Episode 7: The Italian Job. The Tale of Raffaele Scassi

Tales from Imperial Russia

In the early nineteenth century, Raffaele Scassi, Genoese gambler and ne'er-do-well, found himself in the newly founded Black Sea port of Odessa. This was the beginning of a remarkable career in Russian service that led to adventures in the Caucasian mountains, the rebuilding of a ruined Crimean town, and the preservation of ancient Greek relics. This episode explores his life and Russia's expansion to the south.

Sources: Heloisa Rojas Gomez, The Crimean Italians: A History of Mobility and Individual Agency on the Black Sea (PhD dissertation: European University Institute, 2020).

Heloisa Rojas Gomez, ‘Raffaele Scassi: Improvised Colonial Agent and the Appropriation of the Russian South, 1820s,' in D. Guignard and I. Seri-Hersch, eds., Spatial Appropriation in Modern Empires, 1820–1960: Beyond Dispossession (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), pp. 228–54.

Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794-1914 (Harvard University Press, 1986)