“Being a historian I believe that one of the reasons for today’s problems with what we call ‘dialogue among civilizations’ in the Mediterranean area — precisely between the northern and the southern shore — is the result of an imprecise basic vocabulary” explains historian Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, a professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy. “That is why I am working on the construction of a sort of shared library: our authors and their authors, the pages we have read and those that our friends on the other side of the Mediterranean have read. But which are these 10 Mediterranean books which allow our discussion today to be one in which we understand one another?” We interviewed Professor Mascilli Migliorini during our Istanbul Seminars 2013.

Interview and editing: Nina zu Fürstenberg

Video: Anna Fanuele