Mediterranean: A Certain Genius of Inhabiting

Abstract

Embracing a geographic reality that connects the East to the West, and the North to the South, the Mediterranean basin is a melting pot of landscape diversity, which embodies equally distinct cultures, languages, behaviours, creeds, and many other identity traits, intercrossed in a shared History. But above all plurality, is it possible to identify a unity in the approach to the act of inhabiting, of architecting – in an etymological sense of building, of creating Man’s place – landscape and, consequently and intrinsically, housing, through processes that, albeit formally apart, are very close in essence? Through the analysis of different authors, with different approaches – from Braudel’s historiography to the traveling impressionism of Matvejevitch, through Orlando Ribeiro’s passionate but thorough scrutiny – we will try to reveal a transversal inhabitance genius, not confined to a determined loci, in search of that which translates a wider ethos: the Mediterranean.