The Italian Idea

A dual-perspective study of how English engagement with Italy, and the work of Italian exiles in London, radicalised Romantic poetry.

Mild-mannered suburban father Simon Capp took his young family off to the Italian countryside for a change of lifestyle and to test out the theory of the global internet worker. All he needs is electricity and a phone line. What could go wrong? This is the story of the Capp family's Italian odyssey, as they battle the combined forces of Telecom Italia, the nation's stingiest landlord, seven levels of police bureaucracy, a car with a deathwish curse and a town with only one pizzeria in it. It all seemed like such a good idea in the beginning!

This book assesses the pivotal role played by the concept of beauty in Italian literature and language in the construction of the Italian national identity.

From 1815 to 1823 the Italian influence on English literature was at its zenith. While English tourists flocked to Italy, a pervasive Italianism coloured many facets of London life, including poetry, periodicals, translation, and even the Queen's trial of 1820. In this engaging study Will Bowers considers this radical interaction by pursuing two interrelated analyses. The first examines the Italian literary and political ideas absorbed by Romantic poets, particularly Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The second uncovers the ambassadorial role played in London by Italians, such as Serafino Buonaiuti and Ugo Foscolo, who promoted a revolutionary idea of their homeland and its literature, particularly Dante's Commedia. This dual-perspective study reveals the cosmopolitan challenge to Regency mores embodied in both the work of Italian literary exiles in London and the English poetic engagement with Italy.

'The National Idea in Italian Literature' is the written form of a lecture delivered by Edmund Garratt Gardner. He was an English scholar and writer, specializing in Italian history and literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he was regarded as one of the foremost British Dante scholars.