The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question 9780520939820

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The View from Vesuvius

Studies on the History of Society and Culture Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Editors

The View from Vesuvius Italian Culture and the Southern Question nelson moe

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

Unless otherwise noted, all figures are from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moe, Nelson, 1961– The view from Vesuvius : Italian culture and the southern question / Nelson Moe. p. cm.—(Studies on the history of society and culture ; 46) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-22652-6 1. Italy, Southern—Civilization—Public opinion. 2. Italy, Southern—Social conditions—19th century—Public opinion. 3. Italy, Southern—Politics and government—19th century— Public opinion. 4. Public opinion—Italy, Northern. 5. Stereotype (Psychology)—Italy. I. Title. II. Series. dg825 .m64 2001 945'.708—dc21 2001005018 Manufactured in the United States of America 11 10

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8

The man of the south, placed like a king of the universe under the canopy of an ever serene sky, daily reveling in flowers and fruits, dazzled with the éclat of life, and intoxicated, not with ideal, but with sensual gratification, has no distant future to anticipate, or remote past filled with cherished souvenirs, to supply him the charms of his existence. In the midst of nature’s bountiful gifts, ever the subject of keen sensations, and exposed to all the risks of a life not maintained by self-exertion, he is destined never to live with himself and enjoy the benefits of self-communion. The man of the north, on the other hand, endowed with the sublimest of all gifts—that of directing his own destiny—proves to us that human dignity, as well as power and happiness, resides in thought and in reflection far more than in any other agency that ministers to the progress of our race. Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord

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Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: How Did Southern Italy Become “the South”?

i.

imagining the south, c. 1750–1850 1. Italy as Europe’s South “L’Italie, c’est rien”: Foreign Views of Italy “The Abomination of All Nations”: Italian Views of Italy The Empire of Climate Southern Man and Northern Man in Bonstetten and Gioia The Triumph of the North in Leopardi’s Discorso

2. “L’Europe finit à Naples”: Representations of the Mezzogiorno in the Century before Unification What Was Different about Southern Italy? Casanova in a Paradise Inhabited by Devils The Geography of Textual Production Travelers at the End of Europe Southerners and the Backward South

ii.

1

13 14 19 23 27 31 37 38 46 52 55 76

representing the south in the risorgimento, c. 1825–1861 3. The North Looks South, 1825–1848 “Italy Ends at the Garigliano”

85 87

A View from Milan: The Picturesque South in Cosmorama pittorico A Different View from Milan: Carlo Cattaneo The Moral Geography of a Moderate: The South in Vincenzo Gioberti’s Primato The View from Vesuvius: Leopardi’s “La ginestra”

4. Of Bourbons and Barbarism, 1848–1860 Europe and Italy, North and South Gladstone and the Negation of God “Italy Ends at the Garigliano” (Revisited) The South as Africa A Poetic and Picturesque World

5. “This Is Not Italy!”: Ruling and Representing the South, 1860–1861 The Neapolitans Disappoint the Piedmontese Meeting the Barbarians Two Moral Maps The Wound, the Doctor, the Nation The South’s First Day in Parliament The Supreme Argument of Force

iii.

92 102 112 120 126 127 131 139 143 153 156 161 164 170 172 176 179

representing the south in postunification italy, c. 1870–1885 6. Terra Vergine: Picturing the South in Illustrazione italiana Politics, Positivism, and Pessimism, c. 1874 The Geography of Textual Production in Postunification Italy The Birth of a Magazine: Picturing the Nation in Illustrazione italiana The Squalid South in Nuova illustrazione universale The Picturesque South in Illustrazione italiana

7. The Emergence of the Southern Question in Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti The Southern Question in Villari’s Southern Letters Franchetti’s Sicilian Nightmare

187 189 194 197 207 211 224 225 236

8. The Geographical Poetics of Giovanni Verga A Sicilian Writer in Milan Picturing Sicily in Eva Preamble to a Geographical Poetics: “Nedda” “One Helluva Fuss”: Milanese Responses to “Nedda” A Singular Interest: “Stories of the Castle of Trezza” The Problem with “Padron ‘Ntoni” A Pretty Little Picture: “Fantasticheria” The Antipicturesque in “Rosso Malpelo” The Hybridity of Vita dei campi and I Malavoglia The Negation of the Sea in Novelle rusticane The Return of the Picturesque in “Across the Sea” and Cavalleria rusticana

Conclusion: What the South Enables Us to Say

250 252 253 257 261 266 271 275 277 280 286 289 297

Bibliography

301

Index

337

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Illustrations

1. Italy, divided into its three regions

39

2. View of the Islands of Trezza

68

3. The Return from the Festival of the Madonna dell’Arco

69

4. “The Antipodes”

95

5. Sant’Elmo Castle in Naples

98

6. Etna (Mongibello) in Sicily

99

7. Vesuvius in Eruption

100

8. Masthead, Nuova illustrazione universale, 1874

200

9. Masthead, Nuova illustrazione universale, 1874

201

10. Masthead, Illustrazione italiana, 1877

203

11 & 12. Scenes from Modica, Sicily

214

13. View of the Channel of Ischia at Piedigrotta

218

14. Cantina napoletana

220

15. The Fishmonger of Mergellina

222

16. Cavalleria rusticana

293

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Acknowledgments

I was first introduced to the “Southern Question” on a train heading from Milan to Reggio Calabria in the spring of 1983. Having recently arrived for a semester of study abroad in Perugia, I had decided to go south for the Easter break. When I told the Florentine woman in my compartment that I planned to stop in Naples, a look of dismay spread across her face. Didn’t I know that this was a filthy, dangerous city, full of hucksters and thieves? Didn’t I know that the south was like Africa? With so many beautiful cities to see in the north, why was I heading to the Mezzogiorno? The woman’s response to my travel plans caught me off guard. Her vivid evocation of the horrors of Naples and the south made me curious not only about the region itself but about the way it was perceived. I soon found out that the south was a topic about which every Italian had something to say, usually with considerable passion. Yet as my interest in the way Italians viewed the south shifted from casual conversations to the libraries, I discovered that the problem had not received the kind of scholarly attention it deserved. This study, which grew out of my initial fascination with the image of the south in Italian culture, was written while shuttling back and forth between the United States and Italy. In the process of researching and writing the book, I have benefited from the support and assistance of many teachers, colleagues, and friends on both sides of the ocean. My first debt is to Piero Bevilacqua. His encouragement, suggestions, and readings of various drafts of the manuscript have been invaluable. I am deeply grateful to Tommaso Astarita and Gabriella Gribaudi for their thoughtful comments on much of the manuscript. Franco Benigno, Jane Cowan, Laurie Hart, Salvatore Lupo, Robert Lumley, Romano Luperini, Paolo Macry, Jonathan Morris, Ugo Maria Olivieri, Silvana Patriarca, Frank Rosengarten, Jane Schneider, xiii

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Martin Thom, and Thomas Willette also gave valuable feedback at various stages. Early on Anthony Grafton and Michela De Giorgio provided me with some crucial references. At Columbia University I received thoughtful and often lively input from the members of a writing group that met in 1996–97: Adam Bresnick, David Levin, Michael Levine, Daniel Purdy, and James Schamus. My colleagues in the Italian Department, Teodolinda Barolini, Jo Ann Cavallo, and Luciano Rebay, also offered helpful comments on a draft of the manuscript. Marta Petrusewicz and Lucia Re, the two readers for the University of California Press, and Lynn Hunt, coeditor of Studies on the History of Society and Culture, offered many incisive observations. I greatly appreciate the expertise and enthusiasm that my editors, Juliane Brand, Sheila Levine, and Mary Severance, brought to publishing my book. John Joerschke put the final polish on the manuscript with his copyediting. For their support and input at various stages I am grateful to Joseph Buttigieg, Victoria De Grazia, Mark Mazower, Tommaso Pomilio, Eduardo Saccone, Dorothea Von Mücke, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Gregory Lucente and Giancarlo Mazzacurati, who sadly are no longer with us, inspired me with their intellectual examples and passion for Verga. I am also grateful to a number of individuals with whom I discussed the project while enjoying their Mediterranean hospitality: in Naples, Marco Rossi-Doria, Anna Maria Savarese, and Caroline Peyron; in Rome, Domenico Jervolino and Mara Gasbarrone; and on the island of Aegina, Greece, Fay Zika and Dimitris Dikaios. The Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Columbia University Council for Research in the Humanities, the Columbia University Chamberlain Fellowship Fund, and the Lurcy Foundation gave financial support for research and writing. Kathy Davis and the entire staff of the interlibrary loan office at Columbia University kept me busy with a steady flow of materials. Ariella Lang showed stamina and resourcefulness as my research assistant. My parents, Doris Tanner and Daniel Moe, and parents-in-law, Nicholas and Marcia Van Dyck, have been gracious and supportive throughout the process. My greatest debt, finally, is to Karen Van Dyck. Her generosity and passion for living, thinking, and writing amaze me, sempre. I dedicate this book to my sons, Jacob and Benjamin, volcano lovers, and to Leander, born with a view of Vesuvius. Chapter 5 is reprinted in revised form from Meridiana. Rivista di storia e scienze sociali 15 (1992): 53–89 and from Making and Remaking Italy: The

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Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, eds. Albert R. Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (Oxford: Berg Press, 2001), 119–53. Reproduced by permission of Istituto meridionale di storia e scienze sociali and Berg Press, respectively. Chapter 7 is reprinted in revised form from Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg Press, 1998), 51–76. Reproduced by permission of Berg Press. Chapter 8 is reprinted in revised form from Oltre il meridionalismo: Nuove prospettive sul Mezzogiorno d’Italia, eds. Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris (Rome: Carocci, 1999), 145–75. Reproduced by permission of Carocci editore. A note on translations: All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I have occasionally revised existing translations to clarify the meaning of the original in the context of my argument.

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Introduction How Did Southern Italy Become “the South”?

The central chapter of The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa contains a memorable encounter between the Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio, and a Piedmontese official named Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo. Chevalley has just arrived in Sicily, his head filled with tales of brigands, and can be immediately recognized as a visitor from the north by the alarmed expression on his face. While waiting to be picked up at a postal station near the prince’s villa, Chevalley is momentarily reassured by the words Corso Vittorio Emanuele painted in blue letters on the side of a house before him. But this sign of his king’s authority on the island is ultimately “not enough to convince him that he was in a place which was, after all, part of his own nation” (195). In the 140 years since the unification of northern and southern Italy, many have felt similar doubts. The vexed relationship between the two parts of the country, often referred to as the Southern Question, has shaped Italy’s political, social, and cultural life during the past century. The emergence of Umberto Bossi’s separatist Northern League during the 1990s has lent a new urgency to this question, providing millions of voters with a political channel through which to vent their discontent with the unified state formed from Italy’s various regions in 1860. How and when did southern Italy become “the south,” a place and people imagined to be different from and inferior to the rest of the country? My book explores this question through the analysis of a wide range of textual and visual representations of the south produced in Italy and elsewhere in Europe between the mid-eighteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. I argue that a modern vision of the Italian south, or Mezzogiorno, took form in the middle decades of the nineteenth century under the combined pressures of western Eurocentrism, nationalism, and bourgeoisification. 1

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In the decades before 1860, liberal elites in Italy set their sights on the formation of an independent nation that would take its place in the constellation of leading European states; they imagined their future nation in the image of modern Europe. At the same time they were haunted by a sense of their country’s backwardness. Italian civilization had triumphed in the Renaissance; in the intervening centuries, however, it had been politically dominated and culturally upstaged by countries to the north of the Alps. Simply put, Italy was a southern country in a century when the superiority of “the north” was virtually beyond dispute. One of the central ironies of the Risorgimento, or the movement to revitalize Italy and free it from foreign rule, is that unification split the nation in two, accentuating the northernness of one part and the southernness of the other. To be sure, Italians had always recognized significant differences among the various peoples and lands on the peninsula. But in the middle decades of the nineteenth century the forces of Eurocentrism and nationalism converged to produce a nation committed to participating in the civilization of western Europe. In the context of the drive to make Italy a more northern nation, the southern part of the country was identified as different. When, in the fall of 1860, a northern general reported back to Count Cavour in Piedmont about the conditions in the south, he put it quite succinctly: “This is not Italy! This is Africa” (Carteggi di Camillo Cavour: La liberazione del Mezzogiorno 3: 208). The bulk of this study examines the way the south was represented in the decades before and after unification, with special attention to the crucial phase of the 1870s. I also emphasize how visions of the south were produced within a broader geographical and historical context, shaped, in particular, by the accentuation of western Eurocentricism after the mid-eighteenth century. Around 1750, the south was first marked as backward in relation to that part of Europe that was increasingly identified as leading the way of progress: England, France, and somewhat later, Germany as well.A new sense both of the south’s distance from western European civilization and of its liminal position with respect to Africa and the Orient emerged. Foreign travelers in particular, but southerners too, denounced the barbarism of life in southern Italy. New positive modes of appreciating the south, however, also developed. While the rise of bourgeois civilization in western Europe fueled a new emphasis on the barbarism of other parts of the continent and the world beyond, it also generated new forms of interest in those very backward areas and peoples. Travelers and artists looked south in search of a more natural, untamed world to find, in a word, the picturesque. From the late-eighteenth

How Did Italy Become the South?

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century on, the picturesque becomes the main prism through which the south’s status as a source of interest and delectation for the civilized observer is viewed. The south therefore became both “Africa” and terra vergine, a reservoir of feudal residues, sloth, and squalor on the one hand and of quaint peasants, rustic traditions, and exotica on the other. The first two chapters survey from two different angles the deployment of these imaginative patterns in the century before unification. Chapter 1, “Italy as Europe’s South,” highlights the elasticity of the south as a category, exploring some of the ways in which Italy was represented in toto as a southern country. Through readings of texts by Montesquieu, CharlesVictor de Bonstetten, Melchiorre Gioia, and Giacomo Leopardi, I investigate how the conceptualization of Italy as Europe’s south informed the representation of Italian identity in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, “L’Europe finit à Naples,” examines the imaginative patterns that characterized the representation of southern Italy in particular and discusses the conditions that contributed to their ascendancy in Italian and European culture more generally. Through readings of texts by Casanova, Sade, Stendhal, and Renan, among others, I explore the recurrent motif of southern Italy as a liminal space between Europe, Africa, and the Orient. Both chapters highlight the importance of foreign perspectives. The remaining chapters of the book address the representation of the south in the context of the Risorgimento and unification, moving chronologically from the mid-1820s to the mid-1880s and shifting geographically from Europe to Italy. My readings of selected texts and visual representations explore not only the interactions between conceptualizations of national unity and visions of southern difference, but also the importance of the specific geographical positions and perspectives from which these representations were produced. I broadly emphasize the difference between the perspectives of southern insiders and central-northern outsiders, while also exploring the exchanges and overlaps between them. Chapter 3, “The North Looks South, 1825–1848,” investigates how the growth of Italian nationalism helped to foster a new interest in the south among elites of the center-north. As the Lombard writer Carlo Cattaneo put it in 1845, the time had come “to illustrate the bel paese piece by piece” (“Annuario” 80), and the largest of these pieces was the southern Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Through readings of texts by Cattaneo and other central-northern political thinkers, and through the analysis of the Milanese illustrated weekly magazine Cosmorama pittorico, I highlight the tendency to represent the south as alternately backward and picturesque vis-à-vis a civilized and modern center-north. I conclude with an analysis of “La gines-

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tra,” the final great poem by Giacomo Leopardi, set on the desolate slope of Mount Vesuvius. “La ginestra,” I argue, critically redeploys the topos of a natural and picturesque south in order to mount an attack on the progressive vision of modern European civilization promoted by nationalists of the center-north. Chapter 4, “Of Bourbons and Barbarism, 1848–1860,” examines how concerns over the formation of a European Italy inform the anti-Bourbon propaganda campaign in the decade before unification. I focus especially on the conceptual slippage evident in a series of political texts between denigrations of the Bourbon regime and of the southern Italian people themselves. If, in the noted words of William Gladstone, the Bourbons were “the negation of God erected into a system of Government” (Gleanings 7), southerners were no angels either. The accentuation of a negative image of the south at this time plays a crucial role in the construction of an image of Italy divided between north and south. Chapter 5, “‘This is Not Italy!’: Ruling and Representing the South, 1860–1861,” focuses on the letters exchanged among the political and military leaders associated with the predominantly northern political tendency known as the Moderates, who conquered and annexed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the fall of 1860. In the context of a virtual civil war between north and south, imaginative patterns that had developed over the previous century were redeployed by northern Italians with a new divisive force. By bringing the two parts of the country into contact for the first time, the process of unification paradoxically accentuated their differences. The last three chapters of the book investigate the explosion of interest in the south that took place in Italian bourgeois culture during the 1870s. Over the course of that decade, representations of the south proliferated in a variety of fields, and the dual vision of an alternately picturesque and backward south established itself in the consciousness of Italy’s middle and upper classes. Chapter 6, “Terra Vergine: Picturing the South in Illustrazione italiana,” begins by outlining the political and cultural coordinates of this trend and then focuses on the best-selling illustrated weekly magazine of the day, Illustrazione italiana, which helped to popularize picturesque images of the south among the country’s middle and upper classes. Chapter 7, “The Emergence of the Southern Question in Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti,” examines texts by the first Meridionalists, the social and political thinkers who announced the existence of the Southern Question and helped to make the problem of southern backwardness a key point of reference in the political discourse of the nation’s elites. Finally, Chapter 8 investigates the fiction of Giovanni Verga, the Sicilian

How Did Italy Become the South?

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writer who discovered the symbolic power of the south while residing in Milan during the 1870s and early 1880s. I emphasize the significance of geographical position and perspective in his work while relating the evolution of his art to his involvement in other fields of cultural practice that produced representations of the south. I argue that Verga’s shift of focus to Sicily in 1874–78 was partly enabled by his engagement with the discourse of picturesque Sicily as it was elaborated in the journal Illustrazione italiana. The Sicilian fishing village of Aci-Trezza is a “pretty little picture” to the bourgeois lady from the north described in the story “Fantasticheria” (Tutte le novelle 1: 122). Yet the emergence of the Southern Question and the writings of Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino in particular prompted Verga to subject that picturesque vision to a powerful critique. Verga’s representation of Sicily is characterized by a continuous experimentation with these alternative perspectives on the south, as well as by an ongoing engagement with the question of perspective itself. Verga not only created the first great poetic evocation of southern Italy in modern Italian literature but also elaborated what I term a geographical poetics, a sustained reflection on the role that geographical and cultural distance play in the production of cultural representations. I thus move from a broad examination of the representation of the south as a category in European culture to a close reading of how one part of the south is represented in the work of an Italian novelist. This move from the general to the specific is paradigmatic of my critical approach and of the interventions I seek to make in the two fields of cultural theory and Italian studies. In both I am interested in troubling general assumptions with specific cases. With regard to recent discussions of geography and identity in cultural theory, I shift attention from the cultural construction of west vs. east to that of north vs. south. With regard to Italian studies, I turn away from the socioeconomic aspects of the Southern Question and focus on the modalities of the south’s representation in literature and culture. The identity of Europe and its relation to the world beyond it has been at the center of discussions in cultural theory during the 1990s. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) offered a major reevaluation of European civilization from a global perspective. His study highlighted the interconnections between Europe’s vision of an “Other”—the Orient—and the expression and exercise of its global supremacy. Orientalism was a study in what Said termed “imaginative geography” (49–73), an exploration of the myriad ways in which one part of the world imagined another in the process of dominating it. Said’s study was thus not only a major reexamination of Europe but a pathbreaking example of cultural analysis in a geographical

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key, inviting further research into the relations between cultural representations and geography, territory, place. While Said’s book emphasized the dichotomy between Europe and its Other, the Orient, a number of more recent studies have highlighted the extent to which European identity is itself inconsistent and fractured, its boundaries fluid and variable. In Inventing Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff explores the conceptual division between western and eastern Europe, tracing the origins of this split back to the Enlightenment. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova offers a wide-ranging investigation into the representation of the Balkans as the Other of Europe in the modern era. The View from Vesuvius joins these studies in showing how the consolidation of Eurocentrism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only helped to accentuate the divide between Europe and its Others but also redefined the contours of civilization on the continent itself. The south’s imaginative destiny at the margins of Europe can be usefully understood in relation to that of eastern Europe which, as Balzac wrote, constitutes “a link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism” (quoted in Wolff 13). Like eastern Europe and the Balkans, Italy’s Mezzogiorno constitutes an alternately fascinating and troubling border zone between Europe and its Others. What is interesting to me, however, is that these and many other studies dealing with imaginative geography since Orientalism conceive of Europe’s internal fragmentation, and of the world more broadly, primarily in terms of a division between east and west. The division between north and south, which structured the European imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has instead received remarkably little attention. Thus, while countless studies have contributed to our understanding of the significance of the Orient or “East” in modern European culture, our historical understanding of the south is sketchy, as is our awareness of the ways the categories of north, south, west, and east have interacted and evolved in the modern era.1 I aim to illuminate the workings of imaginative geography in a southern mode with a focus on Italy. As I argue in Chapter 1, Italy was a crucial figure for the south in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But what makes Italy a particularly rich site for such an investigation is the way in

1. Both Wolff and Todorova, for example, make the questionable assertion that the opposition between north and south is simply displaced by the opposition between east and west in the eighteenth century (see Inventing Eastern Europe 5; Imagining the Balkans 11). As I aim to show in Chapter 1, the opposition between north and south had a powerful hold on the European imagination well into the 1800s.

How Did Italy Become the South?

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which north and south have been articulated within Italy itself. North and south have been structuring terms in Italian culture since the ascendancy of nationalism in the 1850s. A preoccupation with the differences between north and south has shaped diverse areas of Italian culture up to the present day, reflected most significantly, perhaps, in the tradition of political thought and social analysis known as Meridionalism (meridionalismo). As Piero Bevilacqua has written, the “‘Southern Question’ is an Italian speciality” (“Vecchio e nuovo” 251). The 1990s were a particularly rich decade for the discussion and analysis of the Southern Question in Italian studies. At the end of the 1980s a number of historians, many associated with the journal Meridiana, began to question the dualistic model of an Italy divided between north and south. They challenged in particular the traditional representation of the Mezzogiorno as a unified bloc conceived as different, lacking, backward. The south, they argued, was more than just a “question” or “problem”; it was a “piece of the world” that required analysis on its own terms.2 The category of the south and the notion of the Southern Question itself needed to be reassessed and new ways of writing the history of southern Italy explored.3 The new way of thinking about the south advanced by these historians went hand in hand with a new way of thinking about Italy as a whole. In both cases the unity and identity of Italy were at issue. Scholars had begun to turn their attention to the question of national identity at the beginning of the nineties.4 The challenge to national unity spearheaded by the Northern League helped to galvanize interest in the question of Italian identity and in the Southern Question among both scholars and the public at large. Over the past decade, countless essays, books, and newspaper articles concerning both Italian identity and the relations between north and south have appeared. My book has taken shape at the intersection of these discussions in Italian studies, both drawing upon and seeking to contribute to them.5 It nonetheless offers a novel approach, above all its focus on cultural repre2. See Donzelli, “Pezzo di mondo,” written as the opening statement for the first issue of Meridiana in 1987, and “Mezzogiorno.” 3. John Davis reviews this new scholarship in “Casting Off the ‘Southern Problem’” and “Changing Perspectives on Italy’s ‘Southern Problem.’” See as well Morris; Lyttelton, “New Past for the Mezzogiorno”; Riall, Sicily 17–19. 4. The Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History significantly chose “The Cultural Nationalization of Italians” as the topic of its inaugural symposium in 1991. See Romanelli, “Nazione debole,” for an early assessment of the question in the Italian context. 5. Earlier versions of Chapter 5 originally appeared in Meridiana in 1992 and subsequently in a recent collection of essays on Italian national identity. Versions of

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sentations of the south and the workings of texts in particular. Historians were the first to insist upon the need to address the problem of representation, but their primary aim has been to correct misrepresentations of the south and to rewrite its history more accurately.The cultural representations themselves have received relatively little attention. If, as Carmine Donzelli wrote, the image of north and south has taken shape in the consciousness of Italians through a “long and often subterranean process of cultural, ideological, and political elaboration” (“Mezzogiorno” 23), then it is essential for us to analyze this process in its cultural and textual specificity. I aim through the eyes of a literary critic to scrutinize some of the key cultural and specifically textual forms that make up that process. Much of my analysis is in the form of close readings that examine specific rhetorical strategies and figures of speech. At the same time, my use of a broad range of texts and a selection of visual representations reflects my cultural studies approach. Imaginative geography, and the representation of the south in particular, cuts across a wide variety of discourses and cultural practices: travel accounts, political discourse, ethnographic studies, literary texts, visual illustrations. I explore the range of domains and energies that concerned themselves with the south in nineteenth-century Italian—and not only Italian—culture. Research into representations of the south over the past decade has been mainly conducted by historians and cultural critics who have focused on texts and documents other than literature.6 There has, moreover, been relatively little exchange among literary critics and historians, and little discussion of the relation between literary representations of the south and other kinds of representations. A key exception is the earlier work of the literary critic Romano Luperini, who showed the interconnections between Verga’s fiction and the southernist investigations of Franchetti and Sonnino.7 But on the whole, literary critics have not sought to situate literature within this field of concerns, and historians have not looked to literature to illuminate issues relating to the representation of the south. Placing Verga within this field of concerns helps us to see the extent to which the problem of representing the south, and the cultural practices that give expression to it, informs Verga’s work and in the process becomes integral to modern Italian literaChapters 7 and 8 first appeared in essay collections dedicated to new perspectives on the Southern Question. 6. See, for example, John Dickie’s important study, Darkest Italy. 7. In particular, Verga e le strutture narrative, published in 1976, and the chapter titled “Simbolo e ‘ricostruzione intellettuale’ nei ‘Malavoglia’” in Simbolo e costruzione allegorica in Verga published in 1989. Luperini’s contributions are fundamental to my interpretation of Verga in Chapter 8.

