Romantic culture in Italy thus played a key role in the Risorgimento, tying itself to the struggle for national unity. While sharing common ground with Romanticism elsewhere in Europe, such as opposition to the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism, Italian Romanticism developed distinctive characteristics influenced by Italy's own classical heritage and its unique political context.[6]
Early developments
Italian Romanticism found its early development influenced by the Napoleonic era and its dramatic shifts in political landscapes and social structures.
As regards the legal and political reflection of the late eighteenth century, a strong link with the philosophical principles of the Italian Enlightenment was maintained (especially in Gioia and Romagnosi), although Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who examined the failure of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, anticipated romantic and proto-nationalist themes by referring to Giambattista Vico; he highlighted the need to defend the historical specificities of peoples, with their "customs" and traditions, against the abstract application of universal principles.[8]
A controversy between classicists and romantics broke out in January 1816, the date on which Italian Romanticism is usually officially begun, when the French writer Madame de Staël published in Milan, on the magazine Biblioteca Italiana, her article On the manner and utility of translations, in which she invited Italians to know and translate foreign literatures as a means of renewing their own culture.[9]
Young intellectuals such as Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852), Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851), Ludovico di Breme (1780–1820), firmly sided with the romantic renewal advocated by Staël, while others such as Pietro Giordani remained faithful to the principles of classicism.
Berchet wrote a pamphlet entitled Grisostom's Semi-Serious Letter to His Son, considered the manifesto of Italian Romanticism, for which true poetry springs from the popular spirit.[10] Di Breme defined Romanticism as «the liberation of the soul from the constraints of old forms and as a creative impulse»;[11] he was among the founders of a new liberal magazine, Il Conciliatore, organ of romantic school established in 1818 at Milan, whose members included, in addition to Borsieri, Berchet, di Breme, Silvio Pellico, Tommaso Grossi, Maroncelli, Scalvini, Confalonieri, Lambertenghi, Romagnosi, but their activity was nipped in the bud by Austrian censorship, which imprisoned many of them or forced them into exile.[12]
Meanwhile, the uprisings of the Risorgimento following the Restoration of Conservative Order were already spreading across the peninsula, and to these tensions Italian Romantic literature would prove closely linked. More than any other form of literature, Romanticism was committed to the construction of a national identity. At least in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was less concerned with defining strategies of struggle and institutional forms of government, and more focused on moralistic, humanitarian, and pedagogical aims.[7]
The main instigator of a national redemption was Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873). He formulated the objects of the new Romantic school, saying that it aspired to try to discover and express "the truehistorian" and "the moral truth", not only as an end, but as the widest and eternal source of the beautiful, against mythological-pagan "fictions". It is realism that characterizes Italian literature from Manzoni onwards.[15]
Hid historical novel The Betrothed (I promessi sposi) is the work that has made him immortal.[16] The idea of the historical novel came to him from Sir Walter Scott, but he succeeded in something more than an historical novel in the narrow meaning of that word; he created an eminently realistic work of art.
So The Betrothed is generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature.[17] The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message[17] and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language, understandable by both scholars and common people.[18]
In it, Manzoni dives down into the innermost recesses of the human heart, and draws thence the most subtle psychological reality. In this his greatness lies, which was recognized first by his companion in genius, Goethe. As a poet too he had gleams of genius, especially in the Napoleonic ode, The Fifth of May, and where he describes human affections, as in some stanzas of the Hymns and in the chorus of the Adelchi. But it is on the Bethored alone that his fame now rests.[15]
The great poet of the age was Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), born thirteen years after Manzoni at Recanati, of a patrician family, bigoted and avaricious. He became so familiar with Greek authors that he used afterwards to say that the Greek mode of thought was more clear and living to his mind than the Latin or even the Italian. Solitude, sickness, domestic tyranny, prepared him for profound melancholy. From this he passed into complete religious scepticism, from which he sought rest in art.[19]
Everything is terrible and grand in his poems, but besides being the greatest poet of nature and of sorrow, he was also an admirable prose writer. In his Operette morali (Small Moral Works), dialogues and discourses marked by a cold and bitter smile at human destinies that freezes the reader, the clearness of style, the simplicity of language and the depth of conception are such that perhaps he is not only the greatest lyrical poet since Dante, but also one of the most perfect writers of prose that Italian literature has had.[19]
He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century[20][21] Although he was educated in the Enlightenment culture, he highlights its negative and destructive aspects, and despite his pessimisticmaterialism he maintains a paradoxical relationship with Platonism, which does not cancel but rather exalts the «eternal mystery/ of our being», reaching an unconscious harmony with German Romanticism, even though he has nothing in common with Idealism.[22]
Moral and civil Primacy of Italians, in which Gioberti defended the moral supremacy of Italy as a «princely nation».
