Search Results

This chapter explores the impact that English politics and institutions had on Risorgimento liberalism. It argues that the exiles' observations can be seen as the foundation of Risorgimento Anglophilia. Italian historiography has traditionally viewed Risorgimento Anglophilia as evidence of the backward nature of Italian moderate liberalism. The writings on England of Giuseppe Pecchio, Pellegrino Rossi, and Ugo Foscolo and other exiles, however, demonstrate that it was thoroughly conversant with French Anglophilia, and that exile liberalism was in fact more progressive than its French equivalent, as it continued to support the revolutionary idea of popular sovereignty while praising the role of an aristocracy devoted to the public good. At the same time, when assessing the possibility of transferring foreign constitutions to Italy, the exiles almost invariably advocated the integration of the most advanced French and English political models with local institutions, and the adoption of reforms inspired by 18th-century Italian philosophers and constitutionalists like Filangieri or Pagano.

This chapter documents the extraordinary enthusiasm for biographies of Petrarch in Great Britain in the three-quarters of a century between 1775 and 1850. It explains that during the late eighteenth century Petrarch was more popular than Dante in Britain but Dante soon eclipsed his successor after the rise of Romanticism. It considers works on Petrarch including those of Ugo Foscolo and Walter Savage Landor and suggests some reasons why Petrarch's popularity died out in Britain so suddenly and so radically in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This chapter assesses the distinctive features of the exiles' Philhellenism as compared to its British and continental versions. It considers the contrasting in attitudes of Italian exiles and British liberals towards Greek and Mediterranean freedom. It argues that while the Italian exiles considered Greece to be a European country ready for independence and representative institutions, and justified any means which would achieve this goal, the Benthamites orientalized Greece, depicted it as a backward Asian country, and believed that it needed to be ‘educated’ before it could become independent. The greatest contribution of the Italian volunteers to European Philhellenism was the notion of Mediterranean sisterhood between Italy and Greece and the idea that underpinned Italian patriotism until the end of the century. The significance heroic martyrdom of Santorre di Santarosa, who became the most famous European Philhellenic icon after Byron, lay precisely in its capacity to combine the Risorgimento and the Greek struggle for emancipation in a single movement for freedom.

Chapter 1 offers a thematic biography of Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), one of Italy’s canonical poets. It reconstructs the linguistic and literary landscape of Foscolo’s native Ionian Islands and follows the poet’s gradual Italianization as a man of letters and a political activist. By focusing on his celebrated work Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, it explores the role of exile both as a powerful motif of Risorgimento literature and as a driving force in the poet’s own biography and image-making. Lastly, the chapter investigates Foscolo’s transnational patriotism between Venice, Napoleonic Italy, the British Ionian Islands, and revolutionary Greece.

This chapter moves away from Rossini’s operas and toward the world in which they first appeared. Historians agree on the cataclysmic impact that the arrival of Napoleon’s armies had on all spheres of human activity in the Italian peninsula: it meant nothing less than the arrival of modernity. The result was confusion, bewilderment, shock. The Italy in which Rossini’s operas emerged can be best described with the word “trauma.” The nature and consequences of this trauma are explored through the writings of two uncompromising interpreters of Italy’s first collision with modernity, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi. For Foscolo and Leopardi reality had ceased to make sense for modern Italians: time and space, history and geography had become undecipherable, unknowable dimensions for a subject who had lost all notions of itself as a separate and unified entity. According to Leopardi, Italians lacked the tools to which other peoples turned to deal with this situation—the novel, for example. They instead embraced spectacle: promenading in public, religious ceremonies, and theatrical entertainments. Theatricality became the defining feature of modern Italian society, and one of the clearest symptoms of its failure to work through the trauma of its encounter with modernity.

Chapter 5 explores Ioannis Kapodistrias’s life (1776–1831) in conjunction with a set of other biographies, devoted to his friends and collaborators in the Ionian Islands and Russia during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It explores Kapodistrias’s efforts to learn Greek and Hellenize himself in Russia, his connections to the Ottoman Phanariot environment of St Petersburg, and his meteoric rise in the diplomatic service of the Tsar. The chapter’s aim is to unravel a particular intellectual geography that was formed between Italy, the Ionian Islands, the Ottoman Danubian Principalities, and Russia, and to show the forms of nationalism and proto-liberalism that were fostered, and which creatively combined the empire and the nation. Small nations, for these Ionian proto-liberals, could exist only if protected by great empires.