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ture. At the same time, Verga’s literary engagement with the problem of the south helps us to read this problem differently, brings into focus crucial questions of perspective, and of the picturesque in particular, of cultural and geographical distance, which prove to be key aspects of the representation of the south in nineteenth-century Italy. By closely examining the fiction of Verga along with a range of other texts and visual materials in light of recent discussions in cultural theory and Italian studies, I show that the south is a crucial category for analyzing the construction of Italian and European identity in the nineteenth century. The Piedmontese official in Lampedusa’s Leopard wondered whether Sicily was a part of Italy. Again and again in this study, the south offers an occasion for posing the question What is Italy? and often, at the same time, What is modern Europe and Italy’s relation to it? Whatever its actual contours and real conditions, the south’s capacity to provoke these questions is crucial to what this “piece of the world” became in the nineteenth century and is part of what still defines Italy today.

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I imagining the south, c. 1750–1850

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Italy as Europe’s South

In the years around 1825, two Italian writers working independently of one another took up the question of Italy’s character as a “southern” country. Each was responding in some way to what foreigners had written about Italy, but their views were dramatically opposed. The economist Melchiorre Gioia argued that the categories of northern and southern said little about the character of a people. Whether to the north or the south of the Alps, the laws governing human society are essentially the same. The poet and essayist Giacomo Leopardi, on the other hand, asserted that Italy’s southern nature provided the key to its supremacy in the past and its decadence in the present. “It appears that the north’s time has come,” he writes (Discorso 83). Establishing an equation between modernity and the north, Leopardi assigned Italy the status of southern has-been. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, north and south became charged moral categories in the cultural imagination of Europe. In the work of philosophers and poets, historians and novelists, the idea that Europe was divided between northern and southern peoples and countries acquired a new evocative power and explanatory force. For many, Italy was the southern country par excellence. The lands and peoples of Italy were central to the elaboration of the idea of the south, while the south played an important role in the representation of Italy and Italianness. I begin my study by situating the image of the south within this broader geopolitical and conceptual framework, examining the representation of Italy as Europe’s south in a set of texts written both by Italians and foreigners in the century before unification. This expanded perspective will enable us in subsequent chapters to highlight that which is specific to representations of the Italian Mezzogiorno as well as to appreciate the overarching geographical division of which it forms a part. In my readings of texts ranging from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws 13

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to Giacomo Leopardi’s Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians, I shall pay special attention to Italy’s place in the cultural construction of modern Europe and to Europe’s place in the cultural construction of modern Italy. For it is precisely the question of Italy’s relation to, and its difference from, western European civilization that will play a decisive role in accentuating visions of southern difference from the mid-nineteenth century on.

“l’italie, c’est rien”: foreign views of italy The discursive construction of Italian identity in the century before unification was deeply enmeshed in the geopolitical and cultural context of Europe. To be sure, every national identity has taken shape in a comparative frame of reference and through cultural exchange with foreigners. But in the Italian case, these international aspects of national identity formation were especially pronounced owing to the particular history of the relations between Italy and western Europe in the modern era. Over the course of the seventeenth century, a radical inversion in the relations of force and cultural prestige between Italy and western Europe took place. Model to and “master” of Europe since the fourteenth century (Le Goff 2074), during the 1600s Italy was dramatically upstaged by countries to the north and west of the Alps: Holland, England, and France.1 What was taking place in fact was a massive shift of geopolitical and economic power away from the Mediterranean world as a whole.2 As Fernand Braudel writes, from the mid1600s on “the Mediterranean lay firmly outside the mainstream of history which it had almost exclusively dominated for centuries on end” (Perspective 79). Henceforth the north would dominate the south, within Europe and across the globe.3 Italy marked this epochal shift in a special way. The Italians had lorded their economic power and cultural supremacy over the rest of Europe since the fourteenth century. Italian intellectuals referred to those beyond the Alps as barbarians, using a conceit dating back to the days of Petrarch and central to the consciousness of Italian elites right through the Risorgimento.4 Now the tables were turning. Italian civilization was certainly not eclipsed 1. On the economic crisis in Italy during the seventeenth century, see Aymard, “Fragilità,” especially 5–18; Malanima; Sella 23–49; Marcello Verga; as well as Zamagni 2–10. 2. See Wallerstein, Modern World-System I, especially 216–21 with reference to Italy; Cipolla, “Changing Balance.” 3. See Landes 134–44. 4. See Chabod, Storia dell’idea dell’Europa 45–46; Waquet, “Penser l’histoire inter-culturelle” 4–5, and Le modèle français et l’Italie savante 367–68.

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overnight; in the visual arts and music, for example, Italy remained preeminent even as its political influence and economic power declined.5 But by the end of the 1600s a new vision of western Europe’s superiority visà-vis Italy had clearly emerged.6 As Franco Venturi notes in his classic study of foreign views of Italy in the modern era, over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, western European charges of Italian “decadence, corruption, weakness, political and moral passivity” became “ever more frequent and severe” (“Italia” 999). English politicians, men of letters, and travelers increasingly insisted upon the “extreme misery and poverty that are in most of the Italian states” (“Italia” 1012). Montesquieu, writing of Italy’s “entirely deserted and depopulated” towns in the late 1720s, reflected, “it seems that their only reason for existence is to mark the spot where those great cities once stood of which history has spoken so profusely” (“Italia” 1026). Fifteen years later an English traveler noted that the cities of Italy are “now thin of Inhabitants, their soil barren and uncultivated, and themselves a pusillanimous, enervated, lazy people” (quoted in Mead 270). The most succinct expression of this claim to northern superiority and Italian inferiority was penned by a Frenchman around 1670: “l’Italie, c’est rien.”7 The tendency to denigrate contemporary Italy and the Italians had thus become commonplace in the culture of western Europe by the mid-1700s and would continue well through the next century. These accusations, repeatedly voiced by the English, French, and increasingly by the Germans as well, would have a significant impact on Italian representations of Italy in the Risorgimento. Foreign views of Italy after 1700 tended to have a con5. See Braudel, “Italia” 2246–48. But on the more general crisis of the Italian cultural “model” in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Romano, Paese Italia 73–108, as well as the following observations by Braudel: “The Italy that we see around the middle of the seventeenth century is clearly bereft of most of its privileges and prerogatives. . . . Its commercial networks, though not entirely vanished, no longer dominate the Mediterranean, which has lost much of its importance, nor the rest of the world now linked to Europe, which continues to grow economically and increase its weight and importance. . . . The Italian banks also no longer have their ancient prestige: Genovese money remains in Genova, and Venice counts as a school for banker-apprentices, not as an important financial center. The University of Padova is no longer the meeting point for European intellectualdom. And finally, male clothing with vivid colors, powdered wigs, women’s styles announced via the export of mannequins from Paris—the ‘French doll’—impose themselves upon Italian taste” (2227–28). 6. Paul Hazard discusses this new awareness in terms of the broader shift in cultural prestige “from south to north” in his European Mind 53–79. 7. See Waquet, Le modèle français et l’Italie savante 1. Waquet’s rich study is an essential resource for the study of the shifting perceptions of Italy and France between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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trastive structure. In the first place, foreigners repeatedly contrasted the glory of Italy’s past with its decadent present. Their visions of the greatness of Roman and Renaissance civilization transformed contemporary Italy into the “shadow of a nation,” as Goethe put it in his Italian Journey, or in the famous verses of Lamartine, a “land of the past . . . where everything sleeps.”8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was no less succinct when she wrote that “it is well that they have great memories—nothing else lives” (quoted in Pemble 229). Secondly, foreigners tended, with increasing frequency after 1750, to contrast Italy’s beautiful natural surroundings and Mediterranean climate with its human failings. These two contrasts would structure foreign perspectives on Italy throughout the century before unification. From the last decades of the eighteenth century on, however, some significant changes in the representation of Italy took place. Foreign visions of Italy were refocused in the context of the ascendancy of bourgeois civilization in western and central Europe. The contrasts described above would remain insistent, but they would increasingly interact with a new vision of time and space that placed western and central Europe at the head of the movement of human progress.9 Progress, which was understood to have reached the highest levels in western and central Europe, was increasingly measured in terms of the material well-being and technological development of society. Italy had not simply fallen from its previous heights; it was backward with respect to the most advanced, modern societies in Europe. Thus Goethe, who conceived of his journey to Italy as a form of pilgrimage, nevertheless observed that “this Italy, which enjoys nature’s richest favor, has lagged very badly behind other countries with respect to mechanics and technology, which after all are the basis of a more modern and comfortable way of life” (123). In German, English, and French culture from the late eighteenth century on, contemporary Italy became a key point of reference against which intellectuals and travelers measured the superiority and modernity of their own countries. Yet as the example from Goethe suggests, western Europeans did not take the measure of their own modernity only by denigrating Italy. With the ascendancy of bourgeois civilization after the mid-eighteenth century, a heightened appreciation for Italy’s very decadence, its lack of civilization, and its natural qualities emerged. Italy’s very lack of civilization and Mediterranean climate could delight, entertain, regenerate. From the 8. Goethe 60. On Lamartine, see Venturi, “Italia” 1200–1202. 9. Fabian investigates this new conceptualization of time and space in relation to the emergent discourse of anthropology in Time and the Other.

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perspective of the bourgeois subject’s needs and desires for recreation and restoration, Italy’s perceived lack of contemporary civilization was appreciated and celebrated as “picturesque.” The vision of Italy that takes form between the mid-eighteenth and midnineteenth centuries thus alternates between denunciations of backwardness and exaltations of picturesqueness. In the former case, a more or less explicit comparison is made, and Italy is found to be inferior. In the latter case, Italy in its decadence and backwardness offers the bourgeois subject an encounter with remnants of an ancient past and the experience of a warm, verdant natural world that cannot be found north of the Alps. Madame de Staël’s 1807 novel, Corinne, or Italy, offers an important example of the relation between these two perspectives. One of the most influential representations of Italy produced in the nineteenth century, Corinne is in fact a sustained exploration of the significance of the encounter between the northern subject and the southern land that is Italy.10 Through the figures of Oswald, the protagonist, and his traveling companion, Count d’Erfeuil, Staël rehearses at the outset the comparative and evaluative perspectives, in their English and French variants respectively, introducing both men as “prejudiced against Italy and the Italians” (19). She uses their approach to Rome in one of the opening chapters as an occasion to stage their negative evaluations. The passage is worth citing at some length: The Italians are much more outstanding for what they have been and by what they might be than by what they are now. The wasteland surrounding the city of Rome, a land weary of glory, which seems to despise being productive, is only an uncultivated, neglected area to anyone who judges it by standards of utility. Oswald, accustomed from childhood to a love of order and public prosperity, was, at first, unfavourably impressed as he crossed the deserted lands that herald the approach of the city that was once queen of the world. He blamed the indolence of the inhabitants and their leaders. Lord Nevil judged Italy as an enlightened administrator, Count d’Erfeuil as a man of the world. So the one because of reason, and the other because of frivolity, did not experience the impression which the Roman Campagna makes on the imaginations of those who are steeped in the memories and sorrows, in the natural beauties and the celebrated misfortunes, which imbue the land with an indefinable charm.

10. Michael O’Brien explores the significance of the counterpoint between north and south in Corinne in his chapter on “Italy and the Southern Romantics” in Rethinking the South 92–97.

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Count d’Erfeuil made amusing laments on the environs of Rome, “What! No country houses, no carriages, nothing which suggests the proximity of a big city!’ he said. ‘Oh, my goodness, isn’t it dreary!” (19)

This passage outlines two overarching perspectives on Italy: one condemns its differences from England and France; the other represents the same scene as a source of aesthetic pleasure. The book as a whole champions this second perspective, showing the spiritual enrichment that Oswald experiences through his encounter with both Corinne and Italy, the woman and the country being symbolically interconnected, as the title suggests.11 Yet Oswald ultimately returns to the north to find a wife, whereas Corinne dies. And upon returning to England, Oswald is immediately “struck by the order and prosperity, by the wealth and industry, that greeted his eyes” (304). He thinks of Italy now only “to pity it. It seemed to him that in his native land human reason had left its noble imprint everywhere, while in Italy, in many respects, the institutions and social conditions only reflected confusion, weakness, and ignorance” (304). As the land of the dead, ruins, and nature, Italy provides the north with memories and rejuvenation. But the same qualities that “delight the mind and imagination” of the northerner also mark Italy as inferior to and distinct from the civilized core of Europe (13). It may be true that the south is the land of the spirit, as Stendhal put it under the influence of Staël a decade later, but the north is the land of force.12 Perhaps the most succinct expression of this ensemble of problems, in particular the link between the backward and the picturesque perspectives, can be found in two passages from the travel journal of the English writer Anna Jameson published in 1826 as Diary of an Ennuyée. In the first passage Jameson makes clear that her interest in Italy is exclusively restricted to its past and the natural surroundings: Let the modern Italians be what they may,—what I hear them styled six times a day at least,—a dirty, demoralized, degraded, unprincipled race,—centuries behind our thrice-blessed, prosperous, and comfortloving nation in civilization and morals: . . . it concerns me not. I am not come to spy out the nakedness of the land, but to implore from her healing airs and lucid skies the health and peace I have lost, and to worship as a pilgrim at the tomb of her departed glories. (277–78)

11. On the symbolic links between Corinne and Italy, see Kadish 117–18, and Dejean 129–34. 12. On Stendhal’s debt to Staël’s vision of north and south, see Crouzet 26–42. I will return to Stendhal’s conception of the south, and the Mezzogiorno in particular, in the following chapter.

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Whether or not she agrees with the way the Italians are “styled,” Jameson makes it clear that she has not come to Italy to evaluate and thus condemn its level of contemporary civilization but rather to take advantage of its natural attractions and remnants of the past. In the second passage she makes clear that this very difference with respect to her “prosperous and comfortloving nation” constitutes the condition of possibility for the picturesque. “Civilization, cleanliness, and comfort, are excellent things,” she admits, but they are sworn enemies to the picturesque: they have banished it gradually from our towns, and habitations, into remote countries, and little nooks and corners, where we are obliged to hunt after it to find it; but in Italy the picturesque is every where, in every variety of form; it meets us at every turn, in town and in country, at all times and seasons; the commonest object of every-day life here becomes picturesque, and assumes from a thousand causes a certain character of poetical interest it cannot have elsewhere. (321–22)

Backwardness and the picturesque are two sides of the same coin. “Civilization, cleanliness, and comfort” are invoked here as prime bourgeois values, and Jameson makes clear that England’s superiority to Italy lies precisely in modern achievements like these. Yet such modernity also generates a longing for those picturesque aspects of the world that are being destroyed. In contrast to England, where one is “obliged to hunt after it” in “little nooks and corners,” Italy is picturesque in its entirety. As Henry James, one of the most passionate seekers of the picturesque, wrote after his first day in Rome, “for the first time I know what the picturesque is” (quoted in Buzard 192). Yet James, too, was well aware that “the picturesque is measured by its hostility to our modern notions of convenience” (quoted in Buzard 196).

“the abomination of all nations”: italian views of italy If foreigners both condemned Italy for its difference from the rest of Europe and praised it for its lack of modernity, what were the views of Italians themselves? Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, Italians had developed a keen awareness of the massive shift in geopolitical power and cultural prestige taking place around them. The evolution of their relations with the French during this period is particularly illuminating. As Françoise Waquet notes in her study of the “imperfect dialogue” between French and Italian intellectuals: The relationship between French and Italian culture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cannot be understood without taking

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into account the phenomenon of amplification through which the unequal positions of the two cultures were accentuated. The French, sustained by formidable self-confidence, exalted and placed themselves at the head of civilization; the Italians, assailed by anxiety and doubt, depreciated and weakened themselves.13

A century and more of French, English, and other denigrations of Italy and the Italians thus took their toll on Italian perceptions of themselves. Although the Italians continued to label these foreign peoples barbarians, that attitude, based on the recollection of past glories, could not hide the fact that Italy was no longer the center of civilization but, rather, as Montesquieu put it, a “corner of the world” (Romano, “Storia economica” 1919; cf. also Venturi, “Italia” 1025–30).14 In 1670 a Florentine diplomat in Paris had no doubt that the tables had been turned: “the arts [le belle arti] have crossed the Alps and have gone to settle in those lands that we used to call barbaric, but which are now the most refined” (Waquet, Le modèle français et l’Italie savante 361). Four decades later a Parmesan diplomat in Madrid took an even darker view, writing that “the effeminacy of our nation has reached

13. Le modèle français et l’Italie savante 389. See Waquet’s further comments in “Penser l’histoire inter-culturelle,” especially 9. 14. Already in 1535, a Spaniard put his finger on the contradiction inherent in the Italian claim to superiority, observing that the Italians’ description of others as barbarians flies in the face of the fact that they themselves are “now plundered, in turns, by the Spaniards, the French, the Germans” (cf. Vivanti, “Storia politica” 346–47). As Giulio Bollati has argued, the awareness of this contradiction on the part of the Italians resulted in a form of schizophrenia, or “dissociation” between objective conditions and subjective representation that constituted an enduring “complex” in the Italian national consciousness. He writes, “Classical civilization had expressed an ethnocentrism of enormous historical proportions with the establishment of a neat separation between those that belonged to the Greco-Latin area and the dubious humanity that remained outside of it, the ‘barbarians.’ Once this legacy was bequeathed to Italian culture after the fall of the Empire, this form of self-privileging perpetuated itself over time, heedless of the repeated refutation of historical facts. The primacy of a classical heritage . . . , the privilege of belonging to the nucleus of ‘civilization,’ not only flew in the face of the evidence of Italy’s decadence but in the immensity of the fall found the confirmation of its very height, in the magnitude of the calamity found the sign of election and the legitimation of pride. A form of dissociation [occurred] . . . particularly acute in the vortex of the most dramatic identity crises: during invasions, or when the second fall took place in the sixteenth century—the crisis of ‘Italian liberty’—once again the fault of ‘barbarians.’ Today the extreme effects of this pathological form of Italian consciousness still survive. . . . In the simultaneity of primacy and decadence, of an objective inferiority overcompensated by a sense of invincible superiority, one of the most characteristic and stable schemes of all Italian history is established” (“Italiano” 956).

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such a level of filthy sloth that we are today the abomination of all nations” (quoted in Venturi, “Italia” 1007).15 In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, however, the situation changed. As Franco Venturi notes, the 1730s mark the “low point of the political fragmentation, economic depression and intellectual disillusionment in Italy,” but are also the moment when the political, economic, and intellectual situation in Italy begins to improve (Settecento riformatore 3). By midcentury, Italian intellectuals “shared a strong sense of rejoining the intellectual community in Europe, after a period of isolation” (Woolf, History of Italy 81). Yet this very reconnection with the mainstream of European civilization, this reconceptualization of Italy’s place in the European community, “implied a recognition of Italian backwardness.” As Ludovico Muratori wrote in 1749, “If one compares Italy to France, England, Flanders, Holland and some German lands, a good part of Italy remains inferior in industry and trade to those countries beyond the mountains” (quoted in Woolf, History of Italy 81–82). Nor was Italy’s inferiority only economic. In politics it remained the pawn of European diplomacy (Woolf, History of Italy 29–42), and it was only through music that Italians continued to exercise a dominant influence in European culture. One of the key aspects of the national consciousness that developed in Italy in the century before unification was the necessity of confronting its inferiority vis-à-vis western Europe, both as it was expressed in foreign denunciations and as it manifested itself in the political, economic, and cultural domains more generally. As Rosario Romeo notes, “an exasperated will to vindicate the nation’s dignity” was “one of the most resonant chords of Risorgimento feeling and thought, common to men of extremely diverse political orientations” (Piemonte 74). In the words of Giulio Bollati, the Italians of the Risorgimento harbored “a permanent suspicion of calumny, fostered by the sense of frustration and revenge at seeing political servitude, miserable living conditions, and southern variations of social customs seen by peoples of the north . . . as indecent symptoms of decadence and barbarism” (“Italiano” 963). Whether or not in direct response to foreign calumny, Italian representations of Italy tended to be written from a comparative and often compet-

15. The same diplomat wrote six years later that “this is a miserable and lazy nation, that deserves to be treated like a slave and covered with infamy and misfortune” (Venturi, “Italia” 1007). See as well the catalog of lamentations from the pen of Ludovico Muratori in the same decades (i.e., “noi miseri italiani”) in Waquet, Le modèle français et l’Italie savante 332 n. 131.

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itive perspective. Some writers laid claim to one form or another of Italian primacy.16 In the most famous formulation of this position, Vincenzo Gioberti’s Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians (Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, 1843), Italy’s privileged position as birthplace and home to Catholicism made it supreme. Both England and France might possess “glory, riches, power,” but the Christian and Mediterranean civilization of Italy retained its spiritual dignity.17 Another strategy was to argue that Italy was, either in toto or in part, economically and culturally on par with the most advanced nations of Europe. Three years after the publication of Gioberti’s text, Giuseppe Ricciardi began his call to arms for Italian independence by declaring that the sciences, arts, and letters were as advanced in Italy as they were “on the other side of the Alps, and certainly much better than in Portugal, in Spain, and in many countries of northern and eastern Europe” (Conforti all’Italia 1). But throughout the century before unification, and especially in the decades leading up to 1860, the dominant emphasis was nevertheless on Italy’s need to rise to the economic and cultural levels attained by western Europe.18 The problem of political independence could itself be posed in comparative terms.As Cesare Balbo noted in response to Gioberti, “before attaining primacy we would like to attain parity; and . . . the first form of parity with independent nations is independence” (quoted in Romeo, Piemonte 73). In the dozen years leading up to unification in particular, as the Moderate political tendency asserted its leadership over the national movement, Italian nationalism assumed what could be termed a more Eurocentric, imitative cast. According to one historian, the Moderates aimed “to raise Italy to the level of the other European nations by a rapid assimilation of the most vital elements in their culture and political institutions” (Ruggiero 299). As the Moderate leader Camillo Cavour stated in 1848: “We are preparing ourselves for a new life, with the assiduous examination of events taking place in countries that are most advanced in the ways of civilization, with close attention to the great lessons proclaimed from the stages of England and France” (quoted in De Francesco 317–18). Notwithstanding Italian claims to parity, if not primacy, it would not be the Mediterranean models that prevailed in the making of modern Italy but rather those of western Europe. 16. On the idea of an Italian primacy before Gioberti, see Natali. On this problem more generally, see Bollati’s classic essay cited above, “Italiano.” 17. I will return to Gioberti in Chapter 3 to discuss his representation of the south in this text. 18. On this Europeanism, see Salvatorelli, Pensiero e azione 123–24, and La Salvia, “Moderatismo” 177; with respect to the Lombards, see Greenfield 150, 203.

