Fighting the “Levantinization” of Ottoman Turkey’s Italian community: Italian government’s strategies and plans (1880-1911), LIVING TRANSCULTURAL SPACES CO.AS.IT., Diaspore Italiane - Italy in Movement, MELBOURNE: 4-8 APRIL 2018. (original) (raw)

The rise of nationalism in Italy in the 1880s moved toward an enforcement of the Italian presence in Istanbul and Izmir, perhaps the most cosmopolitan centres in Ottoman Turkey. Since the Ottoman society was organized along strict religious lines, inter-ethnic marriages were likely to happen within the same faith. This was a very common practice among Roman Catholics and Jews, so that French, Italians, Austrians, Greeks, Albanians oftencomposed, together, one family. The absence of a monolithic national consciousness and the use of several languages among these families have led writers, travellers and diplomats to identify them as Levantines (Levantini). The Italian novelist Edmondo De Amicis illustrated in his book Constantinople (1877) the intercultural space wherein his fellow countrymen were living and remarked with huff their “Levantinization” in regard to their language: “It is a bastard Italian, corrupted by four or five other languages which were corrupted before as well”. Members of the same Levantine family could easily be found working for diverse embassies representing antagonistic countries, participating at different national parades; one could easily be a fellow of a French association and on the same time be a supporter of a Risorgimental irredentist Italian organization. In this context, it is interesting to see how the Italian government tried to prevent this trend by promoting a new Italianization of the community through schools, newspapers, associations and new trading routes. This paper will analyse the attempts undertaken by the Kingdom of Italy for fighting the “Levantinization” of Turkey’s Italian community through the study of original archival sources stored in Italy and Turkey. A literature in French, Italian, English and Turkish will support this study.