Ordoulidis, Nikos, 2025. “Crossing the River”: Italian Songs Meet Greek Musicians. In S. Belguidoum, C. De Gourcy, M. E. Buslacchi, & E. Demetriou (Eds.), La traversée sensible—Récits et figures de la mobilité en Méditerranée. Presses universitaires de Provence (PUP), Sociétés contemporaines (english online version: https://cargo.hypotheses.org/1097).

Prelude
Countless pages are required to examine the relations between Greece and Italy. The period in which both regions have established their own nation-state is a small–and of course recent–part of these relations, which go back much further. Before the musical discoveries, a representative part of which this text will bring to the forefront, the trigger for my personal interest around the culture associated with the Italian peninsula was sparked by one of the most excellent television series concerning the Roman Empire, which is titled with the simple and comprehensive “Rome”. It is a BBC and HBO production, aired from 2005 to 2007, which in its two cycles and with a total of 22 episodes, chronicles–both from the perspective of those “from above” and “from below”–the period of Julius Caesar and the Roman civil war, until the time of the second civil war, between Octavian and Mark Antony and Cleopatra, which essentially ended with the naval battle of Actium. Obviously, Greece is mentioned and/or involved in the series many times. In one of these scenes, in episode 6, one of the main–fictional–protagonists, Titus Pullo, says: “he got himself into some trouble with some nasty Greek boys across the river”. This phrase, and especially the word “river” used to describe the Adriatic Sea, inspired the title of this text, as it manages to describe in an extremely eloquent way the close relations between the peoples living to the east and west of it.

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