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As we shall see later in this study, this pressure to conform mounted in the middle of the nineteenth century, helping to split Italy into two parts, a European north and a south that deviated from the European model.

the empire of climate Let us now turn to a set of texts in which Italy as a whole is cast as southern, paying special attention to a key aspect of the north-south distinction, the discourse of climate. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the discourse of climate occupied an important place in European social thought and helped to consolidate the distinction between north and south. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) constitutes the most influential formulation of the view that climate has a determinant role in human society, helping to establish the framework for climatological thinking in modern European culture. Montesquieu was by no means the first to emphasize the influence of climate on culture. First formulated in the writings of Hippocrates, the idea that climate affects society was revived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by thinkers in England and France, most notably Jean Bodin.19 But it was finally Montesquieu’s famous formulation of the influence of climate on social customs and forms of government in books 14–17 of The Spirit of the Laws that gave this view wider currency. Despite the criticisms it drew from Helvétius, Voltaire, and others, well into the next century the discourse of climate associated with the name of Montesquieu would retain considerable force.20 If, as J. W. Johnson notes, “the advent of nineteenth-century pragmatism and scientific empiricism did much to diminish the dignity of classic ideas of climatic influence on men and nations,” it did not, however, succeed in “annihilating it.”21

19. For discussions of the antecedents to Montesquieu’s theory of climates, see Ehrard 691–717; Mercier; Shackleton, “Evolution of Montesquieu’s Theory of Climate”; and, with reference to Bodin in particular, Fournol 117–73. Pinna and Johnson offer more general surveys of climate theory from antiquity through the eighteenth century. 20. On the criticisms of Montesquieu, see Abbattista, Benrekassa, Ehrard 722–24, Merquiol 139–41, Hervé 345. 21. “Of Differing Ages and Climes” 480. In Ernest Renan’s 1855 Histoire, for example, the pitiless sun of the Orient was one of the factors behind the inferiority of the Semites with respect to the Indo-Europeans living in temperate zones (see Bernal 345). Cesare Lombroso, on the other hand, seriously questioned the influence of climate with respect to historical and cultural factors in his 1871 L’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore (White Man and Colored Man) 83–118. In the same decades, however, climate was being redeployed in the context of imperialism to assert the link between “races” and “places” (see Stepan). On the uses of the “moral discourse of

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The specific aspects of The Spirit of the Laws I wish to explore here relate to the role played by climate in the conceptualization of European identity and Italy’s place within it. It has been noted that Montesquieu’s writings, and The Spirit of the Laws in particular, make an important contribution to the definition of Europe “as a geographical, cultural, political, and intellectual entity with its own history and its own distinctive features” (Yapp 147; Chabod, Storia dell’idea d’Europa 99–106). In The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu elaborates a vision of European identity and superiority through an extended set of contrasts between Europe and the rest of the world. The opposition between Europe and Asia is fundamental, and Montesquieu’s discussion of climate in books 14–17 serves to establish a natural basis for that opposition. As he succinctly puts it at the end of book 17, climate “is the major reason for the weakness of Asia and the strength of Europe, for the liberty of Europe and the servitude of Asia” (280).22 The stakes in this classic discussion of climate are thus nothing less than the identity and superiority of Europe (see Ehrard 722). How specifically does climate account for the superiority of Europe over Asia? How does the difference between northern and southern climates figure in Montesquieu’s discussion? What role does Italy play in the articulation of these various oppositions? Montesquieu outlines the basic effects of climate on human society at the beginning of book 14, in a chapter titled “How much men differ in the various climates.” He begins with the basics: cold and hot air affect bodies in different ways. Cold air increases the strength of what he calls “the body’s surface fibers,” hot air decreases it (231). The result, he writes, is that “men are more vigorous in cold climates,” and “this greater strength should produce many effects: for example, more confidence in oneself, that is, more courage; better knowledge of one’s superiority” (231, 232). Different climates, indeed, “make very different characters” (232). Toward the end of the chapter he broadly distinguishes between two types: “In northern climates, you shall find peoples who have few vices, a sufficient number of virtues, and a lot of frankness and sincerity. Draw near the southern countries, and you will think you have left morality itself far behind: the liveliest passions proliferate crimes; each person seeks to take advantage of everyone else in ways that favor these same passions” (234). In subseclimate” more generally in the nineteenth century, see Livingstone, “Moral Discourse of Climate.” The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson offer a striking example of how the discourse of climate was creatively reelaborated in the mid-1800s, as Eduardo Cadava shows in his Emerson and the Climates of History. 22. On the discourse of the “natural” in relation to European liberty and Asiatic despotism in The Spirit of the Laws, see Courtois 310–16.

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quent chapters he will identify other features that distinguish northerners from southerners, emphasizing in particular the contrast between industriousness and laziness, love of freedom and an inclination toward servitude. The key differences between northerners and southerners, and the moral superiority of the former over the latter, however, are clearly established by the end of the first chapter. The first aspect of Montesquieu’s opening discussion to bear in mind is that no mention has been made thus far of the distinction between Europe and Asia. The discussion is cast, instead, in terms of north and south. Equally important, the geographical dimensions of this discussion are not global but intra-European. Most of the opening chapter is couched in the general terms of cold and hot countries, northern and southern countries, northern peoples and southern peoples. Spain is the first example of a southern country, briefly cited in a footnote (232). Montesquieu singles out England and Italy, however, to exemplify the different ways people behave in cold and hot countries: In cold countries, one will have little sensitivity to pleasures; one will have more of it in temperate countries; in hot countries, sensitivity will be extreme. . . . I have seen operas in England and Italy; they are the same plays with the same actors: but the same music produces such different effects in the people of the two nations that it seems inconceivable, the one so calm and the other so transported. (233)

It is through this example that Montesquieu situates the contrast in intraEuropean terms, and through this example that he marks Italy as a southern country. In the following two chapters we find a major shift of perspective. The next chapter takes “peoples of the south” as its subject, citing “Indians” as its example, a people Montesquieu describes as “by nature without courage” (234). The climate of the Indies is contrasted with “the European climate.” The contrast within Europe has been replaced by the contrast between Europe and a southern country, Europe now serving as the northern term of the opposition. In Montesquieu’s next chapter, we find a second shift. He now addresses the character of “the peoples of the East” (235). The subject has changed, but only nominally, as the “laziness of spirit” of the eastern peoples is clearly linked to the laziness of the southerners mentioned at the end of the opening chapter. A double transposition has taken place: the opening opposition within Europe has been replaced by an opposition between Europe and another part of the world defined first as south and then east. And the north-south opposition has been transposed into an opposition between Europe and other parts of the world. Montesquieu will shift back and

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Imagining the South, c. 1750–1850

forth between these geographical frameworks in these and other books in The Spirit of the Laws, alternately stressing the differences within Europe and the differences between Europe and the rest of the world.23 Italy in all this occupies an ambiguous position. It is certainly part of Europe. But being, along with Spain, one of the main components of southern Europe, it has affinities with Asia. The southern qualities that it exemplified in the opening chapter also were associated with Asia. In a few other places, the link to Asia is made explicit. In the seventh chapter of book 14, for example, Montesquieu writes that monasticism “was born in the hot eastern countries” (237). Further, “In Asia the number of dervishes, or monks, seems to increase with the heat of the climate; the Indies, where it is extremely hot, are full of them; one finds the same difference in Europe.” The rest of the chapter attacks the political and religious institutions of southern Europe (237). Book 11, which contains a noted discussion of the doctrine of the separation of powers and an encomium of the constitution of England, creates an even more explicit link between Italy and Asia. Here Montesquieu uses the example of Turkey, where “an atrocious despotism reigns,” to describe what is wrong with the Italian republics (157). In most kingdoms in Europe, the government is moderate because the prince exercises only two of the three powers, the legislative and executive, leaving judicial matters to the people. In Italy, as in Turkey, “the three powers are united. . . . Thus, in order to maintain itself, the government needs means as violent as in the government of the Turks.” Montesquieu adds that the exercise of power in the Italian republics “is not precisely like the despotism of Asia,” yet what he has done, in effect, is to describe the governance of a European country on the model of Asiatic despotism (158).24 In sum, the theory of climate in Montesquieu serves to establish the in-

23. One of the most sharply defined formulations of the north-south division within Europe appears in book 21: “There is a kind of balance in Europe between the nations of the South and those of the North. The first have all sorts of the comforts of life and few needs; the second have many needs and few of the comforts of life. To the former, nature has given much, and they ask but little of it; to the others nature gives little, and they ask much of it. Equilibrium is maintained by the laziness it has given to the southern nations and by the industry and activity it has given to those of the north” (355). 24. Domenico Felice stresses that this depiction of the Venetian state, appearing as it does in the context of a noted discussion of the separation of powers, played no small role in further tarnishing the image of Venice in the minds of contemporaries (78–79). On Montesquieu’s depiction of the political institutions of Italy, see also Desgraves.

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trinsic superiority of Europe over the rest of the world, Asia in particular. At the same time, it provides the basis for Montesquieu’s assertions of the superiority of one part of Europe over another. Strikingly, this intra-European division is the point of departure and conceptual basis for articulating the much more noted division between Europe and Asia. Within this overlapping set of oppositions between Europe and Asia, northern and southern Europe, Italy occupies a liminal position. As part of southern Europe, it belongs to Europe yet has affinities with Europe’s Other. Italy thus marks the part of Europe that deviates from the models of civilization embodied, above all, by England but by Holland and France as well.

southern man and northern man in bonstetten and gioia After the appearance of The Spirit of the Laws, the theory of climate circulated widely and helped to provide the conceptual framework for thinking about north and south in European culture between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.25 In the remainder of this chapter I consider a set of texts from the mid-1820s that focus on the specific question of Italy’s southernness. The first few decades of the nineteenth century constitute a particularly intense phase in the elaboration of an imaginative geography of north and south in European culture. Inspired in part by the reflections of Madame de Stäel, north and south were theorized, discussed, and represented as never before.26 And for Stäel and many others, Italy was the particular prism through which they imagined the south. Charles-Victor de Bonstetten’s L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord,

25. Montesquieu’s theory of climate was enthusiastically received by some (most notably Rousseau and Herder) and, as mentioned above, criticized by others. Not surprisingly, some of his Italian critics were sensitive to the special implications of his theory for their country. In his letter “On the Influence of Climates on Human Societies” published in 1758, the Tuscan Vincenzio Martinelli contested Montesquieu’s proposition that “northern peoples are most fit for conquest and above all most suited to freedom” (Bonora 886). In the first place, he argued, the vaunted Germans were barbarians; secondly, Greece and Italy, “where the weather is so hot,” were the very places where political freedom first flourished (Bonora 889). In conclusion, he writes, “education much more than climate determines the thought and action of men” (Bonora 889). Others steered a middle course, recognizing climate’s influence as one among many. As Francesco Algarotti wrote, “both physical and moral causes influence the character and spirit of nations” (240). 26. The distinction between north and south is central to De la littérature (1800), Corinne (1807), and De l’Allemagne (1813). On this aspect of Stäel’s thought, see Blaeschke lx–lxiv; Larg 201–7; Pellandra 130–31.

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Imagining the South, c. 1750–1850

ou l’influence du climat is the clearest expression of the convergent interests in climate and in the distinction between north and south during this period. It is also one of the most sustained discussions of Italy as a southern country. Born in Berne in 1745 and educated in Geneva, Bonstetten was a childhood friend of Madame de Stäel and a regular member of her circle at Coppet.27 Although published in 1824, much of The Man of the South and Man of the North had in fact been written a dozen years earlier with Staël’s encouragement.28 If the book’s comparative framework of south and north is indebted to Staël, the emphasis on the influence of climate inevitably harks back to Montesquieu. In the opening pages, Bonstetten mentions the author of The Spirit of the Laws but also marks his distance from him. “The direct influence of climate on man has, perhaps, been exaggerated by Montesquieu,” he writes at the beginning of chapter 1 (21; 28).29 In the introduction he similarly notes that “climate is but one of the causes which influence man” (9; 15). Bonstetten is clearly aware of the objections previously lodged against Montesquieu’s theory and of the risks of appearing a geographical determinist. He nevertheless appears to want to have it both ways, to give climate a determining role yet to free himself of the obligation of specifying the nature of its influence. Soon enough it becomes clear that his aim is not to provide a focused investigation into the connection between climate and character but rather to construct an overarching sociocultural dichotomy between the man of the north and south (Rosso, Illuminismo 223). Taking the Alps as the border between the two zones, he outlines a schematic series of contrasts that can be summed up thus:

man of the north

man of the south

lives in a monotonous environment reason, reflection industry lives indoors

lives in an abundant and varied environment imagination, feeling effortless subsistence off the earth lives outdoors

27. Herold provides a biographical sketch of Bonstetten, with specific reference to his relation to Staël, in Mistress to an Age (291–93). See Howald for a more recent, book-length treatment of his life and work. 28. After Stael’s departure from Coppet in May 1812, Bonstetten wrote in a letter: “I have written a little work on the influence of climate on men, and in the preface I have put the description of the south compared to the north that Mme. de Staël often encouraged me to do” (quoted in Pellegrini 40). 29. I cite from the English translation, titled The Man of the North and the Man of the South, and from the 1826 Swiss edition. Here and in further citations, references to these editions appear respectively in parentheses.

Italy as Europe’s South fixed routines planning banks social opinion can be educated/reformed

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no fixed routines no thought for future no banks egotism cannot be educated/reformed

Bonstetten has done little more than provide a catalog of the commonplaces about north and south that had been circulating in European culture for about a century. His stated preference is for a balance between the two climates and forms of human civilization, giving priority to neither (see Rosso, Illuminismo 216–17). The ideal situation is when the two forms coexist, and this is conveniently the case with Bonstetten’s beloved France: “Situated between the glowing sky of the South and the dreamy regions of the North, France seems to present a happy fusion of the two ways of living in these two climates” (44; 54). Yet even within the context of such a balance, the existence of an overarching hierarchy between civilized and natural man is unmistakable. If, as he suggests, both forms of civilization are necessary, Italy’s particular role in this international division is also clear: to play southern nature to northern civilization, the unquestioned subject of modernity. At the same time, the temporal dimension is self-evident. Being more natural, Italians also live in the past. The hierarchical implications of his balance sheet, no doubt, were what caught the attention of readers in the United States a few decades later: in 1864 a Yankee editor published Bonstetten’s treatise as The Man of the North, and the Man of the South, just as the North asserted its supremacy over the South in the Civil War. Melchiorre Gioia published his “Reflections” on Bonstetten’s text in September 1825 in the Annali universali di statistica, “the most important journal of the liberal and rationalist-oriented Lombard intelligentsia.”30 Considered the leading Italian economist of his day, Gioia was also a statistician, entrepreneur, and patriot.31 As an economist and statistician, he was committed to promoting and measuring the civic and economic progress of his native Lombardy; as an entrepreneur he was committed to industry and private enterprise; and as a patriot he was devoted to Italy. He was, in short, 30. Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood 24. In Chapter 3 I shall discuss the significance of the Annali universali di statistica in relation to the article on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys that Carlo Cattaneo published there. 31. Melchiorre Gioia contains a wide-ranging set of discussions of his life and work. In his introduction to the volume, Capra emphasizes Gioia’s position at the vanguard of the bourgeois revolution in Italy (21–24). Patriarca dedicates considerable attention to Gioia in relation to statistics and nation building in Numbers and Nationhood. More briefly, see Lanaro, “Élites settentrionali” 28–29.

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Imagining the South, c. 1750–1850

committed to the idea of Italy as a modern bourgeois nation, writing for a journal that aimed at affirming the common links between Italy and the rest of Europe.32 For Gioia, it was therefore imperative “to destroy the unfavorable comparison that Bonstetten establishes . . . between Italy and other nations” (98) and, more generally, to dismantle Bonstetten’s stark contrast between southern and northern man, which he sums up at the outset in the following terms: “The man of the south is the little fly that lives from day to day gathering the nectar from the flowers strewn across the land he inhabits; the man of the north is the diligent bee who preserves what he has gathered in the harvest season” (86).33 Gioia takes on Bonstetten from a number of different angles. His main point is that the basic conditions of life are the same on both sides of the Alps. In both the north and south, city dwellers work for a wage in order to feed themselves; “artisans in all countries work with the same materials, the same forms and more or less the same tools. . . . A man who hammers a leaf of gold or silver for twelve hours a day is a mole in both the north and south” (88). In other cases Gioia acknowledges certain differences described by Bonstetten but challenges the climatological explanation with a sociohistorical one: “The sparseness of the churches in the north,” Gioia writes, “is not to be attributed to climate but to the ideas introduced by the reforms of Luther and Calvin. Before that epoch the same pomp, splendor, and ceremony reigned in churches of both the north and south” (94). Finally for our purposes, it is important to note that while Gioia’s is a holistic response that defends the integrity, and we might well add, modernity, of Italy as a whole, on a number of occasions he also counters Bonstetten by adopting a more differentiated perspective. He challenges certain of Bonstetten’s statements about “Italy” by pointing out that they are generalizations, applicable only to certain parts of the country. In response to Bonstetten’s observations that Italians do not make provisions for the future, Gioia writes: “In brief, the author attributes to all of Italy a custom which he observed in the noble houses of Rome and Naples” (91; emphasis in original). This happens again when Gioia refutes Bonstetten’s claims about the lack of banks in Italy by vaunting the success of banks in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia (92). He proudly observes that the banks in Mi-

32. In his study of the Annali, La Salvia situates Gioia’s response to Bonstetten within this broader tendency (Giornalismo lombardo 167–69). Modona goes a step further, arguing that Gioia’s response to Bonstetten is entirely motivated—and vitiated—by patriotic fervor (101). 33. I cite from the edition in Gioia’s Opere minori, published in 1834.

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lan are so crowded with people who want to deposit their money that some must return the next day. In contrast to his overarching patriotic emphasis on commonality, here he associates northern Italy with the north. At issue in both the examples cited are particular forms of social life and behavior associated more with modern bourgeois civilization. He thereby acknowledges within the traditional north-south framework that southern Italy is, in certain respects, more “southern.” But this is by no means the main thrust of Gioia’s argument. His primary concern is to invalidate and dismantle the opposition between north and south itself. His is a patriotic response to a northern characterization of Italy as southern. Indeed, much of his text is taken up with one of the standard forms of patriotic defense, a catalog of egregious Italian writers and thinkers, aimed at disproving Bonstetten’s claim that Italians lack a strong rational, critical faculty.34 In sum, Gioia lays claim to the commonality between the societies on the north and south sides of the Alps, asserting the lack of significant differences in the forms and levels of civilization between northern man and southern man. In his view, Italians and other Europeans are clearly akin in their ways of experiencing the conditions of the modern world.

the triumph of the north in leopardi’s discorso Melchiorre Gioia had little patience for musings about the sociocultural differences between north and south and the southern character of the Italians. In the Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians, Giacomo Leopardi addresses a similar set of problems but from a radically different perspective. More than any other Italian thinker perhaps, Giacomo Leopardi reflected upon the notion of southernness and upon Italy’s condition as a southern country. His work is the fruit of almost a century of thinking about climate in Italian and European culture more generally, and constitutes the last great extended reflection on Italy as a southern country. The monumental book of meditations that Leopardi composed between 1817 and 1832, Lo Zibaldone di Pensieri, contains frequent references both to climate and to the distinction between north and south, usually in relation to one another (Placanica, Leopardi e il Mezzogiorno 61). His most focused dis34. One critic writing for the Florentine Antologia in March 1826 in fact took issue with Gioia’s refutation of Bonstetten’s claims to northern superiority: “Our patriotism, which rightly takes pride in our merits, also obliges us to recognize our defects and the merits of other peoples, for our progress depends on this very impartiality” (“Riflessioni” 126).

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Imagining the South, c. 1750–1850

cussion of these issues appears, however, in his Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians, written between 1824 and 1827, at the midpoint of his elaboration of the Zibaldone.35 Leopardi’s analyses of Italy as a southern country in the Discourse and the Zibaldone are closely interwoven (Bellucci, “Note in margine al Discorso” 83–87; Placanica, Leopardi e il Mezzogiorno 152). The Discourse, however, allows us best to see the question of southernness under the particular pressure of imagining Italy in the context of modern Europe.36 In it Leopardi revisits some of the commonplaces regarding Italy as a southern country and gives them an original twist. He begins his reflections on the national character of the Italians by calling attention to the strength of foreigners’ interest in Italy. Italy, he writes in the opening pages, “has become the object of universal curiosity and travel, much more than any time before, and more than any other country” (47). He thus inscribes his text in a tradition of Italian responses to foreign representations of Italy. But he turns that tradition on its head, signaling the reversal of perspective that will inform his view of the division between north and south. Unlike Gioia and many other contemporary commentators, Leopardi considers these foreign portraits of Italy, if anything, too flattering (48). Ever since the publication of Corinne, he writes, more favorable views of Italy have circulated in Europe, views “that I daresay exceed our merits, and that in many areas are contrary to the truth” (48). Leopardi’s reading of Corinne had a massive influence on the development of his thought, and it is not surprising that Corinne is the one text by a foreigner that Leopardi mentions in the Discourse.37 It has been argued in fact that “an ensemble of themes and motifs in the Discourse” are derived from Staël’s novel (Rigoni 158; Damiani, “Leopardi e Madame de Staël” 559). One of these themes is the proposition that Italy lacks “society,” but 35. On the problem of dating the text and the circumstances of its composition, see Dondero 13–67 and Savarese 209–32. Dondero argues for 1824 as the date of composition, while Savarese dates at least part of the composition to 1826–27. 36. This concern with Italy vis-à-vis Europe no doubt explains the unprecedented interest in the text during the 1990s in Italy, both among Leopardi scholars and a broader readership. Originally published in 1906, the Discourse was of interest only to a few specialists until the late 1980s. Since then at least five editions have appeared: Bellucci (1988), Placanica (1989), Moncagatta (1991), Ferrucci (1993), and Rigoni (1998). During the second half of 2000 a popular edition of the Discourse, titled “Sui costumi degli italiani,” was on sale at newsstands in Italy. My analysis is informed by the introductions by Bellucci, Placanica, and Rigoni, and by the chapters by Savarese in Eremita osservatore 209–50. Ezio Raimondi also dedicates a chapter to the Discourse in his Letteratura e identità nazionale 30–66. I cite from the Rigoni edition. 37. See Damiani, “Leopardi e Madame de Staël”; Ravasi.

