Faraḥ Anṭūn’s Nahḍah as a Movement towards an Ideal Oneness in the Arab World: Italian Culture as a Neglected Source of Inspiration?

While the massive and direct influence of French culture on Faraḥ Anṭūn has been taken for granted and fairly, albeit insufficiently, investigated, far less attention has been paid to the influence played by other Western cultures and civilizations. Students of the Arab thinker know that he wrote about outstand ing British, Russian, and German figures, and that he deeply investigated the civilization of the United States, reporting extensively on it during his long stay in the country. However, these stimuli that strongly affected him both as a man and as an intellectual deserve further scrutiny, as so do other catalysts that have been fairly overlooked to date, such as Italian culture. With no claim of being exhaustive, this paper investigates the hypothesis concerning an Italian source of inspiration for Faraḥ Anṭūn’s intellectual, socio-political, and strictly literary activity, as well as provide theories on the channels through which it was received. In particular, it aims to provide hypothesis about the meeting between the intellectual universes of Anṭūn and the famous Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who lived in a crucial period for the Kingdom of Naples, an epoch in many ways similar to that in which Anṭūn lived in the Ottoman Empire.