'Between Politics and Myth: Romantic Travel Writing and The Liberal’s “Letters from Abroad” '
Elena Spandri (University of Siena)
The end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 reinstated the anciens régimes in a vain attempt to turn back the clock of history. The Italian peninsula once again became a venue in which European powers could exert their influence, with the Holy Alliance (Austria, Prussia, and Russia) supporting authoritarian governments intended to deter France’s expansionist ambitions. This period of enforced stability attracted to the Continent a flood of British travellers whose opportunity to take the Grand Tour had been hindered since the beginning of the French Revolution. Unsurprisingly, Italy was among these avid travellers’ favourite destinations. However, Romantic grand tourism differed from its previous forms in one significant way. While in the pre-Napoleonic era the Tour had been the exclusive domain of young male aristocrats, after Waterloo the opportunities to visit the Continent opened up to the middle classes that joined the upper classes in travelling abroad for the first time in history, seeking a cosmopolitan education as well as recreation and excitement.
The democratization and popularization of the Grand Tour is a typically Romantic phenomenon that discloses new geo-cultural territories and foregrounds the composite nature of travel, where first-hand experience is always combined with an imaginative geography corroborated by documentary and literary accounts. Along with Greece, Italy had traditionally been regarded as the repository of classical antiquity and Renaissance high culture, but after the reopening of the continental borders new cognitive maps of Italy were produced, which relaunched the image of the country along different trajectories. As Maria Schoina argues, “the influx of British travellers to Italy in the post-Waterloo period generated a wide cultural agenda that included a plethora of accounts and topographical materials on the Mediterranean country – travel books, works of fiction, memoirs, articles in periodical literature – all of which charted, registered, and valued Italy in ways which revealed more about the place of the subject rather than the said place” (Schoina 2009: 29). The most popular among these distinctly subjective travel books were John Eustace’s A Tour through Italy (1813), Joseph Forsyth’s Remarks on Antiquities (1813), and Mariana Starke’s Travels on the Continent (1820). In these accounts, the authors combined personal impressions with the archive of themes and images traditionally associated with Italy, thereby emphasizing the derivative nature of both travel experience and writing. By the early nineteenth century, Italy had already been turned into a palimpsest of literary and artistic topoi and stereotypes, making it impossible for tourists to approach the Italian peninsula with a totally innocent look.
Over time, Romantic travel writing developed into a highly sophisticated and hybrid genre, merging empirical observation, factual accounts, personal curiosity, and intimate tones. It deprovincialized literary magazines, encouraged the formation of a new public sphere, and promoted cosmopolitanism in British literature. The mixed nature of travel, stemming from first-hand experience as much as from preconceived expectations drawn on written sources, was a great incentive to the search for new locations to explore, new prospects to discover, and original impressions to voice, which led to the saturation of the market for this literary genre. In due course, the increasing familiarity with Italian spaces enabled by travel writing created the conditions for the rise of a mass tourism characterized by an illusory and market-oriented search for ‘authenticity’. Furthermore, the saturation of the travel literature market directly impacted those British expatriates who were eager to distinguish themselves from casual tourists and to establish a more profound and reciprocal relationship with Italy. Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt – the members of the so-called Pisan Circle – belonged to this markedly modern category of people, whom Mary Shelley labelled the “Anglo-Italians”.
Unlike grand tourists, who only resided in the country for short periods, Anglo-Italians lived in Italy for several years and tried to achieve a form of cultural integration through different means and with different degrees of intensity. The category of Anglo-Italianness implies the relocation from England to Italy prompted by some personal, political or economic urgency to leave the home country. At the same time, Anglo-Italianness signifies a process of acculturation and reinvestment of artistic energies shared by a group of writers who were fiercely disappointed with the authoritarian turn of post-revolutionary British politics and wished to provide their fellow citizens with a ‘southern’, broad-minded and cosmopolitan perspective on their homeland. This “rhetoric of biculturality” (Schoina 2009: 153) was the intellectual ground on which Shelley, Byron and Hunt initiated the project of The Liberal and promoted Hunt’s “Letters from Abroad” as the group’s major contribution to the genre of the Italian journey. It drew on two contrasting sources: on the one hand, an idea of national identity as a process of self-construction sustained by active and independent choices rather than passive linguistic and cultural affiliations; on the other hand, a North-South dichotomy based on the Enlightenment idea that climate and physical geography determine the national character and thus, indirectly, the fate of nations.
