The Ottoman Tripoli: a Mediterranean Medina

Unlike many previous volumes dealing with the city in the Islamic world, this one has been specially expanded not only to include snapshots of historical fabric but also to deal with the transformation of this fabric into modern and contemporary urban entities. Rather than focusing on specific historic fabrics alone, often the sites of political and nationalist image-making, attention has been drawn to the entire flow of urban processes up to and including the present, encompassing such phenomena as the introduction of wheeled transport, the impact of colonial structures and administration, and the overwhelming changes brought about by demographic migrations of recent years. The specific features of the urban fabric of Tripoli are due to a process of assimilation of models belonging to other urban cultures of the Mediterranean world. In the articulated structure of the plan of Tripoli, we can distinguish a series of urban patterns that can be referred to specific historical periods of the city. The orthogonal grid of the streets recalls the order of the classic Roman layout based on cardo and decumanus; the irregular and curvilinear passages generate the dead-end alleys of the Arab-Islamic city; and the polygonal geometry of the walls are typical of the sixteenth century system of fortification. These urban patterns reveal, diachronically, the different moments of the complex formation and evolution of the city and, synchronically, suggest the composite character of the Mediterranean urban culture, through the overlapping historical traces. A Mediterranean air, suggesting the assimilation of various foreign influences, emerges from the different ways of the urban life. It seems to represent a basic code for the understanding and interpretation of the complexity of the Ottoman Medina of Tripoli.