Tradition is contamination that worked

Italian culture did not reach us by remaining intact. It became what it is through centuries of encounters, conquests, trade, migration and transformation. You only have to look at what we eat, what we believe and even the words we use to speak.

Words such as identity, tradition, roots, Christianity and, more recently, remigration have returned forcefully to Italian public debate.

My intention here is not to decide what Italian migration policy should be. That is a contemporary question involving law, economics, security, demographics, integration and political choices.

I am interested in another question.

One that comes before it.

When someone says we need to defend our culture from outside contamination, which culture are they talking about?

And above all: when did this uncontaminated Italian culture ever exist?

Because the moment you start moving backward through history, a problem emerges.

It is very hard to find.

Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed. Tradition transforms too

There is a formula commonly used to summarize the principle of conservation of matter associated with Lavoisier:

nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.

A society is not, of course, a chemical reaction. But as a metaphor for how culture works, the formula is surprisingly effective.

Because a tradition does not appear out of nowhere either.

And above all, it does not stand still.

It receives something from those who came before. It encounters something that arrives from outside. It accepts it, rejects it, modifies it, mixes it with what it already has. Then it passes it on to the next generation, which modifies it again.

At some point, enough time passes.

What was once new becomes old.

What was foreign becomes familiar.

What was contamination becomes tradition.

That may be the first thing we should remember when we use the word tradition: it does not necessarily describe something that remained identical. It describes something that was transmitted.

And transmission inevitably means transformation.

First question: Italian tradition from when?

Suppose we wanted to identify an authentic Italian culture to return to.

First we would have to choose a date.

Before Rome?

Then we have to reckon with Etruscans, Celts, Ligurians, Veneti, Samnites, Lucanians, Messapians, Peucetians, Daunians and with a peninsula that had no unified political or cultural identity at all.

During Magna Graecia?

Then we need to remember what the term means: it did not refer to an Italian state, but to the network of colonies founded by Greek populations in southern Italy. Taranto, for example, was founded by settlers from Sparta, in the Peloponnese — in other words, from Greece.

During Rome?

Rome itself built one of the ancient world's largest systems for circulating people, gods, goods, technologies and cultures, stretching from Western Europe to North Africa and the Near East.

After Rome?

Things become even more interesting.

Because in the centuries that followed, the peninsula was crossed, occupied and ruled by peoples and powers coming from practically every direction.

And that becomes particularly obvious when you look at southern Italy.

Byzantines, Lombards, Muslims, Normans: where did they actually come from?

When we study these peoples at school, their names often become abstract labels.

“The Byzantines arrive.”

“Then the Lombards.”

“Then the Saracens.”

“Then the Normans.”

But let us put them back on a map.

The Byzantines were the people and institutions of the Eastern Roman Empire. Its capital was Constantinople, ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul. Its political center therefore lay on the Bosporus, between Europe and Asia, with a strong Greek and eastern-Mediterranean center of gravity. For centuries it controlled territories in southern Italy, including Puglia.

The Lombards were a Germanic people who, after a long migration through Central Europe, entered Italy in the sixth century. In the South they established, among other things, the Duchy and later Principality of Benevento, whose influence also reached parts of Puglia.

Then we find the Arabs, and Muslims more generally.

And it is important not to confuse the two.

“Muslim” denotes a religious affiliation, not an ethnicity. In the medieval Mediterranean, Islamic populations included Arabs, North African Berbers and other groups.

The word Saracens also needs to be used carefully. In the Christian Middle Ages it became a generic term for Muslims, including non-Arabs and groups from North Africa. It therefore did not identify one single, precisely defined people.

In Bari, Muslim presence was not merely a matter of raids: between 847 and 871 the city was the capital of an actual emirate. It later returned to the control of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Then came the Normans.

Here too, the name hides an extraordinary journey.

They were descendants of Scandinavian peoples — the “Northmen” — who had settled in northern France, in the region that would take its name from them: Normandy. There they adopted the French language and culture. In the eleventh century some of them crossed Europe again and arrived in southern Italy, gradually conquering Puglia, Calabria and Sicily.

Scandinavia.

France.

