Mediterranean Historical Review ISSN: 0951-8967 (Print) 1743-940X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmhr20 Italian architects and builders in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey: design across borders edited by Paolo Girardelli and Ezio Godoli, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 301 pp., £61.99 (hardback), ISBN 9781443851947 Miri Shefer-Mossensohn To cite this article: Miri Shefer-Mossensohn (2019) Italian architects and builders in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey: design across borders, Mediterranean Historical Review, 34:2, 250-252, DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2019.1671012 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2019.1671012 Published online: 15 Nov 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 27 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmhr20 250 12. 13. 14. Book Reviews ottomane de l’Égypte (1517), edited by B. Lellouch and M. Nicolas, 113–42 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). Significantly, the author does not even mention Queen Caterina Corner, stating that the Venetian takeover began with the death of the island’s last king, apparently referring to Catherine’s husband, Jacques II (Narration, 54–5). Not all dates included in the period covered by the Narration are explicitly specified. On the construction of the new walls, see G. Grivaud, “Nicosie remodelée (1567): contribution à la topographie de la ville médiévale,” Επετηρίς του Κέντρου Επιστημονικών Ερευνών 19 (1992): 281–306; on the size of Nicosia’s population during the Ottoman siege, see B. Arbel, “Cypriot Population under Venetian Rule: A Demographic Study,” Μελέται και Υπομνήματα 1 (1984): 197. Benjamin Arbel Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel [email protected] © 2019, Benjamin Arbel https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2019.1671011 Italian architects and builders in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey: design across borders, edited by Paolo Girardelli and Ezio Godoli, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 301 pp., £61.99 (hardback), ISBN 9781443851947 Paolo Giradelli and Ezio Godoli present us with a rich volume of essays that discusses various aspects of the Italian artistic and architectural presence in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey through the works of Italian architects, contractors, and builders. The volume’s contributors (Italian, Turks, and Greeks) are academics in the history of art and urban planning, in addition to being practising architects, conservationists, and preservationists. The complex scenario of political, social, and cultural contacts across the Mediterranean has already drawn abundant scholarly attention, yet the hybridity and interweaving of artistic and architectural phenomena have so far received little attention. The book’s focus on architecture from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries brings an important contribution to the field. While vast scholarship has accumulated with regard to nuanced encounters across the Mediterranean in the early modern period, when it comes to the period that follows, scholarship has tended to think in terms of traditional hierarchical power relations. The conventional wisdom frames European involvement in the Middle East as a legacy of the previous mechanisms of colonial power and cultural imperialisms. Yet, as this volume demonstrates, urban and architectural histories allow us to reassess the Italian presence in Ottoman and Turkish cities, and observe the ways in which Italian architects and builders who acted as consultants and participated in various projects of modernization enacted by the states in question. This reframing of the conventional approach also applies to the Ottoman and Muslim side, for instance regarding such notions as “Islamic art”, “Middle-Eastern urbanism”, and the very concept of “modernity” in the context under discussion. Through the case studies assembled by the editors, we are offered a glimpse into material and architectural realities that reveal similarities as well as differences in the perception of space, taste, and beauty. Understanding these perceptions lead to acquiring a deeper understanding of how the Mediterranean Historical Review 251 processes of imports and exports of such material and conceptual things are shaped. But more importantly, we learn of concrete realities of the physical environment that stem from encounters between people from different ethnicities, cultures, and religions. This edited volume draws methodological inspiration from two sources. The editors relate their work to the Braudelian model on the one hand, and trans-national studies on the other hand. They employ the concept of fluidity of people and ideas across the Mediterranean in the context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when boundaries between nations – both geographical and political – became increasingly consolidated. Nevertheless, architects and builders with Italian culture and identity (themselves undergoing major transformation during the same period) influenced many diverse Ottoman and Turkish sites. These were Italians and Levantine-Italians who carried out their designs to new urban scenes, for instance on port cities like Izmir and Salonica, the imperial capital of Istanbul and the Republican centre of Ankara, as well as Balkan cities such as Iaşi (Jassy), Bucharest, and many others. The rich and varied sources that sustain this volume include visual and textual material drawn from diverse origins. Diplomatic documents are located in state archives, Ottoman, Romanian, and