A romantic view of Italy : 1815-1840

Abstract

From the end of the seventeenth century Italy was visited by nearly every British writer of note. Some, like Walter Scott, spent only a few months there, other like Byron, the Shelleys, Leigh Hunt and Browning lived there for several years. John Keats went there to die. With the exception of the last they left the record of their experience in poetry and prose. They were all classically educated, they all came to visit a land which they acknowledged as one of the principal sources of their culture, and their principal object was to bask in the sunlit glory of its past. They were visiting a land called "Italia", home of classical ruins, great art, literature and landscape, a land with no present or future, a land without people. Its inhabitants, when they obtruded on their notice, were treated dismissively. It was as if they were being punished for the betrayal of their glorious Roman and Renaissance past. Italy, as such, was, in Metternich's patronising phrase, a geographical expression. Napoleon Bonaparte had called himself, for a time, King of Italy, implying that there was such a nation to be king of, but by Italy he meant the land between the Alps and Volturno. The Holy Alliance, after his fall, was determined to restore "Italia" to its patchwork of "signorie" and to keep it that way.