Puglia.

Sicily.

By that point we are already looking at people who, over the course of a few generations, would be very difficult to lock inside a single identity box.

Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese: Germans, French and Iberians in southern Italy

The Normans were followed by the Swabians, the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

Medieval Swabia belonged to the Germanic area of the Holy Roman Empire and roughly corresponded to territories that today lie mainly in southwestern Germany and neighboring areas. The Hohenstaufen were a family of German kings and emperors; Frederick II belonged to this dynasty.

Then came the Angevins.

The name comes from Anjou, in present-day west-central France. Charles I of Anjou was the brother of King Louis IX of France and conquered the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266.

Later came the Aragonese, linked to the Crown of Aragon, a major Mediterranean power that developed in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula and in the Mediterranean territories connected to it. In 1442 Alfonso V of Aragon conquered the Kingdom of Naples.

Greece.

The Balkans.

Anatolia.

Germanic Europe.

North Africa.

Scandinavia.

France.

The Iberian Peninsula.

This is not a deviation from Italian history.

It is Italian history.

The most spectacular case: Arab-Norman Sicily, where three worlds became something new

One of the most beautiful examples is found in Sicily.

In the twelfth century, the Norman kingdom brought Western, Islamic and Byzantine traditions into contact.

This is not a modern interpretation invented to celebrate multiculturalism in the abstract. It is the definition UNESCO itself uses for the Arab-Norman heritage of Palermo, Cefalù and Monreale.

UNESCO explicitly describes a socio-cultural syncretism between Western, Islamic and Byzantine cultures, from which new architectural, artistic and decorative concepts emerged. It also notes the presence, within the same context, of Muslims, Byzantines, Latins, Jews, Lombards and French people.

That matters.

We are not looking at three cultures simply remaining side by side.

Their encounter produces something that did not exist before.

Transformation.

Once again.

Now open the pantry: tomatoes, eggplants, citrus fruit and coffee

The simplest demonstration, however, does not require a Norman cathedral.

You only have to walk into the kitchen.

Take a few foods we now consider perfectly normal parts of Italian cuisine.

The tomato comes from the Americas. It was brought to Europe by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and began to be cultivated for food in southern Italy in the seventeenth.

Maize originated in Central America. It reached Europe after the voyages of Columbus and was introduced in Veneto shortly after 1500.

The potato has its centers of origin in the Americas, particularly the Andean region, and reached Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century through the Spanish and English; it reached Italy soon afterward.

The eggplant, today inseparable from many southern Italian cuisines, has very ancient Asian origins, probably in India. It was known and spread throughout the Mediterranean by Arabs and is documented in Italy from at least the thirteenth century.

Citrus fruits come from Asia. Classical antiquity already knew citron, but lemons and bitter oranges were introduced into the Mediterranean by Arabs around the tenth century; sweet oranges arrived later, through the Portuguese.

Sugar cane originated in Asia, and its Mediterranean cultivation was developed by Arabs, including in Sicily.

Coffee followed another route entirely: the history of the drink passes through Yemen and the Islamic world before reaching Western Europe. Venice played an important role in its introduction between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

At this point we can run a thought experiment.

Remove from our idea of traditional cuisine everything that came from the Americas.

Then everything that came from Asia.

Then everything that arrived through the Islamic world.

How much remains of the Italian cuisine we imagine to be eternal?

But the question itself contains an error.

Because a tomato is not culturally “less Italian” simply because the plant did not originate on the peninsula.

Italians did not simply receive the tomato.

They transformed it.

They selected varieties, developed cultivation methods, preservation systems, sauces, recipes and rituals.

The American tomato entered an Italian cultural system, and that system transformed it while being transformed by the tomato in turn.

Nothing is created.

Nothing is destroyed.

Everything is transformed.

Even pasta tells a less simple story than we tend to imagine

Here we need to avoid a very widespread legend.

Saying that “the Arabs invented pasta” would be historically far too simplistic.

Preparations based on cereal dough existed much earlier.

But another fact is documented: dried pasta, particularly suited to storage and transport, appears in North Africa under Arab influence as early as the ninth century, and medieval Sicily became one of its major centers of production.

