Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945 by Salvatore Pappalardo, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021, 280 pp., £85.50 (hardback), ISBN 9781501369964

The main theme of Pappalardo ’ s monograph is the literary invention of a Phoenician origin of Europe, which sought to promote a multi-ethnic and multicultural alternative to the dominant nationalist characterisation of the European continent. In highlighting the contrast between a literary interpretation of the ‘ multiethnic Danube region as a Europe behind the nations ’ and a historical approach focused on the ‘ hegemonic presence of the German Austrian elite ’ , the author sheds light on the ability of literature not so much to produce a utopian world but to ‘ provide an alternative paradigm to the monolithic and monolingual nation ’ , in an autonomous and structurally different way from historiography. Rather than offering the best possible reconstruction of the past, literature thus seeks to provide a mythography capable of legitimising and proposing a future project. This well-documented study could, then, be placed in a broader diachronic perspective, when the myth of origins was a recurring theme in historio-graphical exercises that were structurally mixed with rhetoric. This perspective can also frame the political and ideological stance underlying the convincing historiograph-ical and comparative approach developed in Pappalardo ’ s book, which traces references or allusions to a Phoenician mythography in the literary and non-fictional production of modernist writers linked to and inspired by the multi-ethnic environment of Habsburg Trieste – the Adriatic outpost for a Mediterranean projection of the Mitteleuropean empire. The book ’ s main thesis is further illustrated through a systematic, though by no means unprecedented, downplaying of the irredentist vocation of the Austro-Italian subjects. The book opens with a long introduction where the author clarifies the link between modernism and Europe. The first chapter explains the spread at the turn of the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries of a perception and representation of the Adriatic as a Phoenician sea, crossed and civilised since antiquity by a Semitic people who had represented