The history of a generation of Ionian intellectuals, creators, and political figures—from Ugo Foscolo, Kalvos, and Solomos to Kapodistrias, Andreas Mustoxydis, and Niccolò Tommaseo—who experienced the collapse of the Venetian State and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of the Adriatic. Prominent witnesses of the long transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states, they contributed to the emergence of Greek and Italian nationalism, decisively shaping their vocabulary. By re-examining these biographies and their forgotten intellectual universe, Konstantina Zanou reconstructs a world of diverse bonds, ideas, and exchanges—a mixture rather than a clash of elements of liberalism and empire, Enlightenment and religion, conservatism and revolution, East and West, which were later buried under the conventional narrative of the advent of the nation-state. Starting from the Ionian Islands, the study follows the threads extending from pre-national, unifying Italy and pre- and post-revolutionary Greece to imperial Russia, restoring the lost link between the shifting geopolitical frameworks of Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans in the age of revolutions.