Most historians and anthropologists of North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Levant agree that the Mediterranean has lost its conceptual coherence with the advent of modernity, even if they disagree both on the definition and on the timing of that historical change. As a result, anthropologists have completely abandoned the Mediterraneanist perspective on processes in the region, whereas historians, even when they do directly define a modern Mediterranean, make it almost a residual spatiotemporal category, formed around a similar marginality that places around the sea share, rather than any connecting dynamics of mobility and circulation. This paper opens with an examination of the ways in which the Mediterranean and modernity have been defined in contradistinction to each other. The paper then discusses the similarities and differences among the three main strands of modern Mediterraneanist studies: anthropologists’ interest in honor and shame as well as in patron-client relations, and the interest they share with historians in cosmopolitanism. I argue that by revisiting these three focuses of Mediterraneanist interest we would be able to go beyond the academic separation between nostalgic images of past Mediterraneans and lamenting accounts of the current, seemingly disintegrated region. I then address two recent moments of Mediterranean connections: Italian-North African tensions and relations at the height of the Cold War and the stabilization of clandestine migration routes in the central Mediterranean during the last decade. In both cases, Tunisian, Italian, and Libyan political projects and commitments along the shores of their respective continents and across the sea shaped the circulation of people and goods across the sea. In both cases, circulation then affected these political projects and initiated spatio-political processes of region-forming potential. I use these two examples to argue that by searching for structural similarities across periods more than for continuities through them, and by liberating our concept of processes of regional formation from any time-bound or essence-based definition, we may discover that the Mediterranean may, that it has reemerge as a transnational constellation in modern times.