Postcard from the Palazzo

Held at the Palazzo di Venezia in Istanbul, the conference brought together eleven established Italian and Turkish scholars, including Donald Sassoon, one of the most prominent historians of twentieth-century European politics. Conceived as Italy’s way of celebrating the centenary of the Republic of Turkey, and organized under the aegis of the Embassy of Italy in Ankara, the Italian Cultural Center in Istanbul and the Associazione Italia-Turchia, the conference was a fitting successor to “Venice and Istanbul in the Ottoman Era”, an exhibition and conference hosted by Sabancı University’s Sakıp Sabancı Museum in 2009-10.

Contributors explored the complex network of economic investments and political solidarities at work behind the diplomatic facade. As Vera Costantini noted, this network dated back to 1908, when Carlo Sforza established contact with leading figures of the Committee of Unity and Progress. After WW1, when he returned to Istanbul as High Commissioner, his project of secretly supporting Kemalist forces was fully supported by Giovanni Giolitti’s liberal government and the entrepreneurial sector that it relied on for support. The conference venue itself played a part in Sforza’s projection of soft power. After serving as the Venetian bailaggio for four hundred years, in the early nineteenth century the Palazzo Venezia had been repurposed as the Austro-Hungarian embassy. It was entirely rebuilt by the Austro-Hungarian authorities in 1914-1918. As Paolo Girardelli demonstrated, the Italian reappropriation of the site at the end of the Great War reflected Sforza’s commitment to recover and reinscribe in its fabric a lost Venetian heritage, which predated the establishment of a unified Italy in the nineteenth century. I was particularly intrigued by Giorgio Ennas’ paper, which revealed the influence of one of the architects of that Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, on Balkan and early-Turkish nationalists. This led me to reconsider Italy’s place in the construction of the Turkish nation and of Turkish nationalism.

Returning to the post-war period, Francesco Caccamo offered a new interpretation of the diplomat Alberto Tuozzi’s 1921 mission to Ankara. Vera Costantini considered  Carlo Sforza’s  ambitious political project, revealing the Bolsheviks’ role in the failure of the 1921 Conference of London, that in turn provoked the British to seek to divide Rome from Ankara. Fascist Italy’s acceptance of the country’s diminished role in Near Eastern politics needs to be considered in the context of  Anglo-French support of Benito Mussolini’s early administrations.

Alongside traditional diplomatic traffic, contributors also engaged with less familiar historical sources: Francesco Trentini used a comparison of Italian and Turkish war posters to investigate Kemalist iconography across the Republican era. Nevin Özkan, İlhan Karasubaşı and Raniero Speelman applied literary analysis to two post-war travel accounts, by the critic Antonio Borgese and the journalist and poet Corrado Alvaro. 

The conference presented a wide, well-documented range of perspectives on Italian-Turkish relations after the Great War, as well as during and before that conflict. It demonstrated the important insights that scholars of Italian-Turkish relations can offer for a new understanding of a controversial period of Italian history. Another step was taken beyond the Orientalist paradigm of a self-referential post-Ottoman era.  For those of us who have shuttled between Italy and Turkey in our scholarship and in our working lives, the conference was both fruitful and promising.

FEATURE IMAGE: INTERIOR OF THE PALAZZO DI VENEZIA, ISTANBUL.

Blogposts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.