Alessandro Vanoli: The Invention of the West

Alessandro Vanoli
Laterza Publishing BARI
pp. 272

The United West Stands in Favor of…

The Western coalition of the willing has decided that…

There are now numerous formulas with which Social e mass media they spread a suggestion, a concept, an idea that bears the name of "the West".

Investigating what lies behind this noun appears increasingly important, both because of the so-called ongoing crisis of the Western system, and because it is a concept that belongs profoundly to the world we live in, to the political, geographical, cultural, human dimension. sensu latu, of approximately one billion women and men from Bucharest to Los Angeles, not to mention Japan, South Korea and Australia.

If putting together Tokyo and Washington, Canberra and Warsaw may seem an anomaly, one might wonder what the root of this strangeness of history is and what has made a geographical concept, a direction, the richest and most contradictory model of life and economy to which the entire world looks.

Professor Alessandro Vanoli answers these and many other questions in his historical essay "The Invention of the West".

Formerly a professor at the University of Bologna and the University of Milan, he specializes in the history of the Mediterranean, Islam and the relations between the Mediterranean and Atlantic spaces. A distinguished author and popularizer, Professor Vanoli, through a scientifically rigorous work and a flowing and captivating prose, outlines the history of the West in a path that proceeds from the idea of ​​space understood geographically to a conception of the world characterized by "feet in Europe and head in the Atlantic."

Sails and cannons led the Spanish and Portuguese to the first great maritime conquest of the world and then the Dutch and the English, trading companies, the French, the Germans with their souls divided between the continent and the sea, two great political revolutions, religious reforms and counter-reforms, the imperial dreams of Charles V of Habsburg and the epic of the Far west, but behind all this immense turmoil a constant, the usual, continuous, infinite search for the Orient, an atavistic passion for which at the dawn of the 16th century of the Christian era it was decided to face the immense ocean to rediscover the eastern routes blocked by the Ottoman power.

"How did we go from a geographical direction to an idea of ​​belonging? And the answer, as always, is complicated. What we certainly cannot do is take the West for granted."

With these words the author opens up further stimulating areas of curiosity capable of illuminating the contemporaneity of theWest.

AP