“Verso Oriente. Riflessioni sull’identità fra estetica e integrazione”,

The text centres on how the idea of identity has declined as a result of multiple accounts from late Antiquity and Byzantine eras, some of which are drawn from travelogues. Beginning with the idea that moving «towards Rome» translates to moving towards the centre of the world, which is a symbol of a power ideology and the driving force behind the Romans’ centuries-long globalization strategy, as a suggestion impressed by the title of the famous oration by Elio Aris- tide. Conversely, the current movement of workers, immigrants, pilgrims, merchants, and intellectuals towards Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine East, indicates the broad contours of a vola- tile and polysemous concept that was already somewhat artificial at the time, but which derived from the extraordinary cultural humus that resulted from the intersection of ethnic groups, religions, laws, customs, and society. Political belonging in the Byzantine experi- ence, despite being primarily Christian, however multifaceted and multiethnic, appears only as one of the elements on which establish one’s identity, not without difficulties, discrimination, and conflicts. This is because political belonging no longer plays the role of cen- tripetal aggregation of citizenship, as it did in the Western Roman Empire.