"This trilingual volume focuses on early medieval southern Italy (including Sicily) as a multiple, constantly changing contact area and border region characterised by religious-cultural heterogeneity and shaped by various competing powers, traditions, ideas and perceptions. By involving experts from Medieval, Islamic, Byzantine and Jewish Studies as well as Archaeology, it pursues an interdisciplinary and pluri-perspective approach which takes into account both local and trans-regional dimensions, at that time partly connected with claims to 'universality'. On the basis of different sources, the articles collected here present new insights and open up further research issues to be investigated." --