From the Latin "in the midst of lands," the Mediterranean evokes classicism, contamination and blue skies on which to project a desire: that of being able to capture the features of a common identity. If the historian's gaze seems to belie the idea of Mediterranean-ness-David Abulafia in this volume defines it as a fragmented space, where even in the past the meeting of cultures was the exception of some cosmopolitan cities and not the rule-it is the Muses who are attracted to it. The melancholic and reflective vein of the songs evoked by Turkish musician Zülfü Livaneli, the proverbial conviviality and celebration of leisure praised by Matteo Nucci are looked upon with a mixture of fascination and blame by countries with a Protestant matrix: the nobility of the Greek profile of homo mediterraneus can become in a moment contemptuous caricature synonymous with laxity and cultural backwardness. However you want to define it, the Mediterranean appears to be in crisis: neglected by the European Union, which looks to the North African and Levantine coasts only as a threat and energy resource, it is the crossroads of one of the largest migrations in history. 

While hundreds of millions of vacationers swarm to its shores each year, as in a distorting mirror hundreds of thousands face a dramatic opposite journey to escape war, persecution and poverty. The liquid road, as Homer called it, is increasingly militarized, busy and polluted, as well as overheated and overfished. Seen from the North African coast, more than a Mare nostrum it looks like a wall dividing the Arab and European worlds, a source of division and not a crossroads of cultures. It would be wiser to decant its variety than to seek a fleeting common identity, but perhaps Mediterranean-ness is nothing more than a feeling, and as such it does not want to hear reasons. Nevertheless, it remains fascinating, reassuring and consoling. On its shores modernity does not take root entirely, time flows differently, and peoples talk to each other more than elsewhere. What if homo mediterraneus is still to come?

With a contribution by Matteo Nucci.