The paper discusses the preliminary results of a research re-constructing the history of Oriental and Middle East Studies as a field of research and scholarship in Italy, in particular in the post-World War Two period. The paper builds on interviews with colleagues from various generations and disciplinary backgrounds, who have shared reflections on different aspects of their work as scholars and students “of the Middle East”. More specifically, this paper will focus on the paradigms that have been used, across different generations, to examine social and cultural phenomena (such as modernization, nationalism, political violence) in the region. The paper will discuss the origin, development and decline of such interpretative and epistemological paradigms, thus revealing insights into the training and the intellectual trajectories of the scholars interviewed. The focus on the emergence and the fortunes of dominant paradigms will shed a light on the cultural and scholarly connections between epistemic communities in Italy, the larger Europe and the MENA/SWANA region, also highlighting the structural transformations of the Italian university over the decades. While not dismissing it as a working category of analysis and a theoretical reference, the paper aims to overcome “Orientalism” as an all-encompassing signifier to qualify all European scholarship, and strives to find a more discrete way to describe Italian scholarly production. While imbued with the aspirations and self-aggrandizement typical of its fascist and imperial past, the post-WW2 Italian scholarship about the region suffered from marginalisation in Italian university curricula and at the same time, was enriched by the encounter with newer intellectual projects coming from the post-colonial MENA/SWANA region. The paper will discuss and interrogate the coming together of such changes and continuities in the historical construction of “the field of studies”.