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Leopardi’s vision of north and south, both here and in the Zibaldone, clearly bears the imprint of Staël’s distinction between northern and southern peoples as well (see Ravasi 90–99). Leopardi, however, attributes a different significance to this opposition. Let us briefly review Leopardi’s argument about the nature of society, which occupies the main body of the Discourse, before turning to his discussion of north and south in its conclusion. From the outset Leopardi stresses that the Italian nation is in many respects “at about the same level as any of the more civil and educated nations of Europe and America” (55–56). Ever since the French Revolution, he writes, “the Italians have been, in terms of their moral world view, as philosophical, reasonable, and geometrical as the French or any other nation” (55). There is, however, a major difference. In contrast to the more advanced nations of Europe and America, in Italy there is no “society.” To wit, Italy lacks what Leopardi calls “intimate society”: communal association and exchange, social intercourse and involvement, “public opinion.” In the case of the Italians, this lack produces disastrous effects (64–65). The problem for Leopardi is the following. The bourgeoisie in all the civil nations of Europe and America have lost their illusions. Life is meaningless. Italians share this basic world view with others. But in the other nations “society” helps them to forget the ultimate futility of existence. It helps them to think about the future, to care about themselves and each other. It is not much, Leopardi stresses, but in the modern era it is all we have. Italians, on the other hand, lack both the illusions of former times and the social distractions of the present. They are therefore exceptionally cynical, pessimistic, cruel, egotistical. But that is not all. A second difference compounds the problem and aggravates this lack of society. This second problem is at the center of his concluding remarks. He writes: Up to this point we have considered the lack of society among Italians. But the effects we have just described are not to be attributed to this alone. Another cause is the nature of the climate and of the national character that depends upon and results from it. However astonishing and paradoxical it may seem, it is nevertheless true that no individual or people is so cold, indifferent, and insensitive . . . as those who are by nature most vivacious, sensitive, and warm. (79)

It is a question of climate and national character, then, of northern and southern man, but at first glance, Leopardi’s perspective on it seems paradoxical indeed. For the naturally vivacious, sensitive, warm Italians, the combined lack of illusions and society is even more damaging than it would be for the

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Imagining the South, c. 1750–1850

Germans, English, and French. For just as “northern peoples are less heated in their illusions, so they are less chilly in their disillusionment” (79). For the Italians, instead, “the resulting indifference is complete, ingrown, constant; their inactivity, if one can say it, is most effective, their indifference consummate, their coldness is true ice” (79). Conversely, just as the hot Italians are the coldest, the cold northerners are today “the most animated, the most effectively imaginative, the most mobile and governed by illusions, the most sentimental in both character and behavior, the most poetic both in their actions and life and in their writings and literature” (81). This, he writes, “is the factual truth that leaps to our attention, however singular and monstrous it may seem” (81). Leopardi has adopted the traditional distinction between northerners and southerners but in a sense turned it upside down. What enables this paradoxical perspective is a historical view of the problem, which he makes explicit in the concluding pages. Up to this point Leopardi has focused on the distinction between northern and southern peoples, and thus on the contrast between the Italians on the one hand and the English, French, and Germans on the other. He now insinuates another distinction between ancient and modern, which he fuses to the former. Together they provide the conceptual framework for his final observations on the relation between Italy and the rest of Europe: In ancient times the southern peoples surpassed all others in their imaginative capacities and therefore in every endeavor; in modern times the northern peoples have surpassed by far the southern because of the same imaginative capacities. The reason for this is that in ancient times the actual state of things and of cultured opinion favored the imagination to the same extent that in modern times it goes against it. And thus in effect the imagination of the southern peoples was so much more active than that of the northern peoples, just as the opposite is true today—for the chill of reality has a much more powerful effect on imaginations and characters that are warmer and more spirited. And certainly northern nations, and especially the masses, are today more comparable and similar to the ancient nations than the southern nations, and especially the masses. Thus it is certain that if one had to choose from amongst the climates and natural character of peoples an image for antiquity one would certainly choose the southern peoples, and vice versa the northern peoples for an image of the modern. (82–83)

It is to this superior imaginative capacity, finally, that is to be attributed “the decisive and obvious present superiority of the northern nations over the southern, in politics, in literature, and in all else.” In sum, “it appears

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that the north’s time has come” (sembra che il tempo del settentrione sia venuto). This passage, and the Discourse as a whole, constitutes the most sustained and resounding affirmation of the north and thus of modern European civilization in Leopardi’s oeuvre. By the same token, the Discourse offers one of Leopardi’s most scathing critiques of the contemporary Italians, and of “southern peoples” more broadly, within the framework of modernity. Yet the final footnote in his text, significantly attached to the phrase “it appears that the north’s time has come,” suggests that the victory of the north may be qualified significantly. In this note he elaborates further on the idea that peoples with superior imaginations are superior to other peoples in every other domain of human activity. The extraordinary fact about the northern peoples today is that they “preserve the faculty of the imagination in the midst of an increasingly civilized society” (84). He concludes, however, not by emphasizing the greatness of the modern north but of the ancient south: “The union of civilization with imagination is the condition of the ancients, and there is no need to say what greatness this produced.” This comment evokes the perspective of the Zibaldone, where the basic terms—northern and southern, modern and ancient—are invested with the same meaning but where the overarching valorization of the ancient south over the modern north is apparent.38 Modern northerners are superior today because their condition most closely resembles that of the ancient southerners, but, as we read in numerous passages of the Zibaldone, it is still the ancient south that constitutes mankind’s supreme moment of happiness and greatness. Reading the Discourse in relation to the Zibaldone thus helps us to see that for Leopardi the victory of the north and modern civilization is somewhat more hollow than it might seem at first.39 This is the dimension of his thought that will develop during the 1830s, when, as I shall argue in Chapter 3, Leopardi valorizes the south in a new way and articulates its critical relation to modernity in his important late poem, “La ginestra.” It would be hard to find two readings of Italy’s relation to modernity and Europe that contrast more dramatically than those of Gioia and Leopardi. Needless to say, Gioia’s “patriotic” response to Bonstetten was more in line 38. See, for example, the passage in which Leopardi speaks of “the true and innate preeminence of the southern nature over the northern” (Zibaldone 1026–27, 10 May 1821). 39. Savarese characterizes the concluding pages of the Discourse as a “provisional and apparent expression of admiration for the northern nations” (Eremita osservatore 226; my emphasis). See also Placanica, Leopardi e il Mezzogiorno 48–49, 89–90; and Dondero 76–77.

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with the views of leading Italian liberals who sought to emphasize their country’s common links to the progress taking place on the rest of the continent. A keen concern with being typed as a southern country—and thus with the notion that Italy’s southern climate made it unsuitable for proper modernity—generally characterized the attitudes of liberal elites for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. In 1843 Cesare Balbo attacked the idea that Italy’s problems were “the irremediable fault of the soft climate, of the soft races” (Speranze d’Italia 138). Similarly, in an 1877 essay dedicated to the topic of foreign prejudices about Italy, Pasquale Villari bitterly rehearsed the standard view that “‘the Latin peoples are in decline.The warm climate saps the strength of men and renders them incapable of liberty’ (and sometimes they add the compliment: incapable of morality as well)” (Lettere meridionali 229). More than a century and a quarter after The Spirit of the Laws, the Montesquieuan equation between southern climate and lack of liberty and morality continued to circulate and posed a problem for the construction of Italian national identity. Both in the nineteenth century and after, Italy’s Southern Question needs to be construed not only in terms of the country’s internal division but also in terms of its identity as a southern country within Europe. How then did the image of a south within the south develop? What characterized the specific southernness of the Mezzogiorno? These are the questions we shall take up in the following chapter.

2 “L’Europe finit à Naples” Representations of the Mezzogiorno in the Century before Unification

The modern image of the Mezzogiorno forms part of the broader vision of Italy and the south considered in the previous chapter. The two overarching contrasts between nature and society and between a glorious past and a decadent present also structure many representations of the Mezzogiorno. How was the Mezzogiorno seen as different? To begin, it was often thought to possess qualities associated with the whole of Italy but to a greater degree. The south was on the one hand more backward and uncivilized, on the other more natural and picturesque.Writers expressed the contrasts between nature and society and between past and present in even more dramatic terms. Variations on the theme the farther south you go . . . inform many of the texts to be considered throughout this study. In fact this particular vision of geographical extension, away from “Europe,” becomes one of the characteristic features of many representations of the south from the late eighteenth century forward. Southern Italy will be increasingly seen as a liminal zone between European civilization and the world beyond. The French traveler and Napoleonic administrator Augustin Creuzé de Lesser stated this view clearly. In his Voyage en Italie et Sicile of 1806, he wrote that “Europe ends at Naples and ends there quite badly. Calabria, Sicily, all the rest belongs to Africa” (L’Europe finit à Naples et même elle y finit assez mal. La Calabre, la Sicile, tout le reste est de l’Afrique) (96). This observation reflects the emergence of a new geographical mode of conceptualizing southern Italy’s difference with respect to the rest of Europe. And this spatial-geographical perspective is often linked to a new temporal perspective. The farther south one travels, the farther away from the contemporary moment one moves as well. As the French journalist Alfred Maury put it in 1854: 37

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Imagining the South, c. 1750–1850

As one moves down into Italy, from the Alps to the extremity of Calabria, the look of the customs and populations takes you back into the past. In Milan, in Turin, one finds modern society. . . . In Florence it is like the time of the Medicis. . . . In Rome you are immersed in the Middle Ages. . . . In Naples, we reenter the pagan era. . . . Move from there into Puglia, into the principality of Salerno, and the customs present themselves to you with all the naive simplicity of ancient times. (Quoted in Venturi, “Italia” 1401)

This chapter investigates the main imaginative patterns that structure the representation of the south in the century before unification. I begin by considering a set of diverse factors that helped to produce a distinct vision of the south after 1750, providing some background information that will be useful here and elsewhere. Through a reading of Casanova’s memoirs, I then address the power and longevity of traditional modes of representing the south, in particular the description of Naples as “a paradise inhabited by devils,” while also exploring the antecedents of the liminal vision of the south in the letters of Jesuit missionaries of the late 1500s. I then outline the differentiated geography of textual production that structures the representation of the south between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries or, simply put, the crucial role played by western Europeans on the one hand and southern Italians on the other. The main section of the chapter investigates the particular ways in which the tendency to represent southern Italy as alternately backward and picturesque, and as a liminal zone at the edge of Europe, manifests itself in a set of texts written by western Europeans between the 1770s and 1850s. In conclusion I consider how southern Italians themselves contributed to the production of these imaginative patterns, particularly the idea of southern backwardness.

what was different about southern italy? We have seen that the south was an elastic category. All of Italy could be seen as southern, and in those instances where writers distinguished between north and south the boundaries were anything but fixed. During the first half of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon to find Rome and Tuscany positioned in “southern Italy.” In 1844 the Piedmontese Moderate Cesare Balbo wrote that Italy is “naturally and almost irremediably divided into two distinct parts: northern Italy, i.e., the Po river valley as far as the Apennines, and the southern part beyond it” (137). In the same years another Piedmontese Moderate, Giacomo Durando, mapped a similar division in the appendix to his program for independence, Della Nazionalità italiana

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1. Italy, divided into its three regions. Map appended to Giacomo Durando, Della Nazionalità italiana, 1846.

(figure 1), alternately referring to these two areas as upper and lower Italy or as the Padanian and Apennine regions, and in addition delimiting a third insular area comprising Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica (Durando 85–97).1 Over

1. Instead of Padanian, Durando employs the term Eridanian, based on the classical name for the god of the Po River.

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the past two centuries the boundaries of north and south, as well as the names for these two areas, have varied considerably. Another tendency would nevertheless prevail in the national consciousness of Italians: a relatively tight conceptual correspondence between an area variously referred to as il Mezzogiorno, il meridione, l’Italia meridionale, le provincie meridionali, il sud d’Italia, as well as Napoli, and the territory lying within the confines of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.2 Some of the specific historical reasons for the consolidation of this correspondence between the south and the territory of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at midcentury will be examined in more detail in the next three chapters. By way of introduction here, it is important to note that the centuries-old existence of a kingdom in the south provided a unitary conceptual framework in which to imagine and refer to the peoples and places within its confines. The main component of this unity was the Kingdom of Naples. Since the arrival of the Normans in 1130, all the lands of mainland southern Italy, excepting the two papal cities of Benevento and Pontecorvo, had been conjoined in one political unit (Galasso, “Considerazioni” 15). The Kingdom of Naples was quite simply il regno (the kingdom), distinguished both by its size and its monarchical form of government in the otherwise fragmented political geography of the peninsula (Galasso, Regno di Napoli 4).3 After 1734 this unitary political frame of reference acquired more conceptual weight when what had been the Spanish (and briefly Austrian) viceregno for more than two centuries became an independent kingdom with its own resident monarch. As the Neapolitan political economist Antonio Genovesi put it in 1754, “we too have begun to have a fatherland [patria], and to understand what a benefit it is for a nation to have its own prince. Let us now take an interest in the honor of our nation!” (quoted in Croce, Storia del Regno 258). It was not only the kingdom that provided a unitary conceptual framework in which to imagine the inhabitants and lands of southern Italy; it was also the capital city of Naples itself. The inhabitants of mainland southern Italy were frequently referred to as Neapolitans, and there was a tendency toward conceptual fusion between Naples and the south. As Giuseppe Galasso notes with reference to the “slow accumulation of impressions and judgements [through which] the cliché of the Neapolitan” took shape in

2. When Ferdinand of Bourbon was restored to the throne in 1815 after a decade of Napoleonic rule in southern Italy, the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples were joined to form the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys under his rule; see Spagnoletti 11–13. 3. On the history of the term regno di Napoli, see Epifanio.

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modern European culture, the stock representation of the city “does not always significantly distinguish between the city of Naples and Naples understood as the south as a whole. . . . It is nevertheless the city’s traits that prevail over the more generally southern ones” (“Stereotipo” 150; see also Galasso, Regno 1–12). Augusto Placanica similarly notes with reference to the influential perspectives of foreign travelers that “the great city of Naples . . . was far too absorbent: its merits and defects ended up becoming those of the entire Kingdom” (“Capitale” 173).4 One of the reasons for this elision of the capital and the kingdom is that travelers often stopped at Naples; they saw no more of the kingdom than the city and its surrounding area. And this city—the third or fourth most populous in Europe and the most populous in Italy—was frequently represented in superlative, hyperbolic terms.5 Naples presented a bombardment of the senses that for many visitors, from Goethe to Dickens and beyond, was thrilling and overwhelming. As a friend of Goethe’s put it in a letter that Goethe included in his Italian Journey, “Never in my life have I experienced such noise, such crowds of people.”6 Goethe’s friend is effusive about this “place where God sheds His blessings copiously on all the senses” ( 353). Many others will share his enthusiasm, but as we shall see, foreigners, and Italians as well, will more frequently emphasize Naples’s defects than its merits. Here, too, a blurring between Naples and the rest of southern Italy frequently takes place: “the defects of the Neapolitan people strongly affected the evaluation of the social reality of the south more generally” (Placanica, “Stereotipo” 174). There was, then, a close imaginative association between Naples and the mainland south, deriving both from the unitary framework of the kingdom and the amalgamative function of Naples. But what about Sicily? Over the centuries, the sociocultural reality of Sicily was seen as distinct from both the mainland south and Italy as a whole. It was, after all, an island, the largest and most populous in the Mediter-

4. Franco Venturi also notes the equation between the city of Naples and the Neapolitan state: “As all the writers of the eighteenth century rightly stressed, Naples is something more than a metropolis, a dominant city. It is the capital of a kingdom, it is the fulcrum of an especially centralized state, and ends up representing and summing up in itself the state” (“Napoli capitale” 277). 5. The title of Mozzillo’s book, Il giardino dell’iperbole (The Garden of Hyperbole), eloquently expresses this tendency. 6. Italian Journey 353. The letter is from William Tischbein, who painted the noted scene of Goethe in the Campagna. On foreign reactions to the size and density of Naples in the mid-nineteenth century, see Macry, “Rappresentazioni” 9.

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ranean. Moreover, during the first half of the nineteenth century, a strong sense of local identity was cultivated in direct opposition to Naples, especially after 1815 when Sicily lost its autonomy within the framework of the greater Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (see Renda, Storia della Sicilia 1:13–62). Yet this very exchange of names signals the close enmeshment of the histories of Sicily and the mainland south, Sicily and Naples. For most of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries southern Italy had in fact formed part of the Kingdom of Sicily under the Normans, and thereafter the mainland south was variously referred to as “one of the two Sicilies” or “continental Sicily” (Galasso, Regno 1–9), and the inhabitants of both the mainland and the island were collectively labeled Sicilians.7 Given these historical and nominative links, it is hardly surprising that Sicily and the mainland south came to be closely associated in the European imagination, that a confusion between the image of Sicilians and Neapolitans took place (Mozzillo, Napoletano 7). Over the course of this study we will see the particularity of Sicily frequently emphasized. But on many occasions we also will see that Sicily is represented not as a distinct entity but rather as the southernmost part of Italy, the “deep” south, if you will, where the southern characteristics not only of the Mezzogiorno but of Italy as a whole manifest themselves in their most powerful, essential form. If this tendency will be apparent in various texts by foreigners examined here, we will see it even more forcefully expressed in the Italian texts of the 1870s considered at the end of this study. The Sicily of Pasquale Villari, Leopoldo Franchetti, and Giovanni Verga appears, in many respects, to be a thing apart, set off from the rest of the nation. But their texts also leave no doubt that Sicily forms part of a broader framework of southernness. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, two imaginative frameworks underscored the link between the mainland south and Sicily with a special force. The first of these was the idea of Magna Graecia, the Greek civilization that flourished in the mainland south and Sicily between the eighth and fourth centuries b.c.e. The rediscovery of ancient Greece during the second half of the eighteenth century fueled a new interest in the Greek dimension of southern Italy’s history and landscape.8 Johann Winckelmann, whose writings on Greek art in the 1750s and 1760s

7. This was particularly true after the formation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1815. The Two Sicilies also were known as the Sicilies “on this side” and “that side” of the Farum (viz., Messina). 8. For a succinct discussion of the turn to Greece in European culture after 1750, see Turner 1–4.

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provided the main inspiration for the new interest in Hellenism, also played a key role in shifting attention to the Greek cultural legacy in southern Italy.9 In his History of Ancient Art Winckelmann describes how the beauty epitomized by the Greeks increases as one moves down the Italian peninsula. . . . the closer we draw to the climate of Greece, the more beautiful, noble, and vigorous are the forms of the human beings that nature generates. . . . The lower portion of Italy, which enjoys a milder climate than the rest of it, and finding itself very near that part of the sky under which Greece too is located, brings forth men of superb and vigorously designed forms, who appear to have been made, as it were, for the purposes of sculpture. . . . The Neapolitans are more refined and clever than the Romans; the Sicilians are moreso than the Neapolitans; but the Greeks surpass even the Sicilians. (55–56)

This passage not only reveals the importance of climate in Winckelmann’s imaginative geography of Magna Graecia but also shows how the ideal of Greekness serves to give a positive valence to the move southward. At one level, Winckelmann goes against the grain of the emergent model that articulates the move southward, away from Europe, as a form of degradation. Yet on another occasion he interestingly acknowledges the force of the Eurocentric perspective when he observes that “one thing in Naples disappointed me immensely, that is to see ugly, African blood everywhere. And, this does mess up my system a bit” (Lettere italiane 91). Winckelmann thus shows that if the south is ennobled by its proximity to Greece it nevertheless suffers from its proximity to Africa.10 A second conceptual link between the mainland south and Sicily, destined to play an even more important and enduring role in the representation of the south after the mid-eighteenth century, is the presence of volcanoes, Vesuvius and Etna in particular. The notion of a volcanic south is a good example of how the image of the Mezzogiorno participates in a broader conceptual horizon of southernness but with certain distinctive features of its own. The force of nature, which is a commonplace of Italy as a whole, has a special significance in relation to the Mezzogiorno. As the only live volcanoes on, or in Etna’s case near, the continent of Europe, Vesuvius and Etna convey a specifically volcanic inflection to the image of a natural south (see

9. Winckelmann’s 1759 essay “Observations on the Architecture of the Ancient Temples of Girgenti” was particularly important in this regard (Osterkamp, “Immagine della Sicilia” 141). 10. For a discussion of Winckelmann’s experience in Naples, see Leppman 172–85; Franciscis.

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Placanica, “Capitale” 174; Mozzillo, Napoletano 7–8). During the second half of the eighteenth century Europeans became fascinated with volcanoes, and with Vesuvius and Etna in particular, from both a scientific and a more imaginative point of view.11 The interest in Vesuvius increased greatly after the beginning of excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, in 1738 and 1748, respectively.12 Etna would be “discovered” a few decades later.13 From this point forward volcanoes would figure prominently in the representation of the south. To cite one major example, an erupting Vesuvius dominates the setting of the Neapolitan episode of Staël’s Corinne, and it is Naples and Vesuvius that provide Corinne, and Staël herself, with the great revelation of nature’s power. The phenomenon of Vesuvius makes the heart really beat. Usually we are so familiar with external objects that we barely notice their existence and we hardly ever have a new emotion about them in our prosaic countries. But suddenly the amazement which the universe ought to arouse is renewed at the sight of an unknown wonder of creation. Our whole being is moved by nature’s power, from which society’s arrangements have so long distracted us; we feel that the world’s greatest mysteries do not lie in man and that an independent force threatens or protects him according to unfathomable laws. (193–94)14

11. For a broader survey of the development of vulcanology during the second half of the eighteenth century, in which the study of Vesuvius and Etna plays a central role, see Krafft 51–95. 12. Bédarida notes, “Everywhere in Europe, Naples and Vesuvius were à la mode among erudites and scholars, artists, collectors, and naturalists” (“I ‘canti della sirena’ e l’immagine di Napoli” 57). See also Murphy, Causa 183–84, Fusco 766. For a discussion of some of the varying foreign responses to Vesuvius during the eighteenth century, see Chevallier, “Finalité du Vésuve,” as well as her notes to Meyer, Les Tableaux d’Italie 326–32. 13. The German Hermann Von Riedesel and the Scotsman Patrick Brydone published the first modern accounts of an ascent of Mount Etna in 1771 and 1773, respectively (see Di Paola 117 and Farrell 299). Brydone’s account was particularly influential in European literature. On the importance of the discovery of Etna in the pre-Romantic and Romantic context, see also Kanceff, “‘Scoperta’ della Sicilia” 5–9. 14. In her travel journal Staël further observes that while on the slopes of Vesuvius “the memory of the poets, of Milton and of Virgil, is the only thing that diminishes the impression of this spectacle. If only one could see it in its wild state, without having read a thing” (Balayé 120). About the south’s natural force more generally she writes: “I have felt nature here more than anywhere else. There is something potent in the south that speaks to you like a friend, or rouses you like a party” (Balayé 116). On Staël’s view of Vesuvius, see Jaton 94–96.

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Yet while volcanoes provide a conceptual link between the mainland south and Sicily, this passage from Corinne gestures toward the particular importance of Vesuvius. The symbolic function of Vesuvius is in fact related to that of Naples. As noted above, most travelers went no farther than the environs of Naples, where Vesuvius loomed large. Just as Naples was a synecdoche for the south, so Vesuvius was a synecdoche for Naples and the south, underscoring the natural and picturesque connotations of both. While cultural pressures animated the fascination with Vesuvius, so did the activity of the volcano itself: between 1750 and 1861 Vesuvius erupted with extraordinary frequency (almost twice a decade on average).15 The panoramic view of the Gulf of Naples with Vesuvius in the background became one of the great landscape commonplaces in the nineteenth-century European imagination.16 By the middle of the nineteenth century this set of associations was firmly established in European and Italian culture. In the illustration on the masthead of Illustrazione italiana, reproduced on a weekly basis in the 1870s–80s, Vesuvius simultaneously evokes Naples, the south, nature, and the picturesque itself in the magazine’s imaginative geography of the nation.17 The territorial unity of the kingdom, Naples, the cultural memory of Magna Graecia, and volcanoes will therefore inform representations of the south between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. But it would be impossible to account for the specific ideological character of these representations if we did not situate them in the wider political, economic, and cultural context of post-1750 Europe. As with the rest of the peninsula, the kingdom was politically subaltern and economically subordinate to England and France. The specific extent to which this subordination increased in the century before unification has been widely debated, as has the extent to which economic growth in southern Italy fell further behind that of the center-north. Most important for our purposes is the emergent perception of a marked difference between the forms of society and culture in western Europe and in southern Italy that was held among foreigners above all but, as we shall see, among Italians as well. This was more than just ethnocentrism, although the ethnocentrism of the English, French, and Germans played an important part in it. It was, rather, the perception that the social, 15. See Nazzaro 131–211 for an account of each eruption of Vesuvius between 1631 and 1944, during which time the volcano was in a state of virtually continuous activity. 16. On the formation of the topos of Vesuvius in the European imagination after the mid-eighteenth century, see Fusco 766 and Causa. 17. I analyze this illustration in Chapter 6.

