Cosmopolitan cultures: Reality or utopia?

Acrossroads for people and ideas down the millennia, a place receptive to difference, to the new and to the questioning of received ideas, the Mediterranean basin has given us collaborations and conflicts, great civilizations and the world’s three major monotheistic religions. It was here the Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilizations were born and flourished, and it was in the Mediterranean that the ideas and ideals of contemporary Western culture took shape in the fertile ground of the ports and cities where people and ideas interacted for centuries. How can we, at the dawn of the 21st century, continue to draw on this rich heritage?

Cosmopolitan cultures: Reality or utopia?

We have a tendency to idealize the coexistence of different civilizations in the same place and time. But what do the historical examples show? How developed is the culture of tolerance? To what extent has coexistence been harmonious and underpinned by mutual respect, or a necessary evil? People who have experienced the rise and fall of cosmopolitanism in cities like Constantinople and Alexandria relate their personal accounts of the magic—and the limits—of co-cultural living.