greece. Most of these people were actively involved in the 1848 Venetian revolution, a fact that shows just how local and regional, as well as transnational, the various patriotisms engendered by the 1848–9 revolutionary events were. However, the chapter shows that these revolutions also marked the point at which nationalism and transnationalism would start to become incompatible and even to emerge as contrary poles.

Epilogue

The Epilogue recounts the story of Andrea Mustoxidi’s clash with Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–74), who lived for a time as an exile on the Ionian Islands. The reason for this disagreement was the gradual replacement of Italian with Greek as the official language of the Ionian state in the early 1850s, a process that Mustoxidi supported but in which Tommaseo discerned xenophobic, and more particularly anti-Italian, dimensions. The Crimean War created additional tension on the islands, widening the gap between Christian Orthodox and Catholics in the region. The conflict between these two intellectuals is seen as symbolically marking the end of the ‘transnational patriotism’ moment in the Adriatic, a declaration of the irreversible dissolution of its common Venetian cultural space. The de-Venetization, Hellenization, and Orthodoxization of the Ionian Islands signified the completion of the transition process from empires to nation-states.