History of the Adriatic: a sea and its civilisation Edited by Egidio Ivetic, Polity, 2022, 380 pp, ISBN 9781509552528, Hardback

Abstract

Egidio Ivetic describes the Adriatic as the ‘small Mediterranean’ or the ‘sea of intimacy’ (Predrag Matvejevic). The author explores Adriatic as a single historical space from the first cultures of the Neolithic Age to the present day. The author’s long familiarity with the Adriatic and its coasts, since the time he was a seaman of the Yugoslav navy in the 1980s on the Yugoslav Navy training ship Galeb, gives additional familiarity to his scholarly knowledge of different historical layers of the Adriatic. Ivetic is also a very well-skilled essayist who helps readers enjoy the book and consume it both as a scientific monography and as a novel. Adriatic, like other closed fronter seas, has been a zone of meditation between diversities; it is a sea of sharp contrasts despite being a liquid plan (Fernand Braudel). Author’s reflection on history always begins with geography, which makes him a historian inspired by Braudel. Nonetheless, he embraces the approach of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell of doing historical research of the Mediterranean convinced as a maritime unity with its own characteristics and their evolution over time. The author starts with geography: geology, topography, climatology. In the first chapter, A Minimal Mediterranean, he explains the maritime territory of the Adriatic, with a focus on its regions and its peculiarities. This chapter could be extracted as the most concise yet thoroughly written introduction to the multilayered history of the Adriatic.