Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands

This is the first monograph in English to address Orientalism in the writings of Italian travellers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to do against a backdrop of comparative reference to works in English and French that preceded or were contemporary to them.

The book focuses on several key practices of "accidental" rather than "academic" Orientalists: conversion to Islam, cross-cultural cross-dressing, and passing and posing as Muslim in order to gain entry to Mecca.

The book argues that the historical and cultural specificity of this strand of Italian Orientalism lies in the encounter of a weak national identity with the fluidity and contingency of identities in the late Ottoman world.