Routes of Daily Practices: Food, Clothing and Linguistic Choices in the Study of Pluralism in Premodern Mediterranean Port Cities

The aim of this article is to contribute to the rich and important Braudelian tradition in the study of the Mediterranean and how its One-Plural paradigm could be observed and analysed in daily behaviours involving tendencies towards the hybridisation and differentiation of foreign groups and individual material practices in different pre-modern Mediterranean port cities. After providing an overview of how scholarship has questioned the issue of the conceptual unity of the Mediterranean, the article focuses on the employment of material practices in the historical inquiry as a tool for highlighting meaningful behaviour in cultural identity’s negotiation and affirmation in plural environments. The aim is to expound how a comparison of the combination of these identitarian visual expressions in distant Mediterranean urban environments linked by maritime routes offers meaningful insights into how the political context, and not a global Mediterranean attitude, served to shape specific answers to the problem of cultural pluralism.