The Cavalier Servente and the Confined Mistress: Italian Women and Men in Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad (No. III)
Ilaria Natali (University of Florence)
1. Context
Leigh Hunt’s sojourn in Italy marks a pivotal phase not only in his own intellectual itinerary but also in the broader history of Anglo-Italian cultural exchange during the Romantic period (Baiesi 2021: 4-5). The political climate he encountered after the Congress of Vienna (1815), which left the peninsula divided among Austrian, Sardinian, Bourbon, and Papal authorities, was characterized by fragmentation and restored conservatism, a context that framed Italy as a territory simultaneously stalled in its institutional development and yet animated by deep-seated cultural energies oriented towards renewal. Although Italy was still far from any coherent movement toward national unification, Hunt perceived in it a persistent “thirst for liberty” (Crisafulli 2023: 59), and his letters are shaped by the tension between this latent aspiration and the evident political stagnation of the 1820s.
Well before his arrival, Hunt had established himself in England as an authoritative interpreter of Italian culture (Schoina 2009: 156). His work as an Italian-English translator had given him detailed knowledge of Italian literature, theatre, music, and language, and this expertise lent sharpness to his critique in Letters from Abroad. The noted “diminishment of Hunt’s radicalism when engaged with Italy at first hand” (Bowers 2020: 169) signals a shift from idealized anticipation to a more ambivalent account of the cultural and moral conditions that he believed impeded Italy’s political development. His writings record an attempt to reconcile prior idealism with the realities he observed.
The publication of Letter III coincided with intense ideological conflict in London journalism, where conservative critics attacked the radical celebration of Italy “with increased venom” (Bowers 2020: 169). Letters from Abroad represents Hunt’s strategic intervention in this polemical climate; by documenting Italian social failings, he resisted conservative portrayals of inherent corruption, instead attributing the nation’s problems to entrenched aristocratic customs and clerical repression. This move allowed him to preserve his faith in Italy’s latent potential while explaining the structural obstacles that delayed political renewal. His proto-sociological attention to gender roles thus becomes a political allegory: the configuration of domestic life serves as an index of the institutional forces constraining the Risorgimento.
Letter III of The Liberal exemplifies this complexity, for Hunt’s representations of Italian men and women are woven into a broader political argument. Hunt’s remark on “the superiority of the women over the men” (p. 53) crystallizes his national allegory: male figures embody civic decline, whereas women symbolize Italy’s latent vitality, passion and moral promise. The structure recalls Shelley’s Italian figures, such as Beatrice Cenci, who represent both victimization and potential revolution. Though in different form, Hunt deploys a comparable logic: women become a figurative index of what Italy could be, and their constrained position provides a key to understanding the wider political stasis of the Italian states.
Within this framework, a central tension emerges between Hunt’s long-standing advocacy of “free love” in England and his critique of Italian marital customs (Reiman 1985: 86): the problem, for him, lies not in non-monogamy itself but in the class-bound structure through which men sought to regulate women’s relationships. Thus, what appears, at first glance, to permit freedom becomes a system that replaces genuine emotional autonomy with performances of aristocratic hypocrisy.
2. The Representation of Italian Men: The Cicisbeo
Leigh Hunt’s representation of Italian men, particularly those of the aristocracy, is governed by a sense of disappointment. For English Romantics, Italy remained the symbolic source of virtus, the classical ideal of manliness tied to civic courage. Hunt, whose admiration for Dante and Tasso had long shaped his Italophile sensibility (Baiesi 2021: 11), struggled to reconcile this legacy with the Italy he encountered in the 1820s, where any visible resistance to despotism was absent.
When set against the historical legacy, the nineteenth-century Italian man emerges as a descendant who has relinquished civil agency, choosing passive conformity over ideological opposition to oppressive structures. For Hunt, this individual passivity becomes emblematic of the nation’s incapacity to effect political renewal: in addition, the absence of “gentility” signifies the loss of civic virtue; “raffishness” indexes moral corruption; and “degeneracy” marks the decline of national greatness (p. 53).
The figure of the cicisbeo, or cavalier servente (p. 57), lies at the centre of this critique. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italy, the cicisbeo was a professed gallant or lover of a woman married to someone else, a role typically sanctioned by the husband’s explicit knowledge and consent (Bizzocchi 2008: 8-9). From a liberal English standpoint that valued action and responsibility, this arrangement marked a significant abdication of duty: the husband delegated his marital obligations, while the cicisbeo assumed his social and emotional functions (Bizzocchi 2008: 14-15).
Hunt interprets this arrangement as evidence of aristocratic stagnation. Because it redistributed emotional and social responsibilities based on class strategy, marriage appeared less a locus of affective partnership than a feudal instrument designed to preserve lineage and social uniformity. In Hunt’s view, the absence of the companionate marriage ideal, central to liberal thought, revealed a society still bound to pre-liberal conventions. Accordingly, the domestic sphere functions as a diagnostic space: a nation in which men delegate fundamental personal duties is ill-prepared for cohesive self-governance in the political sphere.
