Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: Topographical Art in North-West Italy, 1800–1920 by Pietro Piana, Charles Watkins, and Rossano Balzaretti, and: Revisiting Italy: British Women Travel Writers and the Risorgimento (1844–61) by Rebecca Butler (review)

The British fascination with the Italian peninsula predates the existence of the modern nation-states of both the United Kingdom and Italy, as George Bruner Parks’s 1954 volume The English Traveler to Italy makes clear. This intercultural preoccupation arguably peaked in the nineteenth century, after the final defeat of Napoleon allowed for leisure travel across the Continent to resume, as John Pemble notes in The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (1987). Throughout the century, technological and infrastructural improvements—railroads, canals, and steam-powered shipping—made travel swifter and (occasionally) safer. A vast number of British artists—from the young Romantic poets to Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, J. M. W. Turner, William Etty, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and others—visited Italy and made significant use of the Italian landscape, history, and people in their works. Much of the scholarly literature on the British fascination with Italy has focused on what might be called cultural arenas—British travelers’ encounters with and reactions to Italian art, music, architecture, and so on. Alison Yarrington, Stefano Villani, and Julia Kelly’s Travels and Translations: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions (2013) is a case in point, bringing together articles on cross-cultural interactions involving an impressive array of artistic genres (from travel writing to opera librettos), all speaking to a deep and varied fascination with Italy’s rich cultural tapestry.

Political historians once offered a different view of the British awareness of Italy. Derek Beales’s England and Italy (1961) argues, for example, that British politicians in 1859, of either party, were not particularly interested in the mid-century political upheavals on the Italian peninsula, their attentions at the time remaining focused primarily on the situation in France. More recently, however, in Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (2019), (reviewed in Victorian Studies, Spring 2022), Patricia Cove has argued to the contrary, that the Italian political situation leading up to the Risorgimento was closely watched and profoundly felt by the British population, and that the British experience of Italian political upheaval caused—perhaps unsurprisingly—a rethinking of British national identity.

Two recent volumes, Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: Topographical Art in North-West Italy, 1800–1920 by Pietro Piana, Charles Watkins, and Rossano Balzaretti and Revisiting Italy: British Women Travel Writers and the Risorgimento (1844–61) by Rebecca Butler, add to this new scholarly understanding of transnational political and cultural encounters, and offer ample evidence that the British during the nineteenth century were interested in all things Italian—from politics to geography to art. These volumes join an increasingly interdisciplinary scholarly discussion of the multidimensional interactions between British travelers and the Italian landscape—both the literal landscape and the political landscape.

Alice’s complaint (what is the use of a book without pictures?) certainly does not apply to Piana, Watkins, and Balzaretti’s Rediscovering Lost Landscapes, which is dense with well-chosen, well-placed, and often stunning illustrations (Boydell Press should be commended here as well). “Topographical” in the title might have, for some readers, a chilling effect and bring to mind state gazetteer maps, but the images offered in the volume are works of art in their own right as well as useful examples of the specificity and precision of British (and some Italian) artists’ depictions of Italian land-, sea-, and cityscapes. Much of the appeal of Italy was, after all, visual—the Italian landscape and Italian paintings in museums were on the must-see list for British travelers, and Rediscovering Lost Landscapes documents some...