Scholars of British Romanticism have thoroughly documented the different and contradictory approaches to Italy that characterized the members of the Pisan Circle, and focusing on this pivotal chapter in the history of Romantic culture is beyond the scope of this short essay (see Marshal 1960, Butler 1981, Cox 1998, Saglia 2002, Schoina 2009; Baiesi-Crisafulli-Farese 2023). More relevant to the present discussion is the fact that, whatever the differences and the varying degrees of incongruity exhibited by each author, the Anglo-Italians’ investment in Italy had to come to terms with a Romantic myth that had already been established by authoritative European writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, François-René de Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. A typically Romantic sense of cultural identity tended to ascribe certain immutable characteristics to members of the same national community and, consequently, constructed a myth of Italy that survived well beyond the Romantic period, despite attempts to debunk it. Integral to this cultural myth was a split vision of Italy as an ill-assorted match of natural and artistic sublimity, on the one hand, and of moral depravity, on the other hand. Despite the Anglo-Italians’ ardent ambition to establish an exclusive and deep connection with their adopted country, to some extent this myth determined their experiential and literary response to Italy.
According to Joseph Luzzi, from 1775 to 1825 Italy underwent the transition from ‘museum’ to ‘mausoleum’. The country went from being perceived as the source of modern European culture, thanks to its monumental past, to being associated with a collective sepulchre in which the classical and humanist values it had once epitomized were buried, on account of its primitive customs and religious subjugation:
The only thing I can say about this nation is that it is made up of primitive people who, under all their splendid trappings of religion and the arts, are not a whit different from what they would be if they lived in caves of forests. What particularly strikes foreigners […] is the homicides that take place so routinely (24 November 1786, qtd. in Luzzi 2002: 64-65).
This is how Goethe describes Italians in his Italian Journey (Italienische Reise, 1816-29), in which his perspective is perhaps more Neoclassical than Romantic. Goethe blatantly connects what he perceived to be the Italians’ propensity for murder to the illiberality of the Papal power and the Catholic faith. Similar disparaging accounts appear in other Romantic travel writings. Both Shelley and Byron exploited the trope of Italy as a collective sepulchre and as a primitive civilization at some stage in their careers, as did Leigh Hunt in his Italian travelogue published in The Liberal. Romantic travellers perpetuated the longstanding cliché about Italy as “a privileged didactic forum” (Luzzi 2002: 61) and were primarily responsible for disseminating the dichotomy between a vital ancient country and a moribund modern one. They reiterated the stereotype of the effeminacy of the Italian character, ascribing the people’s weak sense of morality to the lack of an organized society and a discernible public sphere.
However, from a different perspective, the private codes of honour upheld by Italians (and by other Southern Catholic peoples) appeared as a sign of vigour and creativity, a positive antidote to the passive reliance on official legal and cultural discourse practised by Northern Europeans. Germaine de Staël’s best-selling novel Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) is a case in point, as it employs the heroine’s Anglo-Italian affiliations to advance the opinion that the Italian national character was the cradle of artistic imagination and intense emotions. De Staël extensively draws on the contrast between North and South inaugurated by the rudimentary climatology of the Enlightenment and compares Italy’s intoxicating cultural atmosphere, epitomized by the charming titular improvisatrice, to the rigid and opinionated attitude of her British lover, whose dependence on family prejudice ends up causing Corinne’s fatal end.
On opposite grounds, the Italian expatriate Ugo Foscolo criticized the discourse based on national stereotyping upheld by de Staël and popularised through travel writing. The poet advocated an anthropology based on Giambattista Vico’s theorizations, which promoted a method for comparing nations on equal terms, instead of classifying them according to ethnocentric hermeneutic protocols. In his first work as a London exile, Lettere scritte dall’Inghilterra (written around 1817, but published in 1975), Foscolo rejected both Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s view of man as an abstract entity and instead proposed an empirical approach to assessing peoples and nations according to an idea of cyclical history drawn on Vico’s philosophy. This method eschewed ethnocentrism and allowed for a flexible and antidogmatic regulation of cultural difference. Upon these Vichian foundations Foscolo developed his critique of foreign views of Italy. Against the common portrait of Italians as effeminate, false and servile, he wrote that the early Italians were “anime maschie, alti intelletti, uomini liberi, amatory del vero” (“virile souls, elevated intellects, free men, and truth lovers”, qtd. in Luzzi 2002: 80). The author of the sentimental novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802-1893) and of the renowned civic song Dei sepolcri (1807) wished to provide an insider’s perspective on Italian culture, which could challenge the othering image prevalent in the foreign imaginary. However, as his letters remained untranslated, their attempt to demystify the schizophrenic and ethnocentric Romantic myth of Italy had a very limited impact.
