Book | Antenati a Constantinopoli by Luis Miguel Selvelli[1]
[1] Luis Miguel Selvelli, Translator from Turkish, English, Spanish and Modern Greek into Italian.
From the back cover: During the troubled years of the Risorgimento, they were from the Italian peninsula many to turn their gaze towards the East, towards a Constantinople in turmoil in which an extraordinary process of renewal had been initiated political and cultural. Two companies, the Italian one and the Ottoman one and multi-ethnic group of Istanbul, linked by an exceptional network of affinities, conspiracies, exchanges of ideas and reformist and revolutionary hopes, in the shade of the plots hatched by England, France and Russia to carry on their projects of expansion and domination of the new international capitalist markets: this is the wonderful historical fresco that is returned to us by the author, on the basis of many years of bibliographic and archival research in multiple languages and countries. The volume traces the lives and adventures of some Italian exiles who arrived in the Ottoman capital, ending up being involved in the upheavals in progress.
Through their stories, piece by piece, a world is revealed unknown and unpredictable, which seems to suddenly re-emerge from darkness in which it has been held for decades of stereotypes and prejudices about the world political and cultural heritage of that great empire from whose ashes Turkey arose modern: fleeing migrants and urban modernization projects, uprisings in 1848 and the Paris Commune, the inauguration of the Suez Canal, Courbet's pornographic paintings, Garibaldi's Turkophobic drift, initiation to the freemasonry of the future Ottoman sultan Murat ...
Ancestors in Constantinople thus succeeds in the enterprise of providing a representation lively and at the same time rigorous relations between the Risorgimento Italian and Ottoman reformism, making clear how much those events are historians are actually still extremely close to us, also because, how affirmed by Walter Benjamin from his Parisian exile, "the nineteenth century is the dream from which we must wake up: a nightmare that will weigh on the present until his own spell will not be broken ».
Publisher Il Poligrafo
Paperback format
Published 25/03/2022
Pages256
Italian language
ISBN 9788893871891
[1] Luis Miguel Selvelli, Translator from Turkish, English, Spanish and Modern Greek into Italian.
luismiguel.selvelli@yahoo.it
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Philosophy, International Studies and Economics, Undergraduate. Late Ottoman Period
Researching on late imperial modernities, with a special interest in political philosophy and Western Asia geopolitics.
Luis Miguel Selvelli wanders around. He likes to translate and write at the intersections of art, history and political theory. For seven years he had lots of fun in the Isola neighborhood of Milano. Now he lives in Istanbul to learn more about power and desire. Some of his texts can be read on isolartcenter.org
Luis Miguel Selvelli (1980) works as a literary translator (from English, Turkish and Spanish) for numerous Italian publishing houses, including Saggiatore, Rizzoli, Passigli and Neri Pozza. Since 2007 he has moved to live in Istanbul on the trail of his parents Italian and Levantine ancestors who lived in the big city between 1850 and 1950, pushed in particular from the desire to know more about the great-great-grandfather Italo Selvelli, http://www.levantineheritage.com/miguel-selvelli-interview.html composer in 1909 of the last "national anthem" of the Ottoman Empire.