A Border Island on the Crossroads of History

Lampedusa evokes the crossings made by migrants and refugees and its name is associated with the sad sequence of shipwrecks and deaths in the central Mediterranean. For several centuries, Lampedusa has been an uninhabited land at the frontier of two conflicting worlds: between Africa and Europe and between Christianity and Islam. It was a stopover for sailors and a zone of religious truce. This book follows an ethnographic account of the social life on this small island, exploring its history articulated with the present where thousands of migrants and tourists cohabit both well and poorly in a few square miles.

Dionigi Albera is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research interests include migration, domestic organisation, pilgrimage and interfaith mixing. He has co-edited several volumes with a Mediterranean focus such as Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries (Indian University Press, 2012), and New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies (Taylor and Francis, 2016).