Emerging Egypt looks to Italy: Relations and interactions in the nineteenth-and twenty century Arabic sources

This contribution aims to highlight: (a) the image of Italy that Arabic intellectuals travelling to the West had (as evidenced in their travel accounts), and whether it differs from their view of Europe in general and France in particular, with specific reference to the 1906 exhibition in Milan attended by an Egyptian intellectual whose testimony is even more interesting if compared to those of his predecessors visiting the Paris Exhibition; (b) how much space is given to Italy in the Egyptian press of the same period and how it is represented, taking into consideration the conspicuous Italian presence in Egypt, which was one of the most numerous and active communities in the mid-19th century (it is enough to consider the publication of the Italian newspaper Lo Spettatore Egiziano in Alexandria in 1845; the fact that the first postal service was Italian; many architects from Friuli worked for the Khedive; the important role of the Italian Consuls in Egyptian politics). This essay in fact intends not only to outline the view of Italy prevalent in Egypt but also how much it actually influenced Egyptian society, also taking into account the contribution of Italian Freemasonry in Egypt. According to a perspective in line with the global context, the essay concentrates of the kind of network and cultural connections that existed between the Italians and the Egyptians and, more specifically, to what extent the cultural identity of both interacted in the construction of the idea of modernity. Furthermore, the article introduces into the new perspectives on global history other variables linked to the very identification of ‘Italian’ with ‘Levantine’ that contributed to the remodeling of the sense of the Italian national character to the construction of which there inevitably contributed the idea of the Other, Egyptians, Greeks, Turks etc.