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cultural, and economic life of western Europe was moving at a different pace than that of southern Italy and of other areas at the margins of Europe. Both foreigners and Italians recognized that taking shape in western Europe was a certain form of civilization broadly understood as bourgeois that went hand in hand with the political and economic dominance of that part of the world. The significance attributed to the people and places of southern Italy was, as we shall see, structured by the recognition of this difference.

casanova in a paradise inhabited by devils Although my main aim here is to trace the emergence of a modern vision of the Mezzogiorno, it is also important to take into account the extraordinary longevity of certain commonplaces and stereotypes. The proverbial description of Naples as a “paradise inhabited by devils” is a prime example of what could be termed the persistence of the old imaginative regime. As Croce shows in his noted essay, “Il ‘paradiso abitato da diavoli,” the phrase circulated in various parts of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and remained current in the nineteenth century as well. Part of the popularity and longevity of this topos is due to its overlap with two of the traditional imaginative patterns most frequently encountered with reference to the south between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The first distinguishes between the natural beauty, climate, and fertility of the south and the degradation of society; the second contrasts the commercial and agricultural prosperity of the south in ancient times, whether under the Greeks or Romans, and its poverty in the present. In both cases contemporary civilization is deficient, either with respect to nature or the past, and often the two contrasts are interconnected. The prosperity of the south in ancient times is the proof that it is naturally fertile. As we shall see in this and the following chapter, both imaginative patterns are popular up to the middle of the nineteenth century. But after that, whereas the second, historical contrast becomes scarce, the vision of southern fertility and natural beauty has a particularly long life. Its force was sufficiently strong at the beginning of the last century to provoke a powerful critique from Giustino Fortunato who, in a noted 1904 essay, called the notion of the south’s fertility a “fatal prejudice” that “caused it untold damage. It was a land whose soil and climate on the one hand, and topographic configuration on the other, rendered it essentially poor—and yet it was believed to be, and believed itself to be, exceptionally rich” (Mezzogiorno 2:542). Taking a passage from Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs as a point of departure, I want to address the persistence of these traditional patterns of repre-

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sentation and the relation between them and the southern reality to which they refer. To put it crudely, why did people insist that Naples was a “paradise inhabited by devils”? Was southern Italy paradise? Were the southern Italians devils? Written during the 1790s from his exile in an Austrian castle, Giacomo Casanova’s History of My Life recounts the famed Venetian’s wanderings and adventures across Europe between the 1740s and 1770s. The first of these voyages is due south, to Calabria, where his mother had arranged for him to take up a post with the bishop of Martorano, in a small village near Cosenza. Recalling his trip from Cosenza to the village, he writes: As I traveled, I fixed my eyes on the famous Mare Ausonium and rejoiced in being at the center of Magna Graecia, which Pythagoras’s sojourn had rendered illustrious for twenty-four centuries. I looked with astonishment at a country renowned for its fertility, in which, despite the prodigality of nature, I saw only poverty, a dearth of all that delightful superfluity which alone can make life precious, and a humanity to which I was ashamed to remember that I belonged. Such is the Terra di Lavoro where labor is held in abhorrence, where everything is sold for a song, where the inhabitants feel relieved of a burden when they find someone willing to accept their gifts of all kinds of fruits. I saw that the Romans had not erred in calling them brutes instead of Brutii. (1:237)

Upon arrival in the village, Casanova is immediately struck by the poverty and degradation of the surroundings: the bishop’s house is “badly built and falling to ruin”; the priest who dines with him is a “great ignoramus”; the “wretched dinner” horrifies him; his sleeping accommodations are “poor” and uncomfortable. But, if these things cause Casanova some initial concern, it is when the bishop describes the miserable society around him that Casanova is “almost overwhelmed by the prospect of the dreary life I must be prepared to lead with him”: . . . without a good library, a circle, a spirit of rivalry, a literary intercourse, was this the country in which I must settle down at the age of eighteen? . . . As [the bishop] had to officiate at a pontifical service the next day, I saw all his clergy and the women and men who filled his cathedral. It was then that I decided upon my course, grateful to fortune that I was in a position to do so. I saw nothing but brutes who seemed to me positively scandalized by my entire appearance. What ugly women! I told Monsignore in so many words that I felt no call to die a martyr in this city a few months hence. . . . So it was that I left Martorano sixty hours after I arrived, pitying the Bishop whom I left there and who shed tears as he gave me a thousand heart-felt blessings. (1:239–40)

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What can we say about the particular interaction between representation and reality in this passage?18 The force of the encounter between the writing subject and the sociocultural reality of this region nearly leaps off the page. In every respect, the countryside around Martorano and the village itself fall short of his expectations: of affluence, comfort, cuisine, civic institutions, society, and even his particular conceptions of female beauty. At one broad level, we can take him at his word, at least to the extent that he registers the considerable gap between the conditions and customs of a village in Calabria and those of the high society to which he is accustomed (and which most of the twelve volumes of his History are dedicated to portraying). Surely, however, Casanova’s account is both a response to actual conditions and textually overdetermined. His text flaunts both the textuality and intertextuality of his response. This is especially evident in the first passage. There we see, first, the gusto with which he reworks some of the classic topoi of the south and plays with their contrastive structure. He typically contrasts the famed fertility and prodigality of nature with the current poverty and the degradation of the inhabitants. This contrast overlaps, in the manner outlined above, with that between the illustrious civilization of Magna Graecia and the current “dearth of all that superfluity which alone can make life precious.” We see moreover the pleasure he takes in two forms of wordplay: the paradox of indolence (another traditional southern stereotype) in the Terra di Lavoro (literally, the “Land of Labor”) and the recollection of the pun on “Brutes,” the name of the people residing in Calabria in Roman times. This, then, is an intensely textual, and intertextual representation of southern “reality.” As with most writers who have something to say about the south between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Casanova’s expectations and response are informed by his readings of classical texts. But this vision of the local reality is not merely informed by texts but overwhelmed by them, and Casanova’s account in this sense misses the mark. The purported referentiality of the representation is subverted by the poetic, self-referential dimension of the language. To be precise, the passage discussed above actually misrepresents the referent: it is not the Mare Ausonium that he sees (but the Tyrrhenium); it was not here that Pythagoras sojourned (but in Sicily); this is not the Terra di Lavoro (but Calabria). In sum, Casanova’s text articulates a vivid form of cultural encounter, between a well-to-do traveler from the north and the rural reality of the south. At 18. My interpretation here elaborates on Augusto Placanica’s observations on this passage in “Stereotipo” 183.

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the same time, it shows both the creative, writerly quality of the representation that is produced and the set of tropes that are deployed irrespective of that reality. What we see then in Casanova, as we will see in many of the texts to be considered, is the vividness of a cultural encounter that is amplified and intensified by the commonplaces, topoi, and stereotypes of the south that saturate the culture of the writer. If Naples is not clearly or simply paradise, and the Neapolitans not devils, still in the eyes of many the south seems exceptionally beautiful and fertile on the one hand and degraded on the other. The persistence of this vision may be attributed to a number of factors. In the first place, for outsiders and southerners alike it serves as a way to express the increasingly evident contrast between the growing prosperity of western Europe and the south in the century before unification. This deepening contrast, as we shall see, will generate new patterns that will become dominant. The vision of a beautiful, fertile south is part of a conservative literary culture that virtually all elites of the day share. Foreigners travel south with vivid expectations. But the contrastive pattern is not just deployed as a ready-made form through which to register the distance between the literary expectation and the reality. It also is reproduced with pleasure, as we see in Casanova and others. It is not simply a cognitive tool but a topos that invites visitation and reelaboration. As with “See Naples and die” (Vedi Napoli e puoi muori) and other commonplaces, there is the pleasure of participating in and reelaborating the topical tradition.19 With some justification, then, the majority of texts about the south in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been described as “a collection of intellectual and sentimental commonplaces elaborated according to a variably successful and variably personal technique” (quoted in Mozzillo, Viaggiatori 18). Already rich and extensive around 1750, with each passing decade this “collection” was reelaborated by an impressive array of writers including Goethe, Sade, Staël, and Stendhal. A “paradise inhabited by devils” thus signals the power and persistence of a discursive tradition, one we shall encounter both explicitly and—as in Casanova—implicitly through the rest of this study. It is, however, the emergent forms, which take shape after the mid-eighteenth century, that shall primarily concern me in the rest of this chapter. Yet here, too, periodization needs to be flexible. The vision of southern Italy as a liminal zone between Europe and Africa forms part of the consolidation of a Eurocentric world 19. It would be impossible to count the number of texts that play with the phrase “See Naples and die,” often creating subtle variations upon it, from Charles Dupaty at the end of the eighteenth century to Walter Benjamin (“Naples”) and beyond.

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view between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. But there are antecedents for this perspective also. A number of letters written by Jesuit missionaries between the 1550s and 1650s refer to Calabria and Sicily as “the Indies.” In August 1561, the first year of the Company of Jesus’ missionary activities in the south, missionary Giovanni Xavier sent this note to Rome from Calabria: “The people are so accustomed to evil, are so licentious, proud, lacking in justice and government as if they all lived in the bush. And don’t get me started on the priests: it will be enough to speak of this in person so as to give our brethren the opportunity to come to this India” (quoted in Tacchi Venturi 269).20 Fourteen years later, the Spanish missionary Michele Navarro, after seven months in Calabria and Sicily, provides a more extensive account to his father superior of the work to be done there: Oh dearest father, if you could see the extreme ruin of so many souls and how they are lost due to the frightful ignorance that reigns in these mountains, both spiritually and temporally, you would have compassion for them. And just as some of our brethren go to the Indies, in this India they could labor so as to render a service to God that is not inferior to that rendered by those who go down there: in fact there is a great need here to extirpate errors and superstitions and abuses of which there is an abundance. Here, without traveling so many leagues across the sea at the risk of one’s life, and without waiting a long time to learn a language, they could exercise their talents profitably. . . . I am of the opinion that insofar as the Company [of Jesus] has probationary houses for its novices, these mountains of Sicily would be Indies for those who were eventually to travel down there. I am certain in fact that whoever does well in these Indies of ours, here, will be fit for those across the ocean as well; likewise, he who finds it difficult to withstand these will certainly have a hard time in those others. (quoted in Tacchi Venturi 483)

Ignorance, superstition, lawlessness, and savagery (“as if they lived in the bush”)—these, evidently, are the qualities that link the Indies of southern Italy to those across the ocean in the minds of these missionaries. And, as Ernesto De Martino writes, “this Jesuit cultural awareness of southern Italy as Indias de por acá constitutes something more than an occasional metaphor, for it signals an effective analogy, within the missionary perspective, between the new world to be won over to Christian civilization and the cul20. For general discussions of the Jesuits’ “civilizing mission” in southern Italy during the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Selwyn; Gentilcore; Chavarria.

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tural conditions of large areas of the vice-realm of Naples” (23). There is, in fact, a structural relationship between the Indies “over here” and “over there,” insofar as what makes the metaphorical equation of the two possible is the Spanish colonial expansion into both these areas during the sixteenth century.21 The Indies and southern Italy are thus analogous points within the real and imaginative network of Jesuit missionaries who accompanied the Spanish conquerors, two realities perceived to be akin not only in their degradation, savagery, ignorance, and superstition but also in their need to be civilized, converted by the missionaries to the ChristianEuropean civilization, of which the Jesuits are prominent and energetic representatives. At the same time, in Navarro’s letter a significant difference between southern Italy and the Indies is apparent: the “Italian Indies” are de por acá, near Rome in other words, the center of Christendom, and therefore a place where missionary service can be “profitably” rendered “without traveling so many leagues across the sea.” For this reason southern Italy can serve as a training ground, a stepping stone to those Indies “over there,” where the “need” for profitable service is considerably greater than in the limited confines of southern Italy. The south is thus figured as a liminal space between Christian Europe and the other, New World, a threshold that, while geographically connected to the Old World, is figuratively linked to the New.22 These Jesuit texts vividly articulate the overarching framework of political subalternity and peripheralization that characterizes the history of southern Italy in the modern period. They also reflect the new forms of imaginative geographical differentiation that the discovery of the New World enabled. Here as in Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals,” which is contemporary with Navarro’s letter, a new relation between European civilization and the rest of the world produces a new mode of imaginative ge21. An interesting military pendant to these missionary representations of the south can be found in one Spanish soldier’s account of his garrison along the Calabrian coast in the early 1600s, titled Vida del soldado español Miguel de Castro, particularly 489–91. Croce discusses de Castro’s vida in “Scene della vita” 117–28. 22. Nor was the use of this figure a passing fancy, for as the Jesuits expanded their activities in the south over the course of the next century, they continued to refer to it in a similar manner. Thus in 1651, some ninety years after Xavier’s letter, the author of a report on Jesuit missionary activity in the Kingdom of Naples explains: “This campaign [in the Kingdom of Naples] is rightly thought to be little inferior to our vocation in the Indies: for though we have no hope of sacrificing our blood for the Holy Faith as happens there, here the labors are no smaller, and the result perhaps greater” (quoted in Ginzburg 657).

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ography. There, too, Montaigne played with the adverbs pardeça and par delà in a discourse on civilization.23 It is, in other words, both economic expansion and the pressure of a more “modern” civilization that produces this heightened sense of the links between the savagery of the south and conditions in areas beyond Europe. From this point of view, these letters offer a useful precedent, one that reflects the longer durée of the south’s political and economic subordination.At the same time, however, the representation of Sicily as “las indias de por acà” helps to bring into focus the historical specificity of the new mode of imagining the south that emerges in the context of the European expansion of the late eighteenth century. One sign of this shift is that the analogies now will be made primarily with Africa, the Hottentots, Tahiti. This is not just a lexical change; it reflects a different phase of European empire building, the occupation of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, which begins in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century “as the European hegemony in the Atlantic is coming to an end” (Pagden 2). The key change, however, is that the difference between the observer and the social reality of the Mezzogiorno tends to be imagined less in terms of “the great ruin and perdition of so many souls” than in terms of material well-being and the progress of European civilization. What had radically changed, in other words, was the conceptualization of western civilization. Christendom, as Denys Hay notes in Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, “had been replaced by Europe” (125). “By the beginning of the eighteenth century it is in terms of Europe that Europeans view the world” (117). And, we need to add, it is increasingly in terms of bourgeois civilization that Europeans view the world as well.

the geography of textual production The passages from Casanova’s memoirs cited in the previous section called attention to the importance of textual traditions to the representation of the south. As Staël writes with reference to the area around Naples in Corinne: “In short, it is the region of the world where volcanoes, history, and poetry 23. Montaigne’s perspective is, of course, radically different from the Jesuits’, concerned as he is with highlighting the barbarism of European civilization and the civilization of the savages. Notwithstanding the differences between them, the use of these contrastive adverbs in both texts is a clear signal of the new spatial imagination that took form in the wake of the discovery of the New World, of the new sense of contrasting civilizations “over here” and “over there.” For a consideration of Montaigne’s essay from the perspective of the European encounter with the Other of the New World, see Todorov, as well as the many articles dedicated to this question in Montaigne et le nouveau monde.

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have left most traces” (233). Casanova’s History also reflected the importance of the interaction between outsiders and insiders. It was in fact the bishop’s own harrowing account of life in the village that had helped to convince Casanova that he must leave. As Augusto Placanica observes in this regard, “southern intellectuals projected their social isolation and hegemony onto the cult of an aristocratic past, involving the foreign visitor in their denigration of the present and in their rejection of everyday reality as the mark of a backward society. . . . The homogeneity of class and culture among foreigners and local intellectuals worked to accentuate the negative image of the kingdom (“Capitale” 175). The representation of the south can thus be characterized as intertextual, interactive, and international. What we shall see repeatedly is that representations of the south produced by foreigners, southern Italians, and other Italians are informed by one another. This is especially true with respect to the ways southerners shaped foreign and central-northern views.As both Augusto Placanica and Atanasio Mozzillo have argued, the accounts produced by foreign travelers to the south were heavily indebted to the opinions and perspectives of the southerners themselves, both in Naples and the provinces.24 This also means that to a significant degree commonplaces and stereotypes about the south cannot be exclusively attributed to any one regional or national group. Benedetto Croce considered the saying “a paradise inhabited by devils” to be “thoroughly Italian,” while another Neapolitan thinker, Antonio Genovesi, was equally certain that it originated with the French. As Costanza D’Elia notes, during the Napoleonic occupation the vision of an exceptionally fertile south was shared both by “conquerors and conquered alike, by the entourage of Murat and by the Bourbons in exile” (Mezzogiorno agli inizi dell’Ottocento x–xi). Yet there was not, of course, an interdiscursive free-for-all; geography matters. The main point is fairly obvious: namely, that the regional or national provenance of a writer shapes the manner in which he or she represents the south. But that is not simply to say that “perspectives” on the south are conditioned by one’s regional or national provenance. An attention to the differentiated geography of textual production reveals markedly different ways of participating in the circulation and production of representations of the south. Simply put, foreigners and southerners were, for different reasons,

24. Placanica considers the interaction between Filangieri and Goethe exemplary (“Capitale” 174–75). Mozzillo highlights Henry Swinburne’s acknowledged debts to a number of southerners in his Travels in the Two Sicilies of 1783–85; see Frontiera 219 n. 33.

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keenly interested in the south and made major contributions to its cultural representation, while central-northerners were relatively uninterested. Broadly speaking, foreigners were interested in southern Italy because it was different; southerners were interested because it was their patria to rule, administer, and document. For both foreigners and southerners, the second half of the eighteenth century marks a dramatic increase in the number of representations produced. The south was “discovered” by foreigners at this time, and among southerners, a new type of attention to the social and economic conditions in the capital and kingdom emerged.25 An explosion of analyses, surveys, descriptions, maps, and numerous other forms of socioeconomic analysis appeared. In the center-north no such proliferation of interest took place. In the work produced by the major intellectual and artistic figures of the centernorth in the century before unification one finds a marked lack of interest in the south.26 While it would be tedious to catalog a series of absences, one example may help to clarify my point. Il Conciliatore, published in Milan between 1818 and 1819, was one of the major cultural initiatives of the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Italy. The interests of the journal’s primarily Lombard contributors are wide-ranging indeed. To cite just the main areas of interest, there are articles and reviews dedicated to contemporary literature produced in Germany, France, England, Lombardy, Tuscany, and Piedmont; to the social and economic conditions in those places, as well as in America, India, China, Korea, and Greece; and there is a keen interest in classical Greece and Rome. Naples, however, the most populous city and largest political unit on the peninsula, is nearly absent from the cultural horizon of this journal. Out of some three hundred pieces published in the journal, the one essay directly relating to southern Italy is the review of a book written by a Neapolitan general on the necessity of improving horse breeding for the kingdom’s army. Significantly, the one literary text mentioned that relates in some way to the south is a review of a foreign work, Friedrich Schiller’s Bride of Messina. Along with the absence of the south from the journal’s horizon of concerns, something else helps to bring into focus the differentiated geography of the journal’s imagined patria. One of the best-known responses to for25. Venturi, “Napoli capitale”; Placanica, “Stereotipo” 174;Villani, “Eredità storica” 12. 26. This problem has received little serious attention. The fact that elites of the center-north rarely traveled south of Rome, as Romanelli and Meriggi note, is emblematic of a broader lack of interest; see Italia liberale 126 and Breve storia 42, respectively.

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eign denigrations of Italy is Giuseppe Baretti’s 1768 An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy with Observations on the Mistakes of Some Travellers, with Regard to that Country—a response to Samuel Sharp’s Letters From Italy of 1766.27 When another edition of Baretti’s response appeared in Milan in 1818, the reviewer for Il Conciliatore, Paolo Borsieri, made it clear that Baretti’s rejoinder to Sharp was clearly insufficient. Although Sharp’s calumny was fifty years old, Borsieri rises to the defense of the Piedmontese, Genovese, Venetians, Romans, Tuscans, and above all the Milanese, to whom he dedicates a rousing conclusive encomium. The Italy he redeems from Sharp’s accusations ends south of Rome, however. Beyond that he simply notes, “It appears that the author [Baretti] despaired of defending the Neapolitans from the imputations of Dr. Sharp” (Conciliatore 168). In the context of his patriotic defense of the other regions, Borsieri’s comment amounts to a form of agreement with Sharp’s “imputations.” His patria, and that of the journal, appears to end at Rome. Why this lack of attention to the southern territories by northerners? Foreigners took an interest in the south because it had a climate, a history, and natural surroundings that fired their imaginations, not to mention that it provided opportunities for economic profit and, in the French case, political domination. Southern elites were interested above all because it was their homeland. For central-northerners the south was evidently both too similar and too different, not foreign enough yet too remote to concern them intimately. Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when central-northern Italians begin to seriously reconceive their patria in terms of Italy as a whole, do they begin to express a stronger political and cultural concern for the south as a place and people within their imagined national community. Let us then focus on those who were most interested in southern Italy in the century before unification: the foreigners and, more briefly at the end of this chapter, the southerners themselves. It is they who provide us with the most passionate performance of the imaginative patterns that will establish themselves in mid-nineteenth-century Italian culture.

travelers at the end of europe During the second half of the eighteenth century the cultural interests of many educated Europeans shifted south of Rome. With each passing decade the number of travelers to Naples and points beyond increased, as 27. On the Sharp-Baretti quarrel, see Kirby 203–8.

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did the number of books and pictorial representations relating to the south that they produced ( Bédarida 57; Causa 183). This quantitative increase developed hand in hand with a qualitative change. In the context of the economic expansion and the rise of bourgeois civilization in western-central Europe, visions of the south were transformed. In his essay on Italy and the Grand Tour, Cesare De Seta describes an important aspect of this phenomenon. “The discovery of the Mezzogiorno and the islands,” he writes, “comes after the great fortune of the Voyage en Italie and is distinct from it” (233). While these two traditions undoubtedly overlap and interact, the discovery of the mainland south and Sicily “are part of another story, which is analogous to the discovery of Greece, the African coasts and the Mediterranean in general.”28 Western Europeans were becoming interested in a part of Italy that was perceived to be both geographically and temporally more remote from modern civilization than the rest of the peninsula. They sought in the south peoples and places that were closer to the origins of humanity, understood both in terms of classical antiquity and nature, two terms that often overlapped in the late-eighteenthcentury European imagination.29 The new interest in Vesuvius and Etna was an important part of this new tendency, as was the discovery of Sicily. From this point forward the image of Sicily as a kind of extreme or “deep” south will be elaborated with increasing consistency, a regional image marked by the amplification of the topoi and stereotypes relating to the south as a whole. At the beginning of this chapter, I cited Augustin Creuzé de Lesser’s comment that “Europe ends at Naples and ends there quite badly. Calabria, Sicily, all the rest belongs to Africa” ( 96). For this French writer, who, in the words of one scholar, was “filled with the conviction of belonging to a superior race charged with renewing the world,” Naples and everything beyond it were the epitome of backwardness ( Tuzet, Voyageurs 56). Those who thought otherwise, he wrote, should see for themselves; after a week “in this famous Sicily, in a country without roads, without bridges, with-

28. “Italia nello specchio” 233, 240. De Seta specifies further that “a geohistorical unity thus takes form, with respect to which central-northern Italy is extraneous. Southern Italy was therefore part of a cultural area whose epicenter was the mythical Greece” (De Seta 233). See also Fazio, “Lontano” 74, and Osterkamp, “Immagine della Sicilia” 141, on how the “discovery of Sicily coincides with the rediscovery of Greek art and with the general reevocation of the ideal Hellenic world.” 29. This was evident, more generally, in the frequent analogies made during the period between the ancient Greeks and “natural” savage peoples like Tahitians and American Indians (see Meek 216, 227).

