Italian colonists in the Dodecanese the Leros town of Lakki (founded by the Italians as "Portolago"), which remains a prime example of Italian Rationalism. From 1923 to 1936, governor Mario Lago was able to integrate the Greek, Turkish and Ladino Jewish communities of the island of Rhodes with the Italian colonists. Lago's term of office constituted what might in retrospective be called the "Golden Period" of the Italian Dodecanese, with the economy booming and a relatively harmonious society. In the 1936 Italian census of the Dodecanese islands, the total population was 129,135, of which 7,015 were Italians. Nearly 80% of the Italian colonists lived in
Island of the Jewel Island of the Jewel The Island of the Jewel () or Island of Sapphires () was a semi-legendary island in medieval Arabic cartography, said to lie in the Sea of Darkness near the equator, forming the eastern limit of the inhabited world. The island does not appear in any surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's "Geography" nor other Greek geographers. Instead, it is first attested in the Ptolemaic-influenced "Book of the Description of the Earth" compiled by al-Khwārizmī around 833. Ptolemy's map ended at 180° E. of the Fortunate Isles without being able to explain what might lay on the imagined eastern