Fondaco come fondamento di civiltà. Rileggendo Olivia Remie Constable

Olivia Remie Constable’s sudden death offers us the occasion, paying a due homage to a major scholar, to re-read one of her major works, the book devoted to the “funduq-fondaco” in the Mediterranean society from late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. Here, economic and cultural history are used in the most balanced way, as to show how a culture of acceptance and hospitality emerged, from a felicitous encounter between Arab and Christian civilization. Some traits will remain for centuries the same all over the Mediterranean, until a radical transformation of that sea in the 19th century put an end, inter alia, also to the “fondaco” culture.