What did John Capodistria, Ugo Foscolo, Andrea Mustoxidi, Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos have in common? They were all born in the Ionian Islands and studied in Italy; they were all actively involved in national and international politics; and they were all ‘transnational patriots’ who had a sense of possessing two or more homelands.

All but Solomos were born as subjects of the Venetian republic, while Solomos entered the world as a subject of revolutionary France. Only three of the five ever visited the newly established Greek state, but two of them played leading roles in its administration. Two served in the short-lived government of the Septinsular Republic; two worked for a time as employees of the Russian government; three of them spent many years of their maturity in the British-protected United States of the Ionian Islands, and two of them died there, while two others died in England.

Zanou's remarkable and compelling book analyses the biographies of these and other intellectuals who experienced the afterlife of the Venetian empire. Nowadays those of us who work on modern Greek literature are more than ever aware of the multiple national identities of Kalvos and Solomos. Zanou provides not only additional insights into the lives of these two poets, but into those of many other intellectuals of their time from similar backgrounds who shared similar experiences. This period saw ‘the dissolution of a common regional cultural space and […] the shattering of its centuries-old cultural continuum’ (p. 2). Multi-ethnic empires were beginning to seem outdated: the Venetian empire fell in 1797 and the Greek Revolution in the 1820s struck an unprecedented and debilitating blow at the Ottoman empire. The Greek nation-state was established, the first major efforts at the unification of Italy as a single kingdom were made, and yet another empire, the British, came to control lands in the Mediterranean. During this period of bewilderingly rapid change, intellectuals on both sides of the Adriatic had to reinvent themselves and reassess their sense of belonging.

Zanou shuns teleology in order to delve into the way these individuals actually experienced the changes to their communities and their political and cultural geographies at a time when ‘the Adriatic Sea was slowly being transformed from “a bridge into a border”’ (p. 2). (This is especially the case when she examines the ‘forgotten lives’ of Andreas Papadopoulos Vretos and Mario Pieri through their unpublished or only partially published memoirs, both of which were written in Italian.) In the process, she places hybrid identities centre-stage, thus transcending the traditional dichotomy that in the past tended to separate writers and intellectuals according to two mutually exclusive nationalisms: Greek or Italian. In the case of the three leading Zakynthian poets Foscolo, Kalvos and Solomos, Zanou demonstrates how each of them, far from fitting himself into previously established national literary traditions, invented a new kind of writing. Outside literature, Zanou shows, pace Dimaras, that many among her rich cast of characters transcended apparent antitheses by promoting Orthodox Enlightenment,Footnote ¹ imperial nationalism and conservative liberalism. (The mention of Orthodoxy here reminds me that Zanou perhaps makes it insufficiently clear which of her characters were from Orthodox families and which from Catholic.)

As Zanou points out, recent studies on these Zakynthian poets have at last emphasized their transnational nature. Zanou herself quotes a number of Greek passages in Foscolo's correspondence (indeed, the ‘stammering’ of her subtitle is quoted from his remarkable use of the Greek verb τραυλίζω to describe his use of Italian: p. 38) and she highlights the passionate and active interest shown by Foscolo in contemporary developments in Greece and the Ionian Islands, while Michalis Paschalis has revealed the hidden Italian linguistic and cultural background of Kalvos’ Greek poetry and Afroditi Athanasopoulou has uncovered abundant Italianisms in Solomos’ use of Greek. Zanou also points out that it was in London that Kalvos became a Greek poet, as evidenced by his earliest published Greek poem “Ελπίς πατρίδος” (p. 50). The latest edition of Kalvos’ poetry,Footnote ² which was no doubt published too late to be referred to in Zanou's book, presents his poems in strictly chronological order of publication, with no formal separation between those written in Italian and those written in Greek, whereas previous editions of his oeuvre have confined themselves to either his Greek or his Italian poetry.

Zanou shows how Mustoxidi and his associates stressed the continuity of Greek culture since antiquity rather than its revival in modern times. She rightly points out that in this they were the precursors of Paparrigopoulos’ highly influential theory of the continuity of the Greek nation. Strangely, though, she does not do justice to the role of another Ionian, Spyridon Zambelios, as an essential link between Mustoxidi and the Constantinopolitan Greek ‘national historian’.

This was a time when difficult choices had to be made, but it was also a time of great opportunities: Mustoxidi, for instance was by turns a Russian diplomat, an Italian revolutionary, the superintendent of schools in the Greek state under Capodistria, and a liberal politician back in the Ionian Islands. (His openminded cosmopolitanism contrasts starkly with the intolerant Greek nationalism of Korais: see p. 166.) Similar choices and opportunities were faced not only by intellectuals from the Ionian Islands but also by leading Orthodox Christian figures in the Ottoman empire, chiefly the Phanariots and the members of their entourages. There is room for a companion volume that would focus on these Ottoman Greeks.

Zanou points out that Solomos gave up writing Greek poetry and returned to Italian after the Ionian government decided that Greek would become the sole official language of the Ionian Islands in January 1852. I can add that in August 1851, the Italian performance poet Giuseppe Regaldi put on a show in the Aula Magna of the Ionian University in Corfu, and Solomos appeared on stage with him. One of the poems Solomos recited was ‘La navicella greca’, which he had written specially for the occasion. Most of the poem is on a patriotic theme taken from contemporary Greek history, but it ends with the following lines addressed to Regaldi: ‘Hail, illustrious son of an eternal land, / where song and action have always been great / in favourable and in adverse fortunes, / where the stone and the dry grass are good, / where I arrived as a barbarian and am such no longer.’ This is a remarkable homage paid to Italy and Italian culture by the Greek national poet, especially since Solomos had previously used the linked images of ‘black stone’ and ‘dry grass’ repeatedly with reference to Greece.