Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth

European Modernity and the Passionate South

“…The present circumstances of both Italy and Spain were seen in terms of a decline from different but equally renowned glorious pasts. British writers and artists in particular were wont to symbolize in their images of ruined landscapes the distance between the peaks of the Roman Empire and Italian Renaissance and the current degeneracy of the Italians (Luzzi 2002), epitomized by their sexual immorality. By contrast, the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Hispanic hegemony had left a more ambiguous legacy of admiration and fear which explains the endurance in the European imagination of the motifs of female seclusion and male jealousy, recurrent themes in Spanish Baroque plays and novels.…”

“…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 . 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.…”

Introduction

“…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.…”