So here is the starting point: a map. Like those of ancient travelers: a slightly yellowed map, carefully spread out on a wooden table. To discover that there is no natural border, no geographical location where one can say that the East begins. Instead, there is a single, immense macro-continent, where the divisions between Europe and Asia are not geological but human, cultural, and political. In this book, Alessandro Vanoli tells the story of how the East helped shape the West. A story of journeys, merchants, and wars, it speaks of spices, jewels, and precious stones, but also of countless discoveries, from the compass to the concept of zero to the sofa. Yet at the same time, it also recounts how, alongside this gradual blending, a cultural, ideological, and political divide has increasingly taken shape. For the Garden of Eden and the immense riches dreamed of by Alexander the Great were in the East, but so too were the barbarians and the most terrible monsters. And from century to century, all of this would be revisited and reinterpreted in different forms, right up to the most modern Orientalist fantasies of harems and odalisques, of ascetics in meditation, but also of violence and tyranny. Right up to the present day, amid Indian spirituality, sushi restaurants, and Korean TV series, in an increasingly fragmented world marked by the tragedies of the Middle East and the power of the new China, where no simple definition suffices any longer<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s time for a new map of history. A map where all borders fade away and a millennia-long journey begins\u2014a journey of connections, exchanges, and cultures that have shaped the world we know. It is there that we will discover the East and its history\u2014a history that says so much about us. 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