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out agriculture, without commerce, without hotels, without any of life’s niceties, or the delicacies of society,” they would certainly say, “Let’s go back to France” ( 99). The roads take the cake, however: “it is in this above all that the barbarism of Africa triumphs” ( 96). From the last decades of the eighteenth century forward, “Africa” became the worst that could be said about the south, one of the preferred ways to mark its difference from both Europe and Italy.30 But this very difference with respect to western Europe, this proximity to Africa and the Orient, was also valorized. To those with second thoughts about the supreme value of civilization, the savagery of the south could be seen as picturesque if not downright exotic. In Corinne, Staël also highlights Naples’s proximity to Africa but finds it suggestive: “The African shore which is on the other side of the sea can almost be felt already, and in the wild shouts that can be heard on all sides there is something indefinably Numidian” (193). Naples’s hybridity, the coexistence of an “uncivilized state side by side with civilization,” is “very original”; all those “tanned faces . . . give a picturesque quality to the rabble” (193). Two works played a significant role in the “discovery” of southern Italy, and in the awakened interest in Sicily in particular, during the last decades of the eighteenth century: Baron Hermann von Riedesel’s Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland (1771) and Patrick Brydone’s A Tour through Sicily and Malta (1773).31 Riedesel’s book was the vade mecum to Goethe on his Sicilian journey, while Ann Radcliffe, whose gothic novels set in southern Italy sparked a wave of imitators, relied heavily on Brydone (Churchill 17). Riedesel’s book provides a useful point of departure for this survey because it both rehearses some of the traditional modes of representing the south while also expressing more distinctly modern perspectives.32 Published in 1771 on the basis of his trip to southern Italy four years earlier, Riedesel’s Reise was immediately translated into English and French.33 The title of the English edition clearly expresses the link between the discovery of Sicily, Greece, and the Orient: Travels through Sicily and that Part

30. As we saw earlier, what dismayed Winckelmann about Naples was “to see ugly, African blood everywhere” (Lettere italiane 91). 31. See Michéa 330–35; De Seta 235. 32. On von Riedesel’s Reise, see Di Paola, “Greca, bella, infelice”; Osterkamp, “Johann Hermann von Riedesel” and “Immagine della Sicilia” 141; as well as Kanceff, “Compasso e il pennello” 90–93. 33. Osterkamp notes that Patrick Brydone was concerned that the English translation of Riedesel’s book would render his recently published Tour through Sicily and Malta superfluous (“Immagine della Sicilia” 143).

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of Italy Formerly Called Magna Graecia. And a Tour through Egypt. . . .34 The specific connection to Hellenism is illustrated by the fact that Riedesel wrote the book in the form of letters to Johann Winckelmann, his mentor and friend, who had never been to Sicily.35 The link to Winckelmann and Hellenism is also significant in relation to the bourgeois aspect of Riedesel’s representation of the south. As Lambropoulos notes, Winckelmann’s work and German Hellenism more generally “both defined and served [the] bourgeois cultural ideals” that German intellectuals were elaborating in the last decades of the century (see Rise of Eurocentrism 58–62). Like the contemporary cult of travel literature with which it was closely related, Hellenism was characteristically, if by no means exclusively, a bourgeois phenomenon (Blackbourn 35–36). Riedesel’s vision of the south is broadly structured by the traditional contrast between the glory of the past and the degradation of the present, between the fecundity of nature and the misery of the people.36 We find these contrasts closely interwoven in one of the statements at the end of his account of Sicily: “the climate, the soil, and the fruits of the country, are as perfect as ever; but the precious Greek liberty, population, power, magnificence, and good taste, are now not to be met with as in former times” (151). What, more specifically, does he have to say about the current state of the country and its inhabitants? Riedesel interestingly adopts a number of stereotypes about Sicilians while also speaking out against certain unnamed “prejudices.” In the last pages of the book he notes that his travel accommodations left much to be desired, but he adds, “these difficulties I easily forgot and they were well compensated by the beauties of nature, the noble remains of Greek architecture, and the destruction of those prejudices, which commonly subsist against these countries and their inhabitants, and of which I have convinced myself that they are without any foundation” (227–28). Riedesel here provides a useful reminder that foreign writers are sometimes critical with regard to commonplaces about the south.37 Yet in an earlier pas34. The account of Egypt was not a part of the original German edition and thus reflects the editorial strategy of the English publishers. 35. Winckelmann had provided Riedesel with instructions about which archaeological sites to visit (Osterkamp, “Johann Hermann von Riedesel” 199; Osterkamp, “Immagine della Sicilia” 141; Eisner 76). He did not, however, live to see the publication of Riedesel’s book (he was murdered in Trieste in 1768). 36. Fazio stresses that this vision was common to most German travelers to Sicily in the 1700s; see “Tedeschi in Sicilia nel Settecento” 81–82. On Riedesel’s trip to Sicily, see 85–88. On German travelers to Sicily in the 1700s, also see Beller. 37. In another influential German travel account published two decades later, we read: “I hope that the reader of my letters will appreciate my distance from all

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sage he characterizes the Sicilians according to a set of stereotypes that were already current in eighteenth-century Europe. Sicilians are decent, he writes, but they are also “restless and impatient, and with their great degree of vivacity, often cause the most violent actions; they are therefore remarkable above all other nations for the violence of their jealousy and vindictive temper” (151). What is most striking about Riedesel’s observations is the particular way he uses a climatological perspective to interpret these aspects of the Sicilian character and the current state of the south more generally. The Sicilian “nation,” he grants, “like all the people of warmer climates, is polished, of quick parts and great genius; but it likewise is characterized by that effeminacy, voluptuousness, and cunning, which is found to increase in more southerly countries. They have amazing vivacity, but not the least phlegm, which is very necessary in the cultivation of the arts, and in the execution of its works” (143). As in Leopardi’s Discourse, two contrasts interact with and reinforce each other in Riedesel’s text. On the one hand, the current conditions of Sicily contrast with those in ancient times; on the other they contrast with those northern peoples who now have the “phlegm” “necessary in the cultivation of the arts, and in the execution of its works.” Informing Riedesel’s text is one of the tenets of German Hellenism: just as Athens had been the “school of Hellas,” so Germany would be the school of Europe, the “intellectual instructors of mankind.”38 It is not just in matters of the spirit that the north now triumphs over the south. While taking into account the intellectual dimension, in the concluding passage Riedesel places the stress on the more material aspects of civilization, charting their movement along a north-south axis: I here conclude my few observations on these provinces of the kingdom of Naples, which of old formed separate kingdoms and powerful republics. Now not even the shadow of their ancient grandeur is left. Power, commerce, naval and military sciences, and the improvement of human understanding, all seem to go northward. In time, the Europeans will be obliged to look for protection, education, manners and the cultivation of the intellectual powers in America. (228)

those prejudices with which German travelers usually judge Italy. They believe they are coming to a paradise inhabited by devils, a view that gives rise to a host of mistaken judgements” (Johann Heinrich Bartels, Letters from Calabria and Sicily, quoted in Beller 71). 38. See Lambropoulos 78–79, as well as Bernal on the self-fashioning of Germany as the “New Hellas” (214).

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We are clearly a long way from the Jesuits and their concern with “the ruin of souls.” Employing the standard contrast between ancient grandeur and contemporary squalor, Riedesel articulates southern Italy’s difference with respect to modern, northern civilization in primarily material terms. This way of seeing the south will become more prevalent among both foreigners and Italians with each passing decade. This material aspect is underscored by the reference to America in the last line. “America” confers a specifically bourgeois emphasis to the characterization of modern civilization in these lines, but also interestingly tilts the north-south axis on its side.39 Riedesel takes the contemporary equation between modernity and the north one prophetic step further, suggesting a shift in the course of history from the north of Europe to America. Modernity is northern but is spreading westward across the Atlantic as well.40 In this and numerous subsequent travel accounts, the “kingdom of Naples” is said to diverge from modern, northern civilization. Or, more precisely, this is clearly the case with the area beyond Naples. But what about Naples itself? The issue here is more complex. In 1739 Charles de Brosses wrote that Naples was “the one city in Italy that really gives you the sense of being a capital,” on par with Paris and London (1:394). The Grand dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique of 1768 described Naples as “one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”41 It was in Naples that Casanova “began to breath again” after the horrors of provincial Calabria (1:248). The eighteenth century has indeed been described by historians as Naples’s “golden age.”42 Between the early 1700s and early 1800s Naples was one of the major musical centers in Europe; for much of that time Neapolitan musicians “directly or indirectly dominated the European

39. On the image of North America as the “land of the future” in German culture after 1776, see Zantop 9–10. In his Letters from an American Farmer of 1782, St. John de Crèvecoeur emphasizes the contrast between the future possibilities of America and the decay of Italy, with special reference to the “half-ruined amphitheatres and the putrid fevers of the Campania” (43). 40. Riedesel was, of course, not the only one to prophesize America’s future material power; this was also evident to a contemporary who outlined the dynamics of modern material civilization, Adam Smith. In book 4 of The Wealth of Nations—which appeared in 1776, three years after the English edition of Riedesel’s book—Smith wrote that America “will be one of the foremost nations of the world.” 41. Quoted in Venturi, “Napoli capitale,” who describes this as “the major geographic encyclopedia of the eighteenth century” (241). 42. “The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization under the Bourbons, 1734–1805,” was the title of an exhibit held at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1981.

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scene” ( Di Benedetto 25–29).43 Rousseau, in his article on genius in the Dictionnaire de musique, wrote: “go, my heart, fly to Naples to hear the masterpieces of Leo, Durante, Jommelli, and Pergolesi.”44 And if Naples stood for musical genius well into the nineteenth century, English and French thinkers during the Enlightenment also acknowledged its importance as a center of philosophical thought ( Venturi, Settecento riformatore 523–644). Excellence in music and philosophy are in fact the two chief positive commonplaces about Neapolitan culture in eighteenth-century Europe. Yet at least since the Renaissance, reactions to Naples had been remarkably polarized, oscillating, as Mozzillo puts it, between visions of Arcadia and the apocalypse.45 On the one hand there was a long tradition of praise for the city (Venturi, “Napoli capitale” 241–43). On the other there was a perhaps equally long tradition of denigrations of the Neapolitan masses, in particular the group of indigents known as the lazzari or lazzaroni.46 De Brosses was impressed by the capital’s splendors but disgusted by its populace, whom he called “the most abominable rabble and loathsome vermin that ever infested the earth” (Lettres 2:5–6, quoted in Mozzillo, “Aspetti” 7). The jealousy of Neapolitan men astounded him: “all the jealousy of Italy has taken refuge here, where it thought it would be most safe from the good manners of northern peoples” (quoted in Bologna 31). The notion that

43. The success of the 1699 opera Partenope is emblematic in this regard. Silvio Stampiglia’s libretto for this opera that was composed in Naples, set in Naples, and titled after the city’s original Greek name was set by thirty-eight different composers, including Vivaldi and Handel, during the first half of the eighteenth century. Interestingly, as Cori Ellison notes, “a setting of Stampiglia’s Partenope by the Spanish composer Manuel Zumaya, performed in 1711 at the theater of the Viceroy of Mexico, was the first Italian opera ever performed in the New World” (36). 44. See Jaton’s discussion of the French enthusiasm for Neapolitan music in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (62–67); as well as Claudon; and Chevallier’s note on Neapolitan music in Meyer 324 n. 10. The manner in which Roland de La Platière expressed his admiration for Neapolitan music in 1780 is nevertheless revealing: “this nation which is so vile, ignorant, and obtuse . . . is nevertheless the first in the world for producing great musicians” (quoted in Mozzillo, “Immagine del Mezzogiorno” 65). 45. Napoletano 19. Summing up the reactions of visitors to Naples in the eighteenth century, Kirby writes with considerable verve, “There is a kind of clotted density of human life—a startling confusion, unexpectedness, impropriety, indecency, and cosmic comedy in Naples that absolutely defies definition or description. One either finds a richness of experience he never dreamed of there, or he shudders away from it with mingled apprehension and disgust” (113–14). 46. Galasso, “Magnifiche sorti” 252–53; Mozzillo, Frontiera 79–123, “Immagine del Mezzogiorno” 73–83, Napoletano 69–100.

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Naples was a “paradise inhabited by devils” clearly referred first and foremost to the city’s inhabitants. Between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, views of Naples took a turn for the worse. How is this to be explained? It is fair to say both that Naples changed and, most importantly, that perspectives on Naples changed. Already one of the largest and most densely populated cities in Europe in 1700, Naples nearly doubled its population in the space of a century, increasing from 200,000 to 400,000 inhabitants, with particularly dramatic increases after 1765 (see Aliberti 15–23; Petraccone, Napoli 129–39). Naples in the eighteenth century was, in the words of Ruggiero Romano, a “demographic monster” (Prezzi 72).While its growth would be more gradual in the 1800s, its population would nevertheless approach 450,000 by 1860 (Petraccone, Napoli 187–96). Perhaps even more important, however, were changes in foreign attitudes. New bourgeois sensitivities to urban order, cleanliness, and privacy emerged in western Europe, reflected in the intensified reactions of visitors to the chaos, clamor, and filth of Naples. “There is something repulsive about Naples,” wrote the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius in 1853, “with its chaos of baroque buildings reaching up to the sky, with its heat, dust in the streets, and deafening confusion” (quoted in Galasso, “Stereotipo” 155). As we will see on numerous occasions, the city’s very spatial organization and the forms of social behavior within it perturb, shock, and, in some cases, fascinate those accustomed to other forms of urban life elsewhere in Italy, Europe, and America. At the same time, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, southerners themselves began to take a harsher view of the city. Enlightenment reformers from Genovesi to Filangieri to Galanti emphasized the negative aspects of the capital (Venturi, “Napoli capitale”; Galasso, “Magnifiche sorti” 243–47). Thus, if Naples was often figured as the last outpost of civilization going south, it was itself often experienced as a liminal zone. Depending on one’s perspective, one’s journey to the end of Europe could end splendidly at Naples or, as Creuzé de Lesser put it, “assez mal.”47 As we shall see in a moment, beginning in the 1780s a positive valence could be attributed to Naples’s very distance and difference from European civilization. But in the 1770s an appreciation for the wild side of Naples had yet to emerge. The pages that the Marquis de Sade dedicated to Naples in his Voyage d’Italie of 1775–76 provide a powerful example of the negative view. Sade traveled to Italy in July 1775, fleeing under a pseudonym from 47. See Galasso, “Magnifiche sorti”; Fazio, “Lontano” 75 n. 35; Mozzillo, Napoletano 19.

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the judges back in Lyons who sought to arrest him for the sexual escapades he organized with five adolescent servant girls in his employ. Between January and May 1776 he was in Naples, and one might initially think that Sade would have taken a liking to this city where “every form of libertinage imaginable” could be found.48 But Naples brings out the moralist in the marquis; he writes here not as philosopher of the boudoir but as champion of reason, order, and civilization. The three notebooks he dedicates to Naples contain some of the most passionate denunciations of this city and kingdom ever written. Sade certainly voices his disapproval with what he finds in other parts of Italy; the prostitutes in Florence and castrati in Rome profoundly dismay him. But Naples, the city he locates “at the end of Europe” (au bout de l’Europe), is clearly a thing apart. He begins his description of the “manners and customs of Naples” by warning the reader that what he has to say about the place will not be favorable. “It is sad indeed,” he writes, “to see the most beautiful country in the universe inhabited by the most degraded species” (177). Sade is deeply indebted to the travel literature on Naples, reformulating here the topos of “a paradise inhabited by devils.”49 But alongside this more traditional perspective, what shines through his text is the extreme, personal revulsion of a refined gentleman before an alien sociocultural reality and the articulation of this revulsion from the Eurocentric perspective of an Enlightenment thinker. The sight of the Neapolitan plebs participating in the festival of the cuccagna is “the most barbarous spectacle that one could imagine in the world,” the “most horrible lesson of disorder” (177).50 The corruption and debauchery in Naples is in fact “physically impossible to imagine” (185). Some of his response is couched in the time-honored terms of “probity, honesty and virtue” (177). But he also employs a modern rhetoric: Naples shows little “progress in the arts and sciences” and an “unpardonable negligence of education” that has kept the people in a state of “ignorance” and “brutishness” (177). Conditions in Naples are so far gone that it would take “a complete revolution to lead this people to that level of well-being that reigns in

48. Sade, Voyage d’Italie 185. Sade’s Voyage was not published until 1967. Lever provides a detailed discussion of Sade’s trip to Italy in his introduction to Voyage d’Italie. See Gillet for a discussion of the significance of the Voyage in the broader context of Sade’s oeuvre, with special reference to the Histoire de Juliette. On Sade’s image of Naples in particular, see Didier; Mozzillo, Frontiera 47–54; Sgard. 49. Sade’s main sources are the Voyages of Cochin (1756), Richard (1766), and Lalande (1769). Sade cites Richard in the next line of the text. 50. Sade will reelaborate this scene two decades later at the beginning of part 6 of the Histoire de Juliette (Oeuvres complètes 399–401).

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most other parts of Europe” (177). There is evidently little hope, but all is not lost. Certainly it is regrettable that the arts in Naples “are where they were in the fourteenth century” (211). But is it not a “blessing for Europe,” he asks, “that there are belated provinces like these whose backwardness enables us to measure the progress of the others?” (211). And, we might add, was this backward and barbarous Naples not a blessing for Sade himself, providing him with the setting for some of the most vivid scenes of debauchery in his Histoire de Juliette? (see Didier 363). We could cite many more texts that articulate Naples and the south in terms of their distance from European civilization. These texts emphasize the savagery, barbarism, brutishness, and backwardness of the south. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-1800s the perception of this distance will only increase. But let us now consider the other side of the coin. As the quote from Corinne suggested at the beginning of this section, the presence of such savagery in Europe, the proximity to Africa, was not only condemned but praised. An appreciation of the primitive, natural, less civilized aspects of Naples and the south will become increasingly common from the 1780s on. The pages that Charles Dupaty dedicates to Naples in his Lettres sur l’Italie of 1785 mark the emergence of this new perspective most clearly while also constituting an especially forceful deployment of the discourse of climate.51 Dupaty announces his enthusiasm for Naples in his first letter from south of Rome: “See Naples, say the Neapolitans, and then die, but I say, see Naples and then live. . . . What is to be done in Naples but to live and enjoy life?” (26–28). What is it about Naples, specifically, that Dupaty appreciates? Certainly not its cultural and economic life. Except for music, he writes, “the fine arts are no longer known at Naples. . . . The mechanical arts are here destitute of the most common instruments in use today in the rest of Europe” (70). Neapolitan society is deficient as well. Superstition reigns in the place of religion, and sex appears to be on sale at every corner (64–65). Naples offers something else, however: “the climate, the sun, the sea” (62). Nature has an overwhelming force in Naples. Evoking Montesquieu, he writes that “climate has its full influence here; the sun reigns here with51. See Mozzillo, Napoletano 16–17 and Frontiera 41–44 on this transition, and on Dupaty in particular, Frontiera 55–78. In contrast to Sade’s unpublished travelogue, Dupaty’s Lettres were an extraordinary success: between their publication in 1785 and 1854, they went through fifty-four editions. Stendhal ridiculed them as the gospel of “traveling salesmen” (quoted in Mozzillo, Frontiera 75–76). All citations are from the third volume of the 1823 edition, with page numbers included in the text.

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out check” (64). Subject to the forces of nature, the Neapolitans lack both agency and morality. He refers to the Neapolitans as “human vegetation,” full of “fecundity, vigor, and natural durability” (63). They have plenty of vices, but they cannot be blamed for them because here “vices issue from the climate” (66). By the same token the Neapolitans cannot take credit for their virtues. The state survives not because of the skill of its rulers but because of “the sea, the climate, and the soil” (71). There are intelligent people in Naples but only because “the climate and geography favor it” (72). The Aeneid, indeed, was not so much the work of Virgil as of “this sea, this land, this sun” (72).52 Dupaty’s reading of Naples in the key of climate and nature thus enables an appreciative reading of the Neapolitans, but only at the cost of depriving them of their humanity. They are no longer devils in paradise, but neither are they humans in Europe. In conclusion he writes that “Naples is oblivious to Europe and to the future” (74). Along with the uniquely natural society that he finds in Naples, Dupaty of course appreciates the natural surroundings themselves. The bay forms a “tableau, a situation, an enchantment that cannot be described” (27). In another letter he writes that “every traveler should visit Portici, not for the king’s palace . . . but for its picturesque situation” (39). The last decades of the eighteenth century mark the emergence of a veritable cult of the picturesque in western European culture. As we saw in the previous chapter, Italy was the picturesque country par excellence. The link between southern Italy and the picturesque was particularly strong. Two Voyages pittoresques dedicated to the south appeared in the 1780s, most importantly the monumental four-volume Voyage pittoresque ou description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, produced under the direction of Richard de Saint-Non and published between 1781 and 1786.53 Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque both reflects and contributes to the shift of interest in European culture toward the southern and eastern Mediterranean.54 It was moreover “the broadest and most complete illus52. In the following chapter we will encounter this naturalization of all human activity in Naples, including the highest artistic achievement, in Gioberti’s Primato. 53. On Saint-Non’s Voyage, see Mozzillo, Frontiera 331–41 and, above all, Lamers. The other southern Voyage pittoresque was Jean Houel’s four-volume Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari, which appeared between 1782 and 1787. Two other Voyages pittoresques dedicated to the south appeared in 1822 and 1845, by Gigault de la Salle and Paul de Musset, respectively. 54. Voyage pittoresque de toute la Grece appeared in 1782 (Eisner 80–82). As De Seta notes, the choice of the south was carefully pondered by the editors; the market for books on the center-north was congested, and they aimed at capitalizing upon the emergent interest in a comparatively new and unfamiliar area (241).

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tration of the kingdom that had been produced up to that time” (De Seta, “Italia nello specchio” 239). It is thus a good example both of the increase in the production of representations of the south taking place at this time as well as of the important role played by foreigners in this process. At the same time, Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque calls attention to the way southern Italy helped to shape the conceptualization of the picturesque at a European level and, conversely, to the way the picturesque helps to structure the representation of southern Italy. A direct line, in fact, can be traced from the representation of the south in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the point of departure for my study, to the cultural context of a century later, which I consider at the end. The discussion of Verga in my last chapter will focus on his representation of a specific picturesque site, the coastline of Aci-Trezza in Sicily. It is precisely through Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque, and through other depictions of this scene in the 1780s and early 1790s, that the coastline of Aci-Trezza acquires its valence as picturesque in the European and Italian cultural imaginations (figure 2).55 From this point forward the picturesque in general and the picturesque south in particular will spread with the growth of bourgeois civilization in Europe. A key aspect of its evolution in both a southern Italian and general European context is the broadening of its scope to include the people (Placanica, “Stereotipo” 184). In the View of the Islands of Trezza from SaintNon, the landscape dominates the frame; the people are accessories. What gradually develops from the turn of the century on in the climate of Romantic populism and exoticism, and what points toward Stendhal and beyond to Verga, is that the people begin to take up more space in the picture. In other words, the valorization of nature and classical ruins that characterizes the picturesque in the late eighteenth century makes way for the valorization of natural man: the primitive, the savage, and above all the folk.56 We see this in an aquatint by Achille Vianelli of 1831, The Return from the 55. The “Vuë des Isles de la Trizza” appears in vol. 4, pt. 1 of the Voyage pittoresque, table 35. In the same years, these rock formations, traditionally known as “The Cyclops,” were portrayed by Jean Houel in his 1782 Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari, republished as Viaggio in Sicilia e a Malta, table 109. A particularly expressive painting of the coastline of Aci-Trezza, titled “Faraglioni della Trezza anticamente scogli dei Ciclopi,” was painted by Philipp Hackert in 1793; see Krönig, table 46. 56. See Salerno; Zeri 100–102, and with specific reference to southern Italy, Dieter Richter 79–80. On the discovery of the people more generally at the end of the eighteenth century, see Burke 3–22, 281–88, and from a different perspective, Thom, who notes that folklore, “far from being a discovery of nascent Romanticism, was a central preoccupation of the philosophes” (Republics 192).