Perhaps the most influential travelogue of the Romantic period was Lady Morgan’s Italy, written between 1819 and 1820 and published in three volumes in 1821. Commissioned by John Murray, Byron’s publisher, this monumental work was an immediate European success and politicized the Italian theme at a time when Italian travel writing was mainly focused on reproducing subaltern and antiquarian views of Italy. Like Foscolo, Lady Morgan adopted a comparative approach and criticized the British for their insularity and sense of superiority with respect to Italian people and customs. However, she also contended that the Italians wanted “to emulate English values […] and use them as models for their own political, social, and ethical system” (Schoina 2009: 95), thus implicitly confirming the superiority of the British ethos and politics over the Italian ones. At all events, her and her husband’s extended stay in Italy and their extensive travels from North to South enabled them to systematically interact with Italian customs and lifestyle, leading them to attribute the miserable state of the country to the effects of despotic governments that had long dominated the peninsula. Drawing on Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi’s authoritative Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Âge (1807-1818), Lady Morgan contrasted Italy’s illiberal regimes with the liberal and democratic Medieval republics and with the ideals of emancipation that sustained the country’s current struggle for freedom.
Lady Morgan’s agenda is ostensibly political, as Italy begins with an excursus on Italian history from classical antiquity to the contemporary age, which is intended “to trace the result of this European revolution in Italy, which broke up forever the stale institutes of feudality, and the power of the Church” (Owenson 1821: 30-31). However, as with most British travel accounts of the period, Italy also capitalizes on a deep-seated stereotypical distinction between an idolatrous, spectacularized Catholic religion and a sober, inward Protestant faith. But, despite the derivative aspects of her work, Lady Morgan’s liberal ideas and support for the Risorgimento simultaneously turned her into a public enemy proscribed by Italian authorities and a model for those British and European libertarians who envisaged an independent Italian nation.
All this paved the way for “Letters from Abroad”, Leigh Hunt’s personal contribution to Romantic travel writing, which played an extremely relevant role in the progressive agenda of The Liberal. The travelogue comprises four familiar essays of different origins and tenor, combining empirical observation and local colour with intermittent attempts at cultural critique, and appear heavily influenced by the Italian writings of the other members of the Pisan Circle. Hunt was the last Anglo-Italian to leave Britain and move to Italy with his family. Consequently, his Italian travelogue combines the perspective of a novice with the insight of an author with extensive experience in journalistic writing (see Baiesi and Webb 2023).
“Letters from Abroad” rehearses all the Romantic tropes concerning Italian primitivism and the Paganism of the Catholic Church, and yet also goes beyond them. Although the four essays only obliquely tackle political issues, Hunt succeeds in projecting an aura of liberty onto the Italian space simply thanks to the erratic and protean style of his writing. His method of composition is comparative, and his vivid descriptions of Italian urban and rural scenes are systematically interspersed with allusions to familiar English landmarks for the benefit of a British audience. As he acknowledges other Italian travelogues, he creates an astute self-mirroring effect enabling readers simultaneously to capture the value of his own account alongside the influence of its literary precedents. Perhaps, Hunt’s most openly revolutionary consideration (allegedly prompted by his visit to Pisa’s Campo Santo described in the first letter) concerns the ways in which Italian modernity somewhat impinged on the memory of its monumental past. This clever observation reverses the Romantic trope that equated Italy to a sepulchral scene, and, in contrast, ignites a heterochronic perspective situating past and present within a fully contemporary historical sensibility.
Overall, Romantic travel writing sanctioned the emergence of transnational and transcultural perspectives on European geo-histories that stimulated a political assessment of Italy, thereby complementing traditional antiquarian and subaltern approaches to the Italian peninsula. While providing a bedrock for a long series of cultural stereotypes about the Italian character and lifestyles, Romantic travel writing also heightened the sense of Italy as a homogeneous and unified culture, thus contributing to the dissemination of a national consciousness that nurtured the gradually developing movements for political liberation (see Banti 2000, Crisafulli 2013).
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Ultimo aggiornamento
12.11.2025