But after 1840, even history returned to its spirit of learned research, from the manner of Botta and Colletta, as is shown in such works as the Archivio storico italiano, established at Florence by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux (a continuation of his Antologia, which was suppressed in 1833 owing to the action of the Austrian government), the History of Italy in the Middle Ages by Carlo Troya, a remarkable treatise by Manzoni himself (On Some Points of Lombard History in Italy), and the fine history of the Sicilian Vespers by Michele Amari.[19]
The literary movement that preceded and was contemporary with the political revolution of 1848 may be said to be represented by four writers: Giuseppe Giusti (1809–1850), Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–1873), Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852) and Cesare Balbo (1789–1853). Giusti wrote epigrammatic satires in popular language. Guerrazzi had a great reputation and great influence, but his historical novels, though avidly read before 1848, were soon forgotten. Gioberti was a powerful polemical writer; his Moral and civil Primacy of Italians will last as an important document of the times, manifesto of Neo-Guelphism which recalling the medieval Guelphs outlined the goal of a national federation of the various Italian states, of which Catholic universalism would be the religion that defined Italian identity, since «Italy is the most cosmopolitan of nations».[23] Like Gioberti in his early years, Balbo was zealous for a civil papacy and a federation of Italian states, but presided over by the House of Savoy; his Summary of the History of Italy is an excellent example.[19]
The paintings the of the "historical Romanticism" tend to depict subjects from the past, mostly reminiscent of the italian Middle Ages, in an attempt to reproduce situations similar to that so-called "vulgar Era", considered to be formative of Italian traditions and popular folklore[32] (exactly as Manzoni did in Adelchi). Hayez's repertoire also includes portraits of famous people of his time, from the aforementioned Alessandro Manzoni to Garibaldi and Camillo Benso di Cavour. His best-known painting, entitled The Kiss (1859), depicts a man about to go into battle for his country, who dedicates a passionate and sincere kiss to his beloved: underlining the primacy of sentiment, it resonates with the ideals of Italian unification and of political-military commitment.[33]
Romanticism in Italy was a period of particular renewal for opera, whose subjects were drawn less from mythology and classical studies than from historical themes.
The face of Italian Romantic opera, however, is Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), whose slave chorus in Nabucco is a memorable hymn to all of Italy. Italian nationalistic aspirations were reflected in those of the Jews of the Exodus:[39]
Its success at La Scala of Milan in 1842 marked a turning point in the composer's career, and helped redefine musical taste of the era, with historical-realistic elements that matched typical themes of Romanticism, such as sentiment, freedom, patriotism.[39]
Also Verdi's trilogy formed by Rigoletto, The Troubadour and The Fallen Woman are among his major works, but he reached the peak of his art with Otello and Falstaff at the end of his career. He infused his operas with unparalleled dramatic vigor and rhythmic vitality.
Verdi followed the path of well-composed melodrama, similar to Wagner despite their differences. His immense charisma eclipsed all other Italian composers, including Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–1886) and Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), who also wrote the librettist for his last operas, Otello and Falstaff.
Several interpretative difficulties have emerged regarding the nature of Italian Romanticism, anomalously called upon to construct a national identity in opposition to classicism, in which Italian culture had its distinctive trait.[42][6]Anglophone foreign observers often failed to understand, precisely during the period when Italy was their beloved destination on the Grand Tour, that many Italian authors sought to use classicism itself as an instrument of modernity.[43][44]
Furthermore, those Italian writers who did not participate in the debate between classicists and Romantics detested being grouped into a single category of writing.[45] Therefore, Romantic Italy can seem to be home of numerous isolated literary figures, without a univocal meaning for the term "Romanticism" itself.[45]
In 1908 Gina Martegiani even wrote in The Voice an essay titled Italian Romanticism Does Not Exist,[46] arguing that 19th-century writers in Italy were either all classicists, or those who considered themselves Romantics merely imitated German works, while Romanticism is supposed to be anything but an imitation. Although well-argued, her essay was nevertheless considered paradoxical,[47] and instead helped to emphasize that Italian Romanticism had different connotations than those in the rest of Europe.[43]
Benedetto Croce in La Critica responded that her thesis was based on a reductive conception of Romanticism as a poetic "deviation" from classical canons, when in reality it was to be considered the second great revolution of the European spirit after the Renaissance, which affected all fields of knowledge, such as philosophy or politics, and involved every country.[48] Therefore, the very contrast between classicism and Romanticism was misleading.[48]
Beyond its nominal designation, it led to a renewal of Italian culture, as Stendhal noted, toward modernity,[49] and the recovery of early Romantic texts in the second half of the twentieth century confirms this assessment.[50]
↑ Andrea Battistini, La cultura cattolica italiana tra cosmopolitismo e identità nazionale, in "Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea", vol. 10, Vita e Pensiero, 2004, pp. 247-8.
↑ Scarangello, Anthony (1964). "Major Catholic-Liberal Educational Philosophers of the Italian Risorgimento". History of Education Quarterly. 4 (4): 232–250. doi:10.2307/367499. JSTOR367499. S2CID147563567.
↑ Franco Tomaselli, Il ritorno dei Normanni: protagonisti ed interpreti del restauro dei monumenti a Palermo nella seconda metà dell'Ottocento, Officina, 1994.
Francesco de Sanctis (1953). Carlo Muscetta and Giorgio Candeloro (ed.). La scuola cattolico-liberale e il Romanticismo a Napoli (in Italian). Turin: Einaudi.
Edmondo Cione (1957). Napoli romantica: 1830–1848 (in Italian). Naples: Morano Editore.
Michele Federico Sciacca (1963). Il pensiero italiano nell'età del Risorgimento (in Italian). Marzorati.
Sciacca, Michele Federico (1966). "Lo spiritualismo italiano e A. Rosmini"(VI). La filosofia nel suo sviluppo storico: dal secolo XIX ai nostri giorni (in Italian). Vol.3. Rome: Cremonese.
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