Italian (including both pre- and post-unification Italian cities). The studies that discuss later periods rely also on newspapers and private collections of individual architects, insurance companies, and building companies. Further documentation is mined from collections of Catholic congregations in the Middle East and missionary associations. The volume consists of an introduction and 17 articles. The introduction, authored jointly by the two editors, outlines the project and its evolution from a series of conferences on Italian presence in Mediterranean architecture and urbanism and summarizes the historiography. The 17 essays are organized in four parts. The first section, “Landmarks, Spaces and Politics”, is made up of five papers that deal with projects and buildings with a peculiar political and strategic relevance. This section deals first and foremost with Istanbul, and to a lesser extent with Izmir. Indeed, the Ottoman spaces usually associated with highlighted Italian involvement are the eastern Mediterranean ports. Yet, Raluca Tomi’s contribution in this section is especially noteworthy as it expands the geographical scope of the Italian presence to Ottoman Wallachia and Moldova. The second part, “Individual Experiences in Context”, includes five cases and sheds light on little-known activities of Italian architects. Some of the protagonists need no introduction, such as the Fossati brothers; others are less renowned. Nonetheless, the various chapters present aspects of their activity that hitherto were not discussed. These include teaching local Ottoman-Armenian architects, builders and drawers, and the complex relationship the Italian architects in the Ottoman lands cultivated with their families and colleagues back home. Moving from the personal to the framework in which Italians operated in the Ottoman and Turkish urban environments, the third section, “Institutions and Investments”, focuses on the sponsorship that Italian architectural activity received. While these Italians were neither officially sent nor sponsored by their state, they were not acting as private individuals, either. Hence the four articles in this part situate the careers of Italian architects in the Ottoman Empire in the context of investment policies and real-estate operations of various rich Italian-Levantine families and insurance companies, such as the Assicurazioni Generali (see Francesco Krecic and Diego Caltana’s joint contribution). 252 Book Reviews The fourth and last section, “Late Empire to Republic: A Plural Modernity”, focuses on a theme that appears throughout the collection: modernization and its dramatic cultural and political transformation of the Ottoman world. Three papers deal with Italian architects active in the first half of the twentieth century, that is, the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and the opening decades of the Republican era. Some of the projects discussed in this section never materialized. Milva Giacomelli discusses Italian proposals presented at the 1941 international competition for the Anıtkabir, the mausoleum in Ankara commemorating the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Italians won honourable mentions and also prize money. One Italian project, by Arnaldo Foschini, was one of three proposals that won first prize. However, ultimately the jury preferred the project proposed by the Turkish architects and academics Emin Onat and Ahmet Orhan Arda. Taken together, the volume succeeds in its mission to discuss “design across borders”. The authors do not simply take stock of the Italian presence in Ottoman and Turkish urban centres, but explain the many ways in which Italians and Ottomans engaged in physical and aesthetic planning and construction. The outcome is unique, as it fuses concepts and tastes from all sides. We thus gain a more complete understanding of how buildings and sites took shape, and can better appreciate their meaning. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel [email protected] © 2019, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2019.1671012 Mother and Sons, Inc.: Martha de Cabanis in medieval Montpellier, by Kathryn L. Reyerson, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, 263 pp., 9 ill., US$65 (cloth), ISBN 9780812249613 From the smooth pen of Kathryn Reyerson flows a masterful case study of a successful merchant widow’s life in pre-Black Death Montpellier. Reyerson has spent her career mastering the montpelliérain archival records, which, like other Mediterranean towns and cities, includes rich extant municipal, court, and notarial documentation. In this instance, decades spent in the pursuit of women’s networks, gendered communities, and the transmission of feminine wealth, as well as, more generally, trade, commerce, business, and banking, equip Reyerson to draft a textured portrait of Martha de Cabanis’s world. This book, a work of serious and first-rate scholarship, is also as much a love letter to a family the author knows intimately as it is an homage to microhistory. If Reyerson never fully embraces the narrative flourishes of Natalie Zemon Davis or Gene Brucker, she nonetheless serves up a satisfying case study that leaves the reader with a feeling of proximity. By looking at the business records left by a single woman over two decades, we see refracted her wider world. The lessons Reyerson teaches about a mother and widow’s ability to navigate successfully patriarchal systems are transposable and adaptive. Meanwhile, alongside those broader lessons on female agency, the reader is left to explore the particular courtyards and furnishings of the Cabanis house, the fiscal