In 1154 the Arab geographer al-Idrisi described the production in Sicily of a thread-like pasta exported to other parts of the Mediterranean.

Once again, the real history is more interesting than the legend.

There does not necessarily have to be someone who “invents” a tradition once and for all.

Techniques travel.

Grains are cultivated.

Populations meet other populations.

Preparations change.

And eventually something appears that we recognize as ours.

And Christianity? A religion born in Palestine

Here the short circuit is even more obvious.

When people speak of the “Christian roots” of Italy or Europe, they are describing a real and profoundly important historical component of our culture.

But here too we need to distinguish cultural belonging from geographical origin.

Christianity was not born in Italy.

It was born in the first century in Palestine and within the Jewish world, and then spread through the cities of the Roman Empire and progressively among non-Jewish populations as well.

It is therefore a religion born in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East that, through trade networks, cities, communities and territories of the Empire, also reached Rome.

Rome would then become one of its fundamental centers.

And that is precisely the point.

The fact that something comes from outside does not prevent it from becoming a constitutive part of a culture.

Saying that Christianity originated in the Levant does not make Christianity less important to Italian history.

Just as saying that the tomato originated in the Americas does not make a sauce prepared in Italy for four centuries any less Italian.

Origin and belonging are two different things.

And now back home: Puglia as a Mediterranean frontier

At this point we could stop.

But living in Puglia, we are fortunate enough to have one of the best laboratories for observing all of this right in front of us.

Puglia was not a closed periphery.

For much of its history it was a Mediterranean frontier.

A land facing the Balkans and Greece, connected to the eastern Mediterranean through its ports and at the same time linked to Italy and continental Europe.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire it was contested by Byzantines, Lombards and Franks; it experienced a Muslim presence; it entered the Norman orbit, followed by Swabian, Angevin and Aragonese rule.

Bari alone looks like a summary of half the Mediterranean.

A center of the Peucetians before Romanization.

Roman.

Contested by Lombards and Byzantines.

Capital of a Muslim emirate.

Byzantine again.

Norman.

Swabian.

Angevin.

Aragonese.

And in all of this we are supposed to find the exact moment when local culture was supposedly “pure”?

The Murgia is not outside this story

The Murgia hinterland is not a separate world either.

During the reign of Frederick II, for example, the Alta Murgia around Altamura was affected by processes of agricultural and demographic development documented in historical sources.

Swabian presence itself left our area one of the most recognizable monuments of the entire European Middle Ages: Castel del Monte.

But what I find even more interesting is not only what remained in stone.

It is what remained in people's mouths.

A language never stands still: Puglian dialects and their layers

When we say “Puglian dialect,” we are already simplifying enormously.

Puglia is divided into different linguistic areas. Dialects properly classified as Apulian, belonging to the southern Italian area, are distinguished from the Salentino varieties of the region's far south; there are also Griko, Albanian and Franco-Provençal linguistic communities.

Dialectological studies devoted to Puglia show, alongside the Latin layer, the presence of Greek, Germanic, Arabic, Slavic, Gallo-Romance, Catalan and Spanish elements.

Not because someone decided to construct a narrative about contamination.

Simply because that is the stratification historical linguistics finds inside the words.

The way we speak therefore preserves traces of people who may have disappeared politically many centuries ago.

And this is where Lavoisier's metaphor returns almost inevitably.

A dominion ends.

A dynasty disappears.

A border changes.

But a word can remain.

Dialect even preserves what Italian has forgotten

It is important to understand that this transformation does not only mean receiving foreign words.

Sometimes it means exactly the opposite: preserving something extremely ancient that the national language abandoned.

Take crai, still present in several varieties spoken in southern Italy and in Puglia, meaning “tomorrow.”

It comes directly from the Latin cras.

Standard Italian lost that word.

Some southern dialects kept it.

So a dialect is not badly pronounced Italian.

It is the autonomous result of centuries of linguistic evolution.

It can preserve a Latin element lost by Italian.

It can receive a Greek word.

It can incorporate a French loanword.

It can transform a word until its origin becomes almost unrecognizable.

