Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth

"E non si tosto [noi italiani] viaggiamo, i forestieri che ci conoscono per popolo unicamente musico ci pregano di cantare; né pensano com'ei ci fan piangere sempre!"

--Ugo Foscolo, Lettere scritte dall'Inghilterra (1817)

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Stimulated by the pioneering work of Edward Said and other theorists of literary geopolitics, recent criticism has explored the ideological bias behind the regional and national stereotypes ascribed to Italians at home and abroad. ¹ Scholars have been especially active in examining the marginal position of the Italian South vis-à-vis the Italian North--a situation that has been described as "Orientalism in one country." ² Just as Said demonstrates that Westerners constructed a primitive and archaic Muslim Middle East in contrast to the supposedly more modern and ordered Occident, students of the Mezzogiorno show that Northern Italians promoted their own industriousness and "European" character by distinguishing themselves from a "backward" and provincial South. ³ In addition to these analyses of regional power politics, scholars have also examined the degree to which nationalist sentiments both in Italy and throughout Europe stimulated writers and citizens to define themselves collectively and often negatively against neighboring cultures. ⁴

What has escaped the attention of literary scholars, however, is the manner in which a sense of cultural identity that is continental in scale can motivate its adherents to assign certain characteristics, functions, and qualities to its constituent members. This essay will argue that a sizable number of prominent nineteenth-century foreign writers, in constructing their common European heritage and sense of national identity, created a "Romantic" myth of Italy that persists to the present. ⁵ These predominantly Northern European authors established a dichotomy between their own supposedly rational, progressive cultures and the correspondingly irrational, backward society of their southern neighbor Italy. ⁶ Many foreign writers believed, moreover, that Italy's monumental past (especially that of Rome) represented the privileged historical source of their own individual nations and cultures. ⁷ In linking themselves to this storied Italian past, authors tended either to ignore or to dramatize the shortcomings of contemporary Italy, which emerged paradoxically in the Romantic age as the culturally impoverished antithesis of its own illustrious heritage. The marginal status of contemporary Italian culture in Romantic Europe, however, was not wholly negative: foreign authors sometimes used the example of premodern and primitive Italy to critique the ambiguities and forms of alienation that accompanied modernity.

My argument will explore how a process occurred between roughly 1775 and 1825 that can be described as Italy's transition from Europe's "museum" to its "mausoleum." I will first approach the issue of l'Italia senza gl'italiani by surveying some of the major Romantic statements and images concerning "dead" contemporary Italy. I will then analyze three interlocking literary texts: J. W. Goethe's Italienische Reise, Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou l'Italie, and Ugo Foscolo's Lettere scritte dall'Inghilterra. I will focus on how foreign authors constructed the following categories for describing Italy and the Italians. First, Italy's magnificent cultural residue from Antiquity and the Renaissance overwhelmed any signs of cultural activity in modern Italy, which assumed the didactic function of the "world's university" (Goethe). In this geographically remote classroom, European exiles and Grand Tourists could educate themselves and experiment with their identities for a fixed amount of time before returning to their homelands and their attendant responsibilities. Second, Italy and its people were effeminate, a gender characteristic that helped explain their prowess in the imaginative arts and their role in providing cultural access and opportunities to otherwise oppressed Northern European women. Third, Italians were primitive and violent, often to the point of being murderous; yet this same primitive violence also contributed to their creative accomplishments. Last and most important, Italian society and public order basically did not exist; thus, any sense of law and morality in the country had to be created internally by individual Italians, who had no recourse...