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.