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Festival of the Madonna dell’Arco (figure 3). Here the proportions between the picturesque features of the landscape and the folk found in the illustration of the islands of Trezza have been reversed; Vesuvius, which figures so prominently in the landscape paintings of the south produced in the second half of the eighteenth century, now makes room for the picturesque popolo. From the early 1800s forward, the people, with their customs and costumes, become picturesque in their own right, not just because they are fishing below an impressive group of rocks called the Cyclops. The categories of the picturesque and the folkloric increasingly overlap.57 Here, too, the specificity of the south will be evident. Within the broader horizon of the illustrated travel books about Italy produced during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, representations of Naples will tend to stand out for the prominent role they give to the people, for their combination of “stereotypical landscapes and popular types.”58 Henceforth the picturesque southern landscape will contain the picturesque southerner. In the literary domain, Staël’s Corinne constitutes the first full-blown expression of this dual interest in the southern landscape and southern people and one of the major celebrations of the south in the early Romantic period. The opening chapter on Naples focuses on the appearance and customs of the city’s “picturesque populace,” in particular the lazzaroni, shifting at the end to a vision of the sea and an erupting Vesuvius that, she writes, make you “forget all you know about mankind” (193). Staël’s text is geographically limited, however, to the area around Naples. Stendhal, who was deeply influenced by Staël, went a step further. The journals from his various Italian sojourns between 1811 and 1828 evince a vivid interest in both Naples and southern Italy as a whole and are of special relevance here in that they highlight the citational and textual dimension of the representation of the south.59 Some of his most pithy statements about the south are his citations of others’ views. Even more striking, Stendhal offers an eyewitness account of a trip beyond Naples as far as Calabria, Puglia, and Sicily that, however, he never took. Stendhal’s journals thus illustrate not only the point that representations of the south are often produced through the discursive exchange among foreigners, southerners, and central-northerners but also that they are profoundly structured by commonplaces and stereotypes. If, as we saw

57. Salerno calls this the “sociological” picturesque. 58. See Fusco 771; Vedute, ritratti, scene popolari. 59. I will primarily draw upon the 1826 version of Rome, Naples et Florence, but will also consider an important passage from Promenades dans Rome of 1829 (both texts cited from Voyages en Italie).

2. View of the Islands of Trezza. Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque ou description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, 1781–1786.

3. The Return from the Festival of the Madonna dell’Arco. Colored aquatint by Achille Vianelli, 1831. Museum of San Martino, courtesy of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali Ambientali.

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in Casanova, the “reality” of the south was overwhelmed by the text, certain passages of Stendhal are indeed nothing but text. Stendhal sees Italy and the Italians in both holistic and differentiated terms. The dominant perspective is that of an Italy positively articulated in contrast to his native France. Italians have le bonheur that the hypercivilized French have lost; they are supremely energetic and straightforward: “How natural! What simplicity! How the Italians say just what they are feeling or thinking at the very moment they feel it or think it!” (Voyages 304). As with Staël and Bonstetten, Stendhal’s world view is marked by the opposition between “northern man” and “southern man,” but he is a fervent champion of the south.60 At the same time, various passages articulate a north-south division within Italy itself. The division is neither geographically nor evaluatively neat: the confines vary and many of the most emphatic distinctions appear in the form of statements made by others.61 One of Stendhal’s most succinct formulations of a north-south division within Italy is provided by a certain “Mme L***” of Milan: “In Italy, the civilized country ends at the Tiber. South of this river you’ll find the energy and goodness of savages” ( Voyages 364). In Naples Stendhal gets a local opinion that appears to have a certain affinity with what he heard in Milan.A Neapolitan man warns Stendhal that the opulence of San Carlo should not deceive him with respect to the conditions in the rest of the kingdom: “‘You see this theater,’ he tells me, ‘but you don’t see the little villages.’ He is right to scold me. I conclude from what he says that a Neapolitan villager is a savage, happy as they were in Tahiti before the arrival of the Methodist missionaries” (Voyages 518). Both statements emphasize the savagery of the southern part of Italy, the first with reference to the area south of Rome (the Tiber), the second with reference to a geographically undefined area outside of Naples. While underscoring the savage or primitive state of the south, neither quotation is wholly condemnatory; indeed, the first uses two of Stendhal’s most valued terms (énergie and bonheur), which he elsewhere applies to Italy as a whole.62 A third statement, made by an Englishman whom Stendhal encounters in Perugia, also underscores the lack of civilization in the south 60. For a discussion of the overarching north-south dichotomy in Stendhal, see Crouzet 38–49. 61. My discussion of Stendhal’s representation of the Mezzogiorno is informed by those of Carofiglio; Sciascia, “Stendhal e la Sicilia”; and Mozzillo’s chapter, “Stendhal e le chimere del Sud,” in Frontiera 125–58. 62. Brunel stresses the positive valence of this statement in his preface to Rome, Naples et Florence (21–22).

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but in a wholly condemnatory fashion while at the same time shifting the border north of Rome. “As we were leaving Perugia,” he writes, a protestant minister, an Englishman, piously raised his eyes to heaven, and prayed for the earth to swallow up the inhabitants of Naples and Rome, all this quite seriously. Can’t you see that civilization stops at Florence? Rome and Naples are barbarous countries, dressed in European garb. There you must travel as in Greece or in Asia Minor, except with more precautions, for the Turks are much more honest than the Europeans of Naples. (Voyages 69)

Here the barbarism of Naples and Rome is defined not in terms of Africa but Greece and Asia Minor. For rhetorical effect he favorably contrasts the honesty (i.e., civility), of the Turks to that of the “Europeans of Naples.” But unlike the first two quotations, where in different ways Stendhal aligns himself with the perspective of his interlocutor, here he maintains a safe distance. From the mosaic of others’ perspectives on the south in Stendhal’s writings we can in fact make out the contours of Stendhal’s own views. They are not far off from those of “Mme L***” of Milan. He sees the south as a zone beyond the pale of civilization, culturally contiguous with Africa. But like Staël, he is attracted to its qualities, its naturalness and bonheur. On the island of Ischia “the good inhabitants are African savages . . . . Almost without a trace of civilization; all this, and the movement of the sea, brings me back to my senses” (Voyages 49). In the narration of his invented trip south of Naples, he describes Sicily as “part of Africa” (Voyages 966).63 But, as he wrote in a journal entry of 27 March 1811, this very lack of civilization fires his imagination: “Sicily, if I am ever able to go there, has two advantages: human nature is as strong and interesting to study there as the natural realm of plants and rocks. Living for a month in some wild cave on Etna I would have some rare sensations.”64 In the south man thus lives in a state of nature; nature and man are closely interwoven. This perspective, of course, informs Stendhal’s vision of Italy 63. Consider, too, the opening of “La Duchesse de Palliano,” where Stendhal also employs the device of hearsay: “[Sicily] resembles Africa, or so people say; but what to my mind is quite certain is that it resembles Italy only in its devouring passions” (Romans 2:710). 64. Oeuvres intimes 1012. In the continuation of this passage Stendhal clearly states the material and cultural conditions that give rise to this fantasy: “I write this in my apartment, which is perfectly appointed . . . and besides that one of the most pleasant in Paris. But this height of the greatest modern empire is of no interest to me, I am tired of its pleasures.” On Stendhal’s vision of Sicily in particular, see Sciascia, “Stendhal e la Sicilia.”

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as a whole, but as in so many other cases, he views the peninsula in amplificatory terms. The Italians, he writes, “are the modern people which most closely resembles the ancients” (Voyages 562). But, as with their connection to nature, in Calabria, Puglia, and Sicily the connection to the ancients is strongest. As one goes farther into Calabria, he writes, “the heads [of the people] approach the Greek form” (Voyages 553). But it is essential to note that Naples, to a large degree, stands apart. What is remarkable about Stendhal’s view of the south is that it combines this valorization of southern nature with an appreciation for the civilization of the capital. Naples is “a great capital like Paris,” he writes, “the only capital in Italy,” the “most beautiful city in the universe” (Voyages 516). There is nothing like San Carlo in the rest of Europe (Voyages 513). While he, too, is enchanted by the natural surroundings, his appreciation for Neapolitan society and culture is the dominant note. He sings the praises of one “gay Neapolitan woman educated in the spirit of Voltaire” and notes, “This charming being is more precious than the lovely mountains and delicious bay” (Voyages 540). Indeed, as Mozzillo suggests, Stendhal’s vision of Naples achieves a rare fusion of nature and history (Frontiera 156–57), summed up by his assertion that no other place on earth has “such a combination of sea, mountains, and civilization” (Voyages 540). Stendhal clearly felt the attractive force of southern Italy, considering it an interesting alternative to the bourgeois civilization of the north. Few others would express their appreciation for a natural, picturesque south with such brio and intelligence, but Stendhal’s response to southern Italy anticipates a mode of appreciation that would become widespread in the culture of Europe’s middle and upper classes during the rest of the nineteenth century. Most important for us in this study, this kind of response would become increasingly common within Italian culture itself, as we shall begin to see in the next chapter. The predominant attitude toward the south was nevertheless condemnatory. I conclude this survey of travelers’ perspectives with a selection of letters written by Ernest Renan that offers a particularly forceful expression of this negative view at midcentury. Renan’s letters help bring into focus a number of this chapter’s main concerns. In the first place, the presence of this famous Orientalist in a discussion of representations of southern Italy is emblematic, calling attention to the interrelations between representations of the edges of Europe and of areas beyond it.65 At the same time, if Renan 65. For Said’s discussion of Renan’s decisive role in the field of Orientalism, see Orientalism 130–50, as well as World 268–89. On Renan’s contribution to French racialist doctrine, see Todorov 106–14.

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articulates his condemnation of the south in philosophical terms, his letters also reveal the importance of bourgeois sensibilities in accentuating a vision of southern Italian difference. Finally, Renan clearly illustrates the liminal vision that, by midcentury, had become common currency. In November of 1849, Renan embarked on the first of many trips to Italy, an eight-month “scientific and literary mission” funded by the French Ministry of Public Instruction for the purpose of examining Syriac and Arabic manuscripts in various Italian libraries.66 After two months in Rome, Renan traveled to Naples and in a letter to his sister writes of the striking contrast between the two cities. Rome is “electric,” a place of poetry and imagination; Naples’s attraction is instead limited “to the eyes of the man of pleasure or the man who is exclusively concerned with the beauties of nature.” For such a man, Renan can understand that “Naples might be the perfect place, paradise on earth: but for the philosopher who has formed a more elevated conception of beauty, who seeks it above all in the moral world, in religious institutions, in art, in that which, in a word, is human, for him Naples will offer as much sadness as pleasure” (400–401). Realizing that his judgment of Naples might appear harsh to his sister, Renan asks her not to think he is “applying a rigid and narrow-minded standard of judgement to these things.” On the contrary, he stresses, “no one is more tolerant than I toward types and institutions that are foreign to us.” But, in Naples I can’t stand it. No, I just can’t stand it; it is too much for me. The total extinction of all moral sentiment, that’s the revolting spectacle that this vile people presents; these are not men, my dear friend; they are brutes, among whom you’ll search in vain for some trace of that which constitutes human nobility. No, this is unbearable; no, it simply isn’t possible to completely turn one’s eyes from this degradation to admire the sea, Vesuvius, Ischia, Capri. For what is nature without man? (401)

It would be hard to find a more dramatic statement of the contrast between Naples’s natural prodigies and its human failings. As in Casanova, and more or less explicitly in nearly every other text we have considered here, the Neapolitans are not merely an inferior form of humanity—degraded, disgusting, vile; they are in fact brutes. In this intimate, epistolary moment

66. For a detailed consideration of this mission, see Lefranc and, from a more general biographical perspective, Mercury 256–67. While in Italy, Renan collected materials for, among other works, his Averroés et l’averroïsme. He had already written—but not published—L’Avenir de la science and the Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques.

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with his sister, away from that philological “laboratory” described by Edward Said as the site in which he exercises his scientific authority over the inferior peoples and civilizations he studies, Renan attests to the powerful effect Naples has upon him through an extraordinary series of denegations: “in Naples I can’t stand it. No, I just can’t stand it; it is too much for me. . . . No, this is unbearable; no, it simply isn’t possible.”67 As unsettling as it is for him, Renan goes on to discuss the contrasts between the art and religion of Rome and Naples in greater detail. The popular religion of Rome is “true, naive, full of lofty morality”; but in Naples there is “nothing of that. No moral instinct whatsoever! Religion is nothing but pure superstition, the expression of fear or self-interest” (402). The religion of Naples is, in short, a “perversion” and its churches “out and out museums of pathology” (403). The effect of all this upon Neapolitan art has been, and continues to be, “deplorable”: “Ugliness, repulsion, that’s what appeals to the depraved taste, to the perverted sensibility of this people” (404). Having thus examined the contrast between the religious, artistic, and moral worlds of Rome and Naples, Renan expands his view to consider the different qualities of Italy as a whole. He asserts that there are “three thoroughly distinct Italies”: northern Italy, where the intellectual element dominates, strong, noble, made for action and political life, for philosophy and science (Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, etc.); central Italy ( Tuscany and Rome), where intelligence and sensation combine in the fine proportion that creates art and religion: this is the land of the arts. . . . southern Italy, where sensation dominates everything and stifles all the rest. This is the land of pleasure, nothing more. . . . Never did a noble thought germinate under this sun; never was anyone concerned here with the beautiful ideal and the truth; they let themselves be carried away by inebriating nature. (406)

As Renan writes elsewhere in the letter, “this people understands nothing but the flesh, matter” (404). The inhumanity and ignobility of the southern Italians is thus intimately connected to their enslavement to the senses, to their lack of the distinctly human virtue of intellect, to their inability to participate in the ennobling activities of politics, art, religion, philosophy.68 67. The collection in which this letter appears is titled, in fact, Nouvelles lettres intimes. On Said’s description of Renan’s “laboratory,” cf. Orientalism 142, 146. 68. Renan’s assessment, of course, flies in the face of the renowned southern philosophical tradition that includes Campanella, Bruno, and Vico. As noted earlier, excellence in philosophy was, along with excellence in music, one of the two positive commonplaces about the south in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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They are thus distinct from and inferior to the central-northern Italians, who, in this moral geography, implicitly join the ranks of civilized Europe. Up to this point Renan has outlined the differences between southerners and other Italians in primarily moral and philosophical terms. In a subsequent letter, written to his sister from Florence on 7 February 1850, Renan is more explicit about the material dimension of these differences, and at the same time he situates them in a broader, European frame of reference. The nightmare of Naples has yet to fade from memory. In the midst of his effusion for Tuscany it returns: What a ravishing country, this Tuscany! . . . As for Naples, it is terror itself; it is impossible to live there. To withstand Naples, one must be either very light or very strong to keep one’s eyes off the people and see nothing but nature. Here [in Tuscany], life is more active, more free, more distinguished. Florence is clearly a civilized city: granted, they don’t have the kinds of stores we have in Paris, the charming streets, the general appearance of well-being that makes me love it. But in the end, after Naples, this sweet and calm reflection of European life is pleasing and restful. (428)

If the moral geography in the earlier passage was penned by a philosopher, this one, it seems, was penned by a shopper. Here the bourgeois traveler is explicit about his preference for the kinds of stores, streets, and affluence that he finds back in Paris, all of which constitutes a reassuring “reflection of European life.” Florence may not be a perfect similitude, but after the fun-house mirror of Naples it is a tremendous relief. Naples for Renan is then terror itself, beyond the pale of the human. Yet it is finally a trip some seventy miles farther south that prompts him to formulate his clearest picture of the geopolitical location of the south in a broader European context. After his earlier, extensive description of Naples, Renan pauses to catch his breath: “What have I done, dear friend? Here I have written you four ill-humored pages and there’s hardly any space left to tell you about the enchantments of this city, and of the many famous, charming places that are grouped around this incomparable bay” (407). But his outline of the tourist sites he visited near Naples is rather perfunctory. It is rather the area around Paestum that strikes him most: There, we have planted our pillars of Hercules to the south. . . . Nothing can give you a sense, dear friend, of the savagery of this land and its inhabitants: Salerno can be considered the end of civilization going south. I am unable to tell you the strange feeling I had in thus finding myself suddenly in full barbarousness. What! I am hardly six or seven days from Paris, and I am at the end of civilization! At the center, one

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believes that the circumference extends to infinity; what a surprise when one runs into the edge, like a man who bumps his nose against a wall that he thought was quite distant! (408)

Here, as in the passages from Casanova’s History, the writer-traveler is surprised by the south, and the numerous exclamation marks indicate the intensity of this astonishment. But Renan offers a more precise indication of the south’s distance from the civilization and expectations of the author. The lines of Renan’s imaginary geography are in fact geometrical: Paris lies at the center, and from the center one imagines that the circumference of civilization extends “to infinity.”69 The surprise consists in finding the limit so close to home, in one’s own backyard, as it were. It could be described, in Freud’s terms, as an uncanny—unheimlich—experience of finding the foreign to be within, of finding that which one thought to be distant quite close.70 One expects the south to be a part of European civilization and is shocked to find instead that it marks the end of civilization, a gateway (the Pillars of Hercules) to a savage and foreign world.

southerners and the backward south Because of their quantity, intensity, and prestige, foreign representations played an important role in shaping a modern vision of the Mezzogiorno. Yet the contribution of southerners was hardly less important. To conclude, I highlight a crucial feature of the southern discourse on the south in the century before unification: the emphasis on the kingdom’s backwardness with respect to other parts of Italy and Europe. It goes without saying that southerners viewed the south from a variety of perspectives between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.The traditional views we have already encountered in the texts of foreigners were persistent: the idea that the south was favored by nature and exceptionally fertile and that the kingdom’s current conditions were inferior to those in ancient times. Southerners also developed a picturesque perspective on the kingdom, especially after 69. Renan’s “center” is clearly both of a geopolitical and epistemic nature. Two years earlier in his L’Avenir de la science, he described his position as philologist in the following way: “Me, being there at the center, inhaling the perfume of everything, judging, comparing, combining, inducing—in this way I shall arrive at the very system of things” (quoted in Said, Orientalism 132). 70. Homi Bhabha profitably applies the concept of the uncanny to the foreign elements within the modern nation in “DissemiNation.” In this case the Italian nation has not yet been formed (nor is Italy the frame of reference), but the concept applies nevertheless insofar as what is at issue is a sense of a common European civilization, a shared home.

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the 1830s when the market for “pictorial” and “picturesque” publications emerged across Italy. Yet beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, a new mode of evaluating life in the kingdom on the basis of a comparison with England and France above all, but with other parts of Italy as well, becomes a characteristic feature of the world view of southern elites. A number of factors helped to transform southern perspectives on the south from the mid-1700s on. As mentioned earlier, the establishment of a resident monarchy in 1734 helped to foster a new patriotic interest in the Neapolitan “nation” among southern intellectuals. At the same time, within the broader context of Enlightenment thought, a more concrete interest in the social and economic reality of the south emerged. Within this new cognitive horizon, finally, southern intellectuals became aware of the increasingly dramatic economic developments in northwestern Europe, and in parts of central-northern Italy as well, which became inevitable points of reference for the analysis of their local reality.71 All these factors converge in the work of the Neapolitan political economist Antonio Genovesi, whose teachings and writings of the 1750s and 1760s provide the first powerful expression of a new comparative socioeconomic perspective on the south.72 In his classic study of the Italian Enlightenment, Franco Venturi observes that in Genovesi “the sense of backwardness is profound,” the comparison with England a constant (Settecento riformatore 571–73). In the lectures he delivered to students at the University of Naples in the late 1750s, Genovesi wrote that “intellectual culture among us is still far behind that of other nations” (Venturi, Settecento riformatore 574).With regard to “il costume,” or social and cultural life more generally, he wrote: “In these parts, we are certainly very inferior to other peoples of Italy, who are incomparably more refined than us, such as the Romans and Florentines” (Venturi, Settecento riformatore 584). In the domain of economic production, the kingdom was “very far behind not only nations beyond the Alps, but behind many in Italy as well” (Venturi, Settecento riformatore 584).73 Intellectual, social, and economic life in the kingdom is thus negatively

71. See Bevilacqua’s observations on the culture of economic imitation and “emulation” that takes form in Europe at this time (“Riformare il Sud” 20–22). 72. Venturi observes that in a variety of fields, “Genovesi interpreted the needs of his time better than anyone else” (“Napoli capitale” 248). 73. In his preface to Trinci’s Agricoltore sperimentato, Genovesi also writes: “By every one’s admission Tuscany is that part of Italy where agriculture is best understood and most diligently practiced” (R. Villari, Sud nella storia d’Italia 1:8). See also Genovesi’s bleak assessment of the state of manufacturing in the Kingdom of Naples, which Galasso quotes in “Magnifiche sorti” 243.

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defined in relation to other areas to the north, both within Italy and beyond. In the work of one of Genovesi’s students, Giuseppe Maria Galanti, this contrastive perspective is expressed with similar force. In his “testament,” written in 1806 at the conclusion of his long career of investigations and reflections upon life in the kingdom, Galanti observed that “after two journeys through Umbria, Tuscany, Romagna, and Lombardy, we can say that the aspect of those countries . . . reveals the progress they have made on the road of civilization while showing the extent to which the provinces of the kingdom persist in a state of rudeness [rozzezza] and also in a certain barbarism” (Venturi, Riformatori napoletani 982–83). “Everything languishes in the kingdom,” he adds, “while in Tuscany and the state of Venice everything is in a state of activity”( 982–83).74 In both Genovesi and Galanti, England and Tuscany serve as models; “Do as England does” was the noted motto of the Genovesian school. In the nationalist and Romantic climate of the first decades of the 1800s, this appeal to outside models would be criticized in some quarters. In his reflections on the tragic Neapolitan revolution of 1799, Vincenzo Cuoco highlighted the pitfalls of such a perspective: “We admire the manners of foreigners, without realizing that this admiration has created a prejudice against our own. . . . Who are the dominant nations in Europe today? Not just those that do not imitate, but those that disdain the others” (Saggio storico 91 n.2). There was a broader trend among southern intellectuals to avoid universalistic solutions and the imitation of foreign approaches, valorizing instead the local (Petrusewicz 87). Between 1825 and 1835, moreover, many southerners viewed the kingdom’s economic condition vis-à-vis northwestern Europe in more positive terms (Salvemini, Economia politica 110). One of the most outspoken optimists, Giuseppe Della Valle, claimed that the kingdom’s economic prosperity rivaled that of England, while avoiding some of the problems created by industrialization (D’Elia, Stato padre 165).Yet even Della Valle and other optimists reveal the inevitability of the comparison with England. Furthermore, such optimism did not go uncontested. Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi, who held Genovesi’s chair in political economy at the University of Naples between 1806 and 1821, ridiculed the idea that “we enjoy a level of prosperity comparable to the most affluent nations” (Salvemini, Economia politica 133). Between the turn of the century and his death in 1848, Cagnazzi’s writings provide a sustained reflection on the south’s condition of backwardness vis-à-vis northwestern Europe. After the conservative turn 74. On Galanti’s admiration for English manufacturing, see Galasso, “Magnifiche sorti” 247.

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in Ferdinand II’s regime in the mid-1830s, more and more southerners would share Cagnazzi’s pessimistic view.75 There are, to be sure, significant differences between the way the backwardness of the south was conceived in the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. But there are also some affinities above and beyond the basic idea that social and economic life in the south lags behind that in more advanced areas. In the first place, the citations from Genovesi and Galanti accentuate the difference between the situations in the kingdom and in areas to the north in emphatic terms.The kingdom is not simply behind, but “very far behind,” “very inferior,” while other peoples of Italy are “incomparably more refined than us.” Galanti articulates the contrast between a state of complete languor in the south and complete activity in Tuscany and Venice. In subsequent chapters we will see that many southerners writing about the south after the 1840s practice a similar form of rhetorical extremism, sometimes painting a harrowing picture of the social, economic, and political conditions in the kingdom, usually in contrast to conditions elsewhere to the north. In one respect, the paradigm of backwardness, and the rhetorical extremism through which it is expressed, is something that southerners have in common with outsiders. Yet it is crucial to bear in mind that one component to southern accentuations of backwardness is usually lacking among foreigners. Unlike most foreigners, whose representations of southern difference tend to function as celebrations of northern superiority, Genovesi, Galanti, and other southerners wrote as intellectuals and administrators engaged in their local reality, aiming to improve and reform it. Their emphases upon southern backwardness no doubt expressed a sense of dismay at the distance they perceived between the kingdom and areas to the north. But, as we shall see throughout this book, the extremism of much southern rhetoric has a militant function and is often either a call to action or, at the very least, the expression of a native frustration with local immobility and the resistance to change. The specificity of these southern motivations is also apparent in the analogies that southern intellectuals sometimes drew between the Mezzogiorno and more primitive worlds beyond Europe, a rhetorical strategy that again has certain affinities with that of foreigners. In his Lettere accademiche, for example, Genovesi compared the people living in the countryside around Naples to Patagonians (Autobiografia 410), while in the Lezioni di com75. I will examine this negative shift of perspective in my discussion of Cattaneo in the following chapter.

