If the harem was the forbidden space that authorized a female Orientalism, Mecca is the forbidden space that becomes the site of a masquerade on the part of a handful of European male Orientalists. In this chapter we will look at the topoi of passing and posing as Muslim in nineteenth-century Egypt in the memoirs of several European male travelers whose national belonging was riven, whether by force or choice. Leaving aside the discursive mode of the picturesque and its feminine connotations, as well as projects of social and religious reform, these travelers are practitioners of an ideology of adventure, and the real-life precursors of the kinds of hero who will later populate H. Rider Haggard's imperial fictions. Like those heroes, they are on a quest for a “little fresh information” before they die, and most especially about the sacred spaces forbidden to Christians upon threat of death, the Meccan and Medina Harams (or “holy places”). Although only one of our writers was born in the British Isles, all four published their accounts in English, a fact which underlines the dominant role played by Great Britain in the distribution and consumption of such narratives throughout the nineteenth century, and which, as Aamir R. Mufti has recently argued, is symptomatic of the role of the English language in mediating world literary relations through Orientalism itself. Our three non-British adventurers, John Lewis Burckhardt (1784–1817), Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1824), and Giovanni Finati (1787– date unknown) were contemporaries of Amalia Nizzoli; they similarly owed the impetus of their migration to the arrival of the Napoleonic army to their respective countries of origin and similarly experienced, indeed profited from, the fluidity of national identities that characterized Muhammad Ali's Egypt.

Some 40 years after Amalia Nizzoli traveled to Egypt, another Italian woman, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, offered to unlock the “hermetically closed” harem she had visited during her travels from Anatolia to Jerusalem. A patriot and princess, exceptional woman and anti-emancipationist feminist, Belgiojoso was also a resident in Ottoman lands. But, whereas Nizzoli's detour through the Orient was necessary to “Europeanize” her and make possible her subsequent “Italianization,” Belgiojoso's detour follows a trajectory in which the making of the Italian nation, travel to Ottoman-ruled lands, and entry into the harem line up rather differently. An active proponent of Italian Unification, Belgiojoso sought political exile in the 1830s in order to escape retribution from the Austrian authorities; she chose France, already in many senses her intellectual and cultural “home” as a Lombard aristocrat.1 After the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in Milan and Venice, and of 1849 in Rome, she once again sought exile. But by then deeply disappointed by the role of the French in squelching the Roman republic, during which she played an active role as director of military ambulances, she left Europe entirely to set up residence in Anatolia from 1850 to 1855. Her detour through France was cultural and political, as well as linguistic; with the exception of her 1866 Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire [Of the Present Condition of Women and of Their Future] and her 1868 Osservazioni sullo stato attuale dell'Italia e sul suo avvenire [Remarks on the Present State of Italy and its Future], Belgiojoso wrote her major works in French, including the majority of the texts that will be of interest to us here. These recount, in three different genres, a second detour through the Ottoman empire: the travel narrative La vie intime et la vie nomade en Orient [Intimate Life and Nomadic Life in the Orient], first published in La revue des deux mondes in 1855), her epistolary collection, Souvenirs dans l'exil [Memories in Exile], written en route to taking up residence in Anatolia in 1850, and her short stories gathered together as Scénes de la vie turque [Scenes of Turkish Life], written after her return to Italy and originally published in the Parisian periodical La revue des deux mondes in 1858.

This book examines a set of narratives authored by inhabitants of the Italian peninsula who, through the historical accidents of forced exile, desertion, or opportunism, traveled to Ottoman-governed lands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and wrote about their experiences. It argues that the porous and riven national identities of these Italian travelers positioned them differently than their British and French counterparts in relation to the predominantly Muslim world in which they found themselves, and to which, in some cases, they came to belong. Mindful of the historical relation of the Italian peninsula and its population to the Mediterranean world, and, at least from the seventeenth century until 1861, of Italy as a dominated fraction of the dominant world, and hence as Europe's internal other in the modern period, the book is attentive to the ways in which the particular strand of “Accidental Italian Orientalism” that it identifies may be said to have a cultural and historical specificity of its own. Italians, after all, and especially southern Italians, were themselves subjected to an Orientalization on the part of northern Europeans, and the fact that Italian was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean for centuries positioned its speakers in the Mediterranean world differently from northern Europeans. Indeed, if Edward Said wrote little about Italian Orientalism (with the exception of side glances to Marco Polo and Dante), and the field of postcolonial studies has largely followed in his wake in this respect, it is likely in large part because the Italian case departs significantly from those of Britain and France, where philology, secularization, and the discipline and institutionalization of Orientalism went hand in hand in the nineteenth century. In Italy, instead, the Neapolitan institution that now goes by the name of “Oriental” (the Università degli studi di Napoli “L'Orientale”) was founded in 1732 by a missionary as the “College of Chinese,” whose goal was to train young Chinese so that they might return to China and propagate Catholicism; only in 1888 was its missionary goal officially abandoned, and only in the 1920s did a secular school of Orientalism, linked with a colonial program, take shape.

