Notes on Istanbul, books and research. A document, a building or a question in each post.
When the Ragıp Paşa Mansion in Caddebostan, situated in the Kadıköy district on the Asian shore, was placed on the market, Seyhan Akıncı solicited my historical analysis of the edifice for Milliyet Pazar.
The day after the fire the question on Manşet was simple: what have we lost? Answering it means knowing what burned – the spire the flames took was among the newest parts of the cathedral, not the oldest.
Can the restoration of a nineteenth-century building bring to light a fifteen-hundred-year-old secret lying beneath the hurried steps of İstiklal Caddesi? Savaş Özbey’s report in Hürriyet turns on exactly that phase of the work at Casa Garibaldi.
From 17 to 30 November 2014 the Palazzo Ducale housed an exhibition on the Italian mutual aid society of Constantinople: Casa Garibaldi, una storia levantina. It was curated by the architect Francesca Faiella and mounted by the Associazione Culturale Balumina; it opened on the evening of 17 November with a lecture of mine.
Giuseppe Mancini’s article, published in il Mulino on 22 February 2013, describes the Italian mutual aid society of Istanbul on the eve of its hundred and fiftieth year. Founded on 17 May 1863 by forty-one workers, with Garibaldi as its first president and Mazzini as honorary president, it still had some forty members.
Laura Leonelli’s piece of 3 February 2013 opens with Edmondo De Amicis reaching Constantinople in the fog of a morning in 1877, then turns to Galata, the city the Genoese built. Its news lies nearer: in Beyoğlu, steps from the tower of 1348, Istanbul and Genoa had just been twinned.