By the close of the Revolutionary era, the cicisbeo had already been recognized by Italian patriots and foreign observers as an old-fashioned, embarrassing remnant of the frivolous age (Bizzocchi 2008: 15-20). Hunt’s focus on this figure enables him to indict a ruling class incapable of embracing utility, moral seriousness, or civic engagement. Moreover, because direct political critique was constrained by censorship in the reactionary Italian states, the cicisbeo provided a safer proxy for exposing the structural consequences of despotism. Through this figure, Hunt advances an account of Italian political weakness that allows domestic arrangements to serve as a coded commentary on the nation’s arrested political life.
3. Italian Women: Sensuality, Constraint, and Hypocrisy
If, in Hunt’s account, Italian men appear indolent and passive, Italian women are depicted through a paradoxical blend of natural instincts and severe social limitation. Hunt draws on a composite imaginary – classical precedents from Virgil and Renaissance art, inflected by a mild orientalist coding of the South as sensual and instinctive – to describe them as embodiments of beauty, pre-industrial authenticity, and spontaneous aesthetic responsiveness (p. 52). Yet this idealized frame includes a more substantive critique: for Hunt, Italian women function as examples of how patriarchy, aristocratic custom, and clerical authority jointly constrain individual potential.
Whereas the English Romantic imagination frequently cast Mediterranean women as symbols of sensuality, Hunt re-reads this pattern by emphasizing the systemic pressures that regulate their lives. The aristocratic married woman is not a liberated participant in a permissive culture but rather the object of a tightly structured social system. The woman’s companion was determined by a set of patriarchal rules that emphasized lineage, propriety, and strategic alliances, leaving little room for personal autonomy (Bizzocchi 2008: 11-16).
Hunt’s radical sensibilities attune him to the paradox at the heart of the system: although the cicisbeo arrangement can appear superficially liberal, it functions as a mechanism that substitutes one restriction for another. Because the institution was formalized to such an extent that individual acts of adultery could be overlooked provided class ‘purity’ remained intact, it transformed the woman’s emotional life into a regulated public performance. She might gain privileged access or social visibility through her gallant, yet remained bound to rules that elevated aristocratic strategy and paternal authority over personal happiness or intellectual independence. For Hunt, this structure obscures fundamental inequalities and prevents the emergence of the companionate ideal, which he associated with mutual respect, shared moral purpose, and intellectual reciprocity.
The central critique of Italian women’s position in Letter III is therefore their social training for formality, display, and ritualized sociability. Hunt interprets this training as a symptom of a society in which domestic relationships lack the intimacy and moral partnership necessary for civic cooperation. In this reading, too, the situation of women mirrors the broader political condition: a nation that cannot sustain authentic partnership within the private sphere is unlikely to achieve unity or collective purpose in the public one.
In addition, Hunt discusses gender issues to expose the influence of the Catholic Church (p. 55), which he viewed as a principal obstacle to Italian progress. Historical accounts confirm that the cicisbeo, despite his ambiguous role, was expected to accompany his mistress even on formal occasions such as church visits (Bizzocchi 2008: 9). The coexistence of formalized adultery with public ritual offered Hunt a powerful example of generalized hypocrisy: he interprets the culturally reinforced tendencies towards superficial female religiosity as products of ecclesiastical influence, which shaped social roles while reinforcing broader structures of control. Through this lens, Italian women acquire a central role in Hunt’s political argument: their constrained position reveal the institutional forces that, in his view, thwart Italy’s movement toward liberty and national cohesion.
References
The Liberal, Letters from Abroad. No. III—Italy.
Baiesi, Serena, “Liberal Cultural Exchange: Leigh Hunt and His Italian Experience”, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 18 (2021), 1-26.
Bizzocchi, Roberto, Cicisbei: morale privata e identità nazionale in Italia, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2008.
Bowers, Will, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Crisafulli, Lilla Maria, “What’s in a Name? Shelley, the South, and The Liberal”, in Imprinting Anglo-Italian Relations in The Liberal, ed. by Serena Baiesi, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, and Carlotta Farese, Lausanne, Peter Lang, 2023, 51-88.
Reiman, Donald H., “Leigh Hunt in Literary History: A Response”, in The Life & Times of Leigh Hunt: Papers Delivered at a Symposium at the University of Iowa, April 13, 1984, ed. by Robert A. McCown, Iowa City, Friends of the University of Iowa Libraries, 1985, 73-100.
Schoina, Maria, Romantic “Anglo-Italians”: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009.
Ultimo aggiornamento
23.01.2026