On September 25th, 1919, Max di Collalto and Giuseppe Pizzuto sailed for Italy on the steamship “Sicilia.” They had been expelled from Egypt by the British, in agreement with the Italian authorities. Collalto, Italian owner of the Cairene newspaper Roma and leader of the International Society of Employees of Cairo, was accused “of being in contact with the nationalist Egyptian circles, whom he excites against Britain,” while Pizzuto, president of the syndicate of typographers and the Secretary of the Chamber of Labor, was considered “an open and dangerous revolutionary […] fomenting strikes and organizing syndicates.” In the late 19th and early 20th century, migrants crossed the Mediterranean southwards from Greece, Italy, Malta, Syria and other parts of the Ottoman empire. Much of the literature has acknowledged the presence in Egypt of these trans-Mediterranean workers, problematically defined as “foreigners,” but the roots of their politicization, its implications for local labor militancy, the relationship between this nonindigenous proletariat and the Egyptian working class, and female labor are understudied. Based on documents of the British Foreign Office and of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my paper explores the moments in Egyptian history when foreign and Egyptian workers cooperated. It focuses on the Egyptian nationalist revolution of 1919, when foreign and in particular Italian “agitators” were targeted by the British authorities for their support in favor of Egyptian workers and their nationalist aspirations. This focus on the trans-Mediterranean and Egyptian working-class and to events of inter-ethnic cooperation elicits new questions on foreignness and belonging, cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Class is reintegrated as a category of investigation and used to describe the “working-class cosmopolitanism” of those foreigners and Egyptians who set aside their ethnic solidarities, thus deifying essentialist notions of identity. As shown by the archival evidence, the interplay between the two dynamics of class and ethnicity cannot be oversimplified at the expense of one force over the other, but it needs to be analyzed in the historical complexity of its Mediterranean context. On the whole, while the historiography of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean has often described cosmopolitanism as an elitist movement, with varying nuances of nostalgia and regret for the world that has been “lost” with the advent of populist nationalism, this paper attempts to unearth a seldom told story, also raising questions within broader debates about cosmopolitanism, migration, and nationalism.