Again:

transformation.

And Altamura? The Altamura dialect in linguistic research

The dialect of Altamura is distinctive enough to be the specific object of linguistic study.

Its phonetics include peculiar phenomena studied in academic research, such as distinctive geminate consonants in word-initial position; more recently, specific aspects of Altamura morphology and its relationship with surrounding varieties have also been analyzed.

There are also dictionaries and reference works devoted exclusively to the dialect of Altamura.

And this is the level I find most fascinating.

Grand history talks about armies, emperors and conquests.

But linguistic history tells us what happened after the armies went home.

One population arrives.

Another was already there.

They trade.

They fight.

They marry.

They work together.

Someone learns the name of an object.

A word passes from one mouth to another.

Its pronunciation changes.

A hundred years pass.

Then five hundred.

At some point no one remembers where it came from anymore.

The word is simply “ours.”

In Salento, Greek is still alive: Griko in Grecìa Salentina

In some parts of Puglia this process does not belong only to the past.

In Grecìa Salentina, Griko, a language variety of Greek origin, is still spoken today.

Scholars have debated its history for a long time: according to some interpretations it represents a very ancient continuity with Magna Graecia; according to others it is primarily the result of medieval Byzantine presence.

And the fact that there is no simplistic answer is interesting in itself.

Because real cultures are like this.

They have layers.

Not certificates of purity.

Yesterday's foreigner is today's tradition

There is one final example that I find almost perfect.

The Lombards entered Italy in the sixth century as a Germanic people.

To the Romano-Italian population, they were the foreigners.

Today there is a region called Lombardy.

The Normans reached southern Italy after a journey that began in Scandinavia and passed through France.

Today their cathedrals are Italian heritage.

Arabs and other Muslim populations brought crops, techniques and knowledge into the Mediterranean that were eventually incorporated into local economies and cuisines.

Today no one regards a Sicilian lemon as a foreign body inside Italian tradition.

Christianity was born in Palestine.

Today it is described as one of the roots of European identity.

The tomato came from the Americas.

Now try to imagine Italy without it.

What changes, almost always, is time.

Close enough, and something looks foreign.

Far enough away, and that same thing can become tradition.

So what is a tradition, really?

Perhaps we can finally try to define it.

Tradition is not the motionless preservation of something born pure.

It is what a community receives, selects, modifies and decides — consciously or not — to pass on.

Some things are discarded.

Others survive.

Still others are imported and transformed so thoroughly that we forget they ever came from somewhere else.

Which is why the principle returns once again:

nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.

It is not a law of history.

But it is a useful lens through which to look at it.

Because what we call Italian culture is not the result of two thousand years of maintained sterility.

It is sedimentation.

Rome on top of what existed before Rome.

Christianity inside Rome.

The Germanic world on top of the Roman one.

Byzantium beside the Lombards.

The Islamic Mediterranean beside the Christian one.

The Normans on top of both.

Then the Swabians.

The French.

The Aragonese.

Trade routes.

The Americas.

Migration.

Languages.

Time.

Before defending tradition, we should know it

None of this means that every transformation is positive.

It does not mean every encounter necessarily produces something good.

And it does not mean that knowing history should force anyone into a particular position on contemporary migration policy.

It means something much simpler.

We cannot use history to defend a past that history itself does not document.

We can debate borders.

Immigration.

Integration.

Citizenship.

Security.

Religion.

What we want to preserve and what we are willing to change.

But if we want to do it by appealing to “Italian tradition,” then first we need the courage to look at that tradition for what it actually is.

A construction centuries in the making.

Made of continuity and rupture.

Memory and forgetting.

Things born here and things that arrived from thousands of miles away.

People who regarded other people as foreigners and who, a few generations later, would become part of the same place.

And perhaps the most accurate definition I can find is this:

tradition is contamination that worked so well we forgot it was once contamination.

History is not only beneath our feet.

In Puglia, in the Murgia, in Altamura, it is in the monuments we look at, the food we put on the table, the beliefs we inherited.

It is even in the words we use to name things.

Because a living culture does not remain intact.

It is transmitted. And in being transmitted, it transforms.