“…However, in the South, these discourses clashed with those that emphasised certain immorality intrinsic to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean shoresimmorality that questioned the modernity of these nations (Patriarca 2010, Andreu 2016. Southern Europe fascinated nineteenth-century romantics: it was for them an exotic and picturesque territory situated on the edge of Western modernity (Pemble 1987, Calvo Serraller 1995, O'Connor 1998, Saglia 2000, Luzzi 2002, Brilli 2006, Saglia and Haywood 2018, Varela 2019. Hence, as Joep Leerssen points out, it was possible to consider the "Byronic hero," interpreted as a mixture of southern and eastern features, as characteristic of that Mediterranean.…”