For some decades now, Lampedusa regularly appears in the news in regard to its devastating record of shipwrecks, deaths, and survivors. An ethnographic immersion takes the reader into the twists and turns of contemporary Lampedusan life, revealing a complex and contradictory microcosm. Manifested in the book is a conjunctive thinking that combines different approaches: ethnography, historiography, analysis of literary texts . This makes it possible to outline an unprecedented cultural history of the island. The book is a study of a cultural and political frontier. IThis 20-square-kilometer territory proves to be a pertinent observatory from which to peer into wide configurations that have shaped the history of large sectors of the Mediterranean and still mold their present.