Cultural cross-dressing and conversion to Islam were practices at once strategic and practical: many Westerners who spent any amount of time in the Middle East adopted local dress the better to accomplish their ends, whether scholarly or commercial, and conversion to Islam was in some cases similarly profitable. As we have seen, both cultural cross-dressing and the topos of “turning Turk” raise anxieties about the relation of exteriority and psychic interiority. To what extent can identities be assumed strategically, donned and taken off at will? Did those Christian converts to Islam – the rinnegati who “turned Turk” – merely assume the “external practices” of one religion while maintaining belief in another “in their hearts,” as the Catholic Church itself had sanctioned through the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition? This latter notion functioned as a discursive rescue operation making it possible to reclaim the Christian through an insistence that psychic interiority be strictly separable from the “merely” exterior. By the same token, the practices of passing and posing as Muslim, practices to which cultural cross-dressing was integral, informed performances as skillful as that of Richard Frances Burton, who entered Mecca as a non-believer, or as successful as that of the lesser-known Italian, Giovanni Finati, who entered Mecca as the Muslim Mahomet. In this chapter I turn to a rather different case of cultural cross-dressing and conversion to Islam, that of Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971). The stage upon which she posed was that of twentieth-century Milan, and the audience for her posing was, on the one hand, a small readership made up mostly of fellow anarchists and, on the other, the camera itself. Unlike those of her nineteenth-century predecessors, Rafanelli's “ethnomasquerade” was performed with promise of neither commercial profit nor the thrill of transgressive passing on sacred ground. And, unlike other cross-cultural cross-dressing female travelers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Grace Ellison, and Isabelle Eberhardt, Rafanelli did not favor the şalvar (the divided skirt widely referred to by Westerners as “harem pants”) that was associated with freedom from strictures of femininity, both physical and social, but rather combined an “Egyptian” aesthetic with a “Gypsy” overlay that emphasized an Orientalized femininity.

Our first accidental Orientalist, Amalia Nizzoli, was barely 13 years old when, in 1819, she embarked upon a voyage with her parents to Egypt, where her uncle was employed as a physician by the son-in-law of the ruling Pasha, Muhammad Ali. When she published her memoirs of nine years of residence in Egypt some 22 years later, she did so by proxy. She herself was still traveling, so Francesco Cusani, a now forgotten erudite, patriot, and translator of Walter Scott, stood in for her with the publishing house, and provided a preface that put her narrative in its proper place. Following the logic of supplementarity that characterizes the placement of women's travel narratives within Orientalist discourse, Cusani first establishes the primacy of Nizzoli's male counterparts, whose abundance of writings (“copia dei libri”) has, he claims, rendered superfluous (“superflua”) any writings about Oriental “usi e costumi odierni” [present-day manners and customs] and then positions her as remedying a lack as only a woman can:

Two centuries after the cases we examined in Chapter 3, the Italian–Algerian writer Amara Lakhous reprises the topoi of passing and posing as Muslim in his 2010 novel Divorzio all'islamica a Viale Marconi [Divorce Islamic Style]. No longer primarily the point of departure for emigrating Italians, but rather the destination for immigrants – many of them Muslims from north Africa – contemporary Italy is now the locus of multiple migrations. Divorce Islamic Style explores the imbrication of these migrations with Orientalisms, both internal and external, and thus offers itself both as an epilogue to our examination of accidental orientalists and as a source of yet more reversals. No longer a stage external to Europe, the “Orient” in Divorce has been internalized as the multicultural call center in “Little Cairo,” locus of the novel's action and site where the protagonist Christian takes on his new identity as the Muslim Tunisian “Issa.” “Christian” in both religion and proper name, the protagonist is a Sicilian who studied classical Arabic at the University of Palermo and who, in 2005, is recruited by SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) as part of Bush's “War on Terror.” His assignment: to impersonate a Muslim Tunisian immigrant and infiltrate a purported terrorist cell in the Roman neighborhood known as “Little Cairo,” home to an immigrant community made up largely of Egyptians and other north Africans. Both setting and characters contribute to a layering of migrations: Christian's true family origins link him to southern Italian emigration to Tunisia, and the topic of his tesi di laurea – Garibaldi's sojourn in Tunisia – in turn links that emigration to the Risorgimento and its making of Italian identity. The embedding of “Cairo” within an Italian city recalls yet other Mediterranean exchanges, both historically and geographically; the name “Cairo” itself is in fact the Italianization, on the part of travelers in the Middle Ages, of the original Arabic name of the city, al-Qāhira, and, as noted in Chapter 1 of this book, Cairo and Alexandria were home to immigrant communities of Europeans in general, and Italians in particular, in the wake of the Napoleonic occupation (1798–1801).

When Gabriele D'Annunzio fantasized a new king of Rome in his 1894 novel, The Virgins of the Rocks, he supplied him with a Machiavellian motto, taken not from The Prince, as might be expected, but from the lesser known Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca: “I have taken her, not she me [Io ho preso lei, non ella me].” This pithy saying, in rhetorical terms a chiasmus, appears among the concluding list of witticisms purportedly drawn from the life of the exemplary Castruccio, who “in all fortunes acted the prince”: “Once there was a young woman with whom Castruccio associated intimately. For this, being reproached by a friend of his who said especially that it was bad for him to let himself be taken by a woman, “You are wrong,” said Castruccio; “I have taken her, not she me.”” / As the rhetorical figure that is a crossing of four terms which, through their crossing, are set up as belonging to two categories, the chiasmus is the figure par excellence of reversal and inversion. In Castruccio's case, the wittiness of his reply depends precisely upon such a reversal. The episode might encapsulate the relation of gendered subjects and their objects in Machiavelli's work as a whole and in the tradition of political thought that he inaugurated and to which D'Annunzio was heir. Male and masculine subjects of action are not to be themselves subjected by female or feminine actors, even as the very reversibility built into the rhetorical form of the chiasmus represents precisely this possibility.