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mercio he writes that “one would think that if foreigners did not bring us needles we would have to sew with fish bones like Greenlanders, Californians, Caribbeans, or Siberians” (1: 341). This type of analogy became ever more frequent during the first half of the nineteenth century. An 1809 text promoting irrigation describes the peasants of one southern village as “similar to the savages of America,” while in 1839 Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi compares the shepherds of Puglia to Tartars and Arabs.76 In 1832 the head of the Department of Bridges and Works in the kingdom reported to the monarch that the land reclamation undertaken in the Diano Valley was working miracles. But, he adds, the inhabitants of that area are “more barbarous than the Hottentots,” and “instead of being thankful to the beneficent hand that so improved the value of their property and that rescued it from the misery of a sick and languid life, they have done all they can to destroy our efforts” (quoted in D’Elia, “‘Dannata opera’” 736).77 These citations clearly reflect the dismay and frustrations of reformers and administrators. It is important to note that they also reflect the perspectives of the capital. In her study of public works projects in the kingdom in the half century before unification, Costanza D’Elia notes that administrators’ conceptions of southern backwardness were specifically conceived in terms of “the backwardness and resistance of a periphery with respect to a modernizing center” (Stato padre 9, 167). Some reformers were themselves aware of this tendency; Galanti critically observed that “people in Naples know more about Tahiti than the rest of the kingdom” (quoted in Venturi, “Napoli capitale” 261). But the Napoli-centric perspective was dominant. As Augusto Placanica notes, “the provinces were extraneous and distant continents, as much for a resident of Naples as for a German traveler” (“Capitale” 174). We have seen that both foreigners and southerners themselves took an increasing interest in Naples and the south from the middle of the eighteenth century on. Whether celebrating it as picturesque or denouncing it as backward, foreigners and southerners emphasized the difference between southern Italy and other parts of Italy and the rest of Europe. To be sure, the motivations and points of view of insiders and outsiders differed significantly, but there were also affinities and exchanges of opinion among these groups. As we saw in Stendhal, one Neapolitan resident’s remarks led

76. Quoted in D’Elia, Stato padre 167. 77. This 1832 text, by Afan de Rivera, is significantly titled “Considerations on the Means for Restoring the Proper Value to the Gifts that Nature Has Bestowed on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.”

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him to conclude that the inhabitants of the provinces are “savage, happy as they were in Tahiti before the arrival of the Methodist missionaries.” And if Stendhal is indebted to this local informant, it is he who then makes that perspective more broadly known to a French reading public. Often drawing upon and recirculating each others’ views, foreigners and southerners thereby contributed to the formation of a modern vision of the Mezzogiorno in European culture. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Italians in the center-north would begin to take a more active role in this process as well. It is the forms of their growing interest in the south that I explore in the next chapter.

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II representing the south in the risorgimento, c. 1825–1861

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3

The North Looks South, 1825–1848

In the decades before 1848, elites from the Alps to Sicily became increasingly interested in “Italy.” For the first time statisticians, historians, painters, novelists, composers, political thinkers, and others made a substantial effort to conceive of Italy as a nation. Their works were variously animated by the desire both to represent the diverse regional realities on the peninsula and to imagine a common bond among them. As the Lombard writer Carlo Cattaneo put it in 1845, the time had come “to illustrate the bel paese piece by piece” (“Annuario” 80). For elites of the center-north, the largest and most distant of these “pieces” was the southern Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Before the 1820s, the places and peoples of southern Italy had been of minimal interest to central-northerners. Beginning in the mid-1820s a more pronounced interest in different aspects of southern Italy emerges in the culture of various central-northern regions, prompted to a large degree by the strengthening impulse to imagine a national community. This chapter examines the representation of the south in a selection of texts and publications produced in the center-north between the mid-1820s and mid-1840s, all of which exemplify this new mode of imaginative geography in a national key: an article by the Tuscan writer Francesco Forti, published in the Florentine journal Antologia; a set of articles and illustrations from the Milanese magazine Cosmorama pittorico; two articles by the Lombard writer Carlo Cattaneo published in the Milanese journals Annali universali di statistica and Rivista europea; and finally one the most influential patriotic texts of the Risorgimento, Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians by the Piedmontese writer Vincenzo Gioberti. What kind of differentiation between northern and southern Italy do these texts and illustrations articulate? What did the south mean to intellectuals in the center85

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north in the decades before 1848? Did tensions arise between holistic visions of the nation and those that emphasize southern difference? One of my overarching points is that the representations of the south to be considered below were structured and animated not simply by the spirit of nationalism but by the new forms of bourgeois civilization developing at the time in Tuscany, Lombardy, and Piedmont. The rise of both nationalism and bourgeois society in Italy during the second quarter of the nineteenth century are in fact closely interrelated trends. The nation that takes form between 1848 and 1861 will be fundamentally bourgeois both in conception and practice. As Luciano Cafagna succinctly states: “the Risorgimento movement exists within the European age of the bourgeois revolution. . . . Through the Risorgimento it is the bourgeoisie that grows, not other social classes.”1 Representations of the south in the decades before 1848 need to be understood in terms of the confluence of these two increasingly important dimensions of social existence, the national and the bourgeois. Tuscan, Lombard, and Piedmontese representations of the south reflect not only a territorially expanded view of their national community but also a changing conception of human society and civilization. Within this new national framework, there is, on the one hand, a new concrete concern with how the south participates in the material and moral progress of the center-north and Europe as a whole. On the other hand, emergent bourgeois sensibilities foster an accentuated interest in the picturesque dimensions of the south, a heightened curiosity in an area viewed as different from their regions. The interest in the south that emerges in the center-north at this time thus tends to be structured by both modernizing and picturesque perspectives. It will be helpful to begin by mentioning a few things that this diverse set of documents produced in the center-north have in common. All were produced by major cultural figures and appeared in journals or books that had considerable resonance in Italian culture during the final decades of the Risorgimento. More specifically, these publications formed a part of cultural initiatives associated with those members of the middle classes and liberal aristocracy who would dominate the leadership of the national movement after 1848. For the most part, these writers and publications focused on their native regions and on the center-north more generally, conceived within the broader horizon of western Europe. The part of Italy below Rome was quite marginal to their concerns, and their representations of the south constitute only a small fraction of their total cultural output. Except for one, none 1. Quoted in Lyttelton, “Middle Classes” 217. See also Della Peruta, “Conoscenza dell’Italia reale” 7–8; Davis, “Remapping Italy’s Path” 304.

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had ever traveled there; most of what they had to say about the south therefore derived from the accounts of southerners and foreigners. Finally, their national interest in the south is articulated from a federalist perspective. All the texts to be considered reflect a new type of interest in the south, a new sense of appurtenance. But none even remotely considers the possibility that their regions might be united with the south to form a politically unified state. As Gioberti wrote in his Primato, “to suppose that Italy, divided for centuries, can peacefully be brought under the power of a single state is madness.” 2 Thus while this chapter addresses single, isolated examples, these documents nevertheless reflect certain broader tendencies in the culture of central-northern elites in the decades before 1848 and, by the same token, are the work of men who provided important contributions to the formation of a national public opinion.

“italy ends at the garigliano” Probably the most notorious anti-southern quip passed down to us from the Risorgimento is the statement that Italy ends at the Garigliano.3 According to this view, the Garigliano River, which is located halfway between Naples and Rome and which formerly separated the Papal States from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, marks the divide between “Italy” and a world beyond. This formulation of an equation between the center-north and Italy, to the exclusion of the south, exemplifies a general tendency in the imaginative geography of modern Italians. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, in both the popular and scholarly imaginations, the center-north frequently will be seen as the true and primary Italy. The remaining chapters of this study will contain numerous examples of this attitude. But if “Italy ends at the Garigliano” constitutes a kind of benchmark formulation of southern difference in the Risorgimento, it also signals at the outset an important aspect of the representation of the south by centralnortherners in the decades before 1848. The statement was attributed to the Tuscan writer Francesco Forti by the Umbrian historian Filippo Antonio

2. Quoted in Woolf, History of Italy 343. On the predominance of federalism among the Moderates in the decades before 1848, see Della Peruta, “Federazione nel dibattito politico risorgimentale, 1814–1847”; Berselli, “Crisi del federalismo” 115–24. 3. It is thanks to Benedetto Croce, who includes the statement in his Storia del Regno di Napoli 335, that the phrase is familiar to some contemporary Italian readers.

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Gualterio writing in 1850. In a passage to be considered in the next chapter, Gualterio observes that Forti, who died in 1838, “used to” make this “hyperbolic” statement (4: 3). Gualterio provides no source for the statement, and his use of the imperfect tense suggests that it was a repeated if not habitual utterance. Yet no trace of it can be found in Forti’s works, which, as we shall now see, offer a more favorable and thoughtful consideration of the south. It would appear then that Forti “used to” make this remark in conversation or in personal correspondence. The contrast between the negative statement about the south attributed to Forti and his more positive published views is paradigmatic: centralnorthern writings on the south before 1848 are generally informed by a patriotic spirit; their authors are favorably predisposed toward this distant part of their common patria. It is true that representations of the south are structured by many of the commonplaces and stereotypes encountered in the previous chapter. “Italy ends at the Garigliano,” I would argue, reformulates in a local, Italian register the idea that “Europe ends at Naples.” By the same token, the perception that the south was socioeconomically less advanced than the center-north was widespread. But in the patriotic climate of the decades before 1848, central-northern intellectuals looked to the south with a sense of hope and encouragement. They were especially enthusiastic about intellectual production in the south. In 1845 a writer for Rivista europea praised the Neapolitan Museo di scienze e letteratura as “one of the finest Italian journals, the most worthy representative of the flourishing intellectual life in the kingdom of Naples.”4 Forti wrote in similar terms fifteen years earlier. A crucial distinction between private and public discourse, however, structures the representation of the south during the middle half of the nineteenth century. In conversations and letters, denigratory statements about the south were certainly made, but in more public forms of discourse like published texts or speeches, they were virtually anathema. Read in the context of Forti’s published statements about the south, “Italy ends at the Garigliano” gestures both toward the force of anti-southern attitudes in the decades before 1848 and toward the nationalist tendency to keep them in check, if not under wraps. What then did Forti have to say about the south in public? Let us con4. Or see, for example, the praise for the Apulian intellectual Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi in an 1831 article in Annali universali di statistica, where Cagnazzi is described as the “Nestor of Italian statisticians,” the most recent fruit of “a land that in the same century produced Genovesi, Filangieri, Galiani, Serra, Scrofani, Palmieri, and Galanti in the field of political economy” (see Salvemini, Economia politica 127 n. 49).

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sider an article he published in Antologia in 1828. Founded in Florence in 1824 by the Genevan merchant Giampietro Vieusseux, Antologia was one of the major cultural initiatives of the Risorgimento and was distinguished by Vieusseux’s aim to create a national culture in close contact with the rest of Europe.5 Forti had personal ties to Vieusseux through his uncle, the historian Jean-Charles Sismondi, another Genevan who had settled in Italy.6 Upon completing his studies in jurisprudence at the University of Pisa in 1826, Forti moved to Florence and became a regular contributor to the journal. The ninety review articles and other notes he wrote for Antologia between 1826 and 1832 clearly reflect the journal’s wide-ranging interests and simultaneously local, national, and cosmopolitan program.7 Of the twenty articles that Forti wrote on topics relating to Italian matters outside of Tuscany, three are reviews of books and journals by Sicilians.8 The opening lines of the first, which contains his most substantial discussion of the social and economic conditions on the island, are particularly telling: The beautiful island of Sicily, which we commonly call the breadbasket of Italy, has been celebrated since ancient times for the fertility of its soil and its commercial prosperity. This island so favored by nature should be one of the most prosperous kingdoms of Europe, yet it currently finds itself in conditions I would almost describe as dismal. The two books announced here help us to learn about this situation and to reveal its causes. Nor should we Tuscans, who by virtue of the wise provisions taken by Leopold, maintained despite certain bad examples offered by other countries on the continent, who find ourselves in quite prosperous conditions, think that we can afford not to find out about the condition of other peoples. . . . Matters relating to Sicily merit our attention especially, for whether 5. Vieusseux stated that Antologia is “an undertaking which has nothing, absolutely nothing municipal about it; it is wholly Italian” (quoted in Woolf, History of Italy 320). On another occasion he stated, “I would ask the writer to enter truly into the spirit of Anthology and show himself Italian rather than Tuscan or Piedmontese, European rather than Italian” (quoted in Woolf, History of Italy 320). It is noteworthy that its Italian emphasis increased over time. On Antologia, see Woolf, History of Italy 319–24; Carpi, Letteratura e società nella Toscana and “Egemonia moderata” 431–47. 6. On the relations between Vieusseux and Sismondi, see Frènes. 7. On Forti’s collaboration with Vieusseux and Antologia, see Papini 64–85. 8. The first article consists of his reviews of Niccolò Palmieri, Saggio sulle cause ed i rimedii delle angustie attuali dell’Economia agraria in Sicilia, and Salvadore Scuderi, Principii di Civile Economia. The other two reviews are of Alberto Riccobene, Nuovo trattato del Matrimonio secondo le disposizioni del Codice per lo Regno delle Due Sicilie, and Il Giornale di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti per la Sicilia.

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it regards our national character, or the useful direction of culture, the efforts of those islanders shed glory on the name of Italy. (289)

The gist of Forti’s thirteen-page essay is contained in this passage. Through a summary of the two economic works under review, he highlights the poor economic situation on the island—in marked contrast to the noted fertility of the soil and its ancient prosperity—outlines the causes that he attributes to long-standing faults of “institutions and men,” and emphasizes from beginning to end the progress promoted by the government and local elites. In conclusion he thus writes that the “miseria” of the island’s manufacturing sector is not to be attributed to the laziness of the Sicilians, but to the lack of capital. This lack has many causes, the elimination of which will require a great deal of time and effort. In the meantime we hope that those worthy citizens, who seek to prepare the way with their enlightened teachings, will understand that neither the distance between us nor diversity of governments can prevent us from praising their righteous efforts. (301)

Forti’s text is characteristic of central-northern views of the south during this period in a number of respects. It articulates an interest in a distant southern region from within a national perspective. This national perspective is nevertheless not unitarian: we Tuscans should be interested in their problems and their progress, which redound to the glory of the Italian name, but their problems remain theirs. At the same time, the interest is relatively weak and marginal (as noted above, only three out of Forti’s ninety articles deal with Sicily); neither is his interest strong enough to get him to travel there. By the same token, he knows relatively little about conditions in Sicily and bases his observations on the reports of southerners. Yet there is no doubt in his mind that Sicily is “dismal” with respect to his “prosperous” Tuscany, a country that compares favorably not only with Sicily but with other countries on the continent as well. We also see that Sicily’s condition of degradation is filtered through the commonplace that contrasts the fertility of the soil and human failings, more or less conjoined to the other commonplace contrasting the glory of the ancient past and the degradation of the present. In other words, Forti’s sketchy knowledge of Sicily is structured by the patterns of representation employed by foreigners and southerners considered in the previous chapter: the contrast between the natural and human conjoined to the contrast between the past and present, and the sense of inferiority and liminality with respect to the more civilized areas of Italy and Europe.

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Nevertheless, while these commonplaces are evident and while Forti is quite matter-of-fact about the relative prosperity of Tuscany, it is crucial to note both his open criticism of southern stereotypes and, more generally, his supportive, encouraging tone. In the first case, he challenges one of the key southern stereotypes of laziness. The problem is concrete, a lack of capital; solving it will take time, but progress already is being made; Sicily is on the right path. Elsewhere in the article Forti counters another stereotype, that of Sicilian banditry, by noting that police efforts have so reduced the number of bandits that “the safety of the roads in Sicily can be compared with that of the best administered countries” (293). In the conclusion to his last article on Sicily, he takes issue with the widespread view that places Sicily beyond the pale of civilization: “We wanted to give these reports on Sicily so that readers will see that men use culture there to the benefit of civilized life” (564).9 Each of these examples reflects the supportive and encouraging attitude that shines through the article. It is true that Forti writes from the perspective of a superior civilization. He no doubt considers the populations of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to be “among the less advanced of the peninsula,” as Luigi Serristori, another Florentine in his circle, put it in his Statistica dell’Italia of 1835–39.10 The key point, however, is that the notion that the south is “less advanced,” which is variously expressed in all the writings to be considered here, is not emphasized, just as the notion that Tuscany is more advanced is not accentuated either. The contrast with the more negative perspective that predominates after unification is striking, particularly in the case of another Tuscan Moderate who wrote about Sicily a half century later. As we shall see in Chapter 7, Leopoldo Franchetti conceives of Sicily and the southern provinces in general as the “little sisters” of the center-north, “emaciated, starving, covered with sores” who, in 1860, “threw themselves into our arms” in the hope of being cured (Inchiesta 1:238). What has changed, of course, is not only the encouraging attitude but the recognition of southern autonomy. In this new unitary context, in fact, “the coexistence of Sicilian civilization with that of central and northern Italy in the same nation is incompatible with the prosperity of the nation” (Inchiesta 1:237). Thus, whereas for Forti Sicily’s “worthy citizens” “use culture to the benefit of civilized life,” for Franchetti they are part of the “morbid phenomenon”

9. This is his review of the highly regarded Giornale di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti per la Sicilia. 10. Emphasis in original. Quoted in Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood 138. Both Forti and Serristori were contributors to the Giornale agrario toscano.

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that is Sicily. Unlike the Sicilians in the Antologia article who take an active role in furthering the cause of progress on the island, those in Franchetti’s text must submit to the superior wisdom of the center-north, “for it is precisely their way of feeling and seeing that constitutes the illness to be cured” (Inchiesta 1:221).

a view from milan: the picturesque south in cosmorama pittorico Inspired and informed by the example of Antologia, from the mid-1820s on, Lombard journalists also began to make a more concerted effort to imagine Italy as a whole. In the words of Kenneth Greenfield, they sought to make the “emotional abstraction” of Italy more concrete, to picture the country as “a local habitation” as well as a “name” (180). A new attention to the peoples and places of southern Italy formed part of this broader effort. Though their journals “furnished a much better view of the North and Tuscany than of the South,” reports from the Kingdom of Two Sicilies occasionally appeared in magazines of pastime like Cosmorama pittorico as well as in the scholarly journals Annali universali di statistica and Rivista europea (Greenfield 274, 176, 180). Before examining a selection of texts and illustrations from these three journals, it will be helpful to note both the cultural milieu they shared and a basic difference between the types of representations of the south published in Cosmorama pittorico and in the two scholarly journals. All three are animated by a growing interest in a national community. At the same time, they reflect the new dimensions of bourgeois cultural life in Milan during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. More than in any other Italian city, distinctly bourgeois forms of social life and cultural production developed in Milan at this time.11 The growth of the city’s publishing industry, particularly in the journalistic field, played an important role in this process of bourgeoisification (Berengo, Intellettuali e librai 6, 116). All three of these journals were staffed and read by leading members of the Milanese middle classes and liberal aristocracy, and there was considerable overlap among the writers and readers associated with them. To cite one key example, the founding editor of Cosmorama pittorico, Defendente Sacchi, was also one of the main contributors to Annali universali di statistica. Yet there is a crucial distinction between the way the south is represented in Cosmorama pittorico and in the two scholarly journals. As we shall see, 11. See, for example, Meriggi, Milano borghese.

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the south of Cosmorama pittorico is picturesque, while that of Carlo Cattaneo’s essay in Rivista europea is backward. The chief aim of one publication is to entertain and inform, that of the other to assess and evaluate civic and economic progress on the peninsula. For Cattaneo, in fact, Cosmorama pittorico marked a parting of the ways between himself and the Sacchi brothers, Defendente and Giuseppe, with whom he had worked on Annali universali di statistica. Soon after Sacchi began publishing the journal, Cattaneo wrote disparagingly that the Sacchi brothers “have set themselves up with Cosmorama to explain little pictures to children” (Defendente Sacchi 289). In the decades before 1848, Lombard bourgeois journalism thus begins to articulate some of the discursive options that would be more fully developed in the center-north in the decades after unification. A dual vision of the south as both backward and picturesque begins to take form and, along with it, a tendency for these two perspectives to be distributed in different types of publications and areas of cultural practice.12 During the first decades of the nineteenth century a new form of pictorial culture emerged in Milan; images were produced and consumed by growing numbers of middle-class viewers and readers. There was a steady increase in the number of paintings hung at annual exhibitions (Gozzoli and Rosci 135–40); the 1820s witnessed the proliferation of illustrated books, especially those dedicated to travel and to popular customs, both within Italy and beyond (Mazzocca 368); and in 1827–28 the first lithographic presses appeared in Lombardy (Gozzoli and Rosci 137). These new technologies of artistic production served not only to meet the demand of a growing market for images but helped to create it. In 1834–35, following the example of the English Penny Magazine, founded in 1832, the first illustrated weekly magazines began to appear in Italy.13 The critical comments of one contemporary observer a few months later vividly evoke the cultural atmosphere in which the first issues of Cosmorama pittorico appeared. In an article published in the politically conservative and aesthetically traditionalist Biblioteca italiana, the anonymous critic relates the success of this type of publication to the proliferation of the “pictorial” and the commercialization of the image in contemporary society: What people won’t do on this miserable earth to create new sources of profit, exciting human curiosity with the most time-honored means! 12. These two interrelated tendencies will be a primary concern in the last three chapters of this book. 13. See Giordano 15–48. On the Penny Magazine, see Patricia Anderson 50–83.

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Once upon a time the fine arts only concerned themselves with certain determinate objects, which by their very nature could be truly called pictorial, or picturesque. Now the whole world has become their dominion. Every other day we see new publications sprouting up on the other side of the Alps, and in Italy too, called pictorial worlds, universal worlds, picturesque universes, representations of the world, pictures of nations and families, and—it amounts to the same thing— cosmoramas, dioramas, universal magazines, picturesque magazines, universal theaters, and other works of this sort with varied and more or less specious titles, all of which basically contain the same things, only arranged differently and described and represented from different points of view.14

Founded in 1835, Cosmorama pittorico was among the most successful of this new breed of publication. It provided Lombard readers for the first time with a weekly publication containing figurative and textual treatments of a dizzying array of subjects: botany, geology, technological progress, history, the arts.The rubric under which most illustrations were grouped in the magazine’s own annual index, however, was picturesque scenes: mostly of Lombardy but also of other parts of Italy and Europe and, much more rarely, of the world beyond. What Cosmorama pittorico enabled, in fact, was a new, pictorial way of articulating local bourgeois identity vis-à-vis other peoples and parts of the world. The cover of the first issue for 1836 provides a particularly clear example of this new visual form of identity construction (figure 4). The first paragraph of the text, titled “The Antipodes,” reads: When we speak of some being who is our complete opposite we often say that it is at the antipodes. Let’s now take a little look, with the help of figurative images, at the kind of physiognomy these antipodes have, which for us are the inhabitants of the maritime world, or more precisely the world of Oceania. They are certainly not beautiful folks, whose company you would enjoy sharing. But in the natural order everything is right: nature wanted the most savage peoples under the feet of the most cultured peoples in the world, the Europeans. (my emphasis)

This article assumes an identification between the categories of Lombard and European: we embraces both. One imagines that the category of 14. The passage is quoted in Mazzocca 376; the article originally appeared in the April-June 1835 issue of Biblioteca italiana. On Biblioteca italiana see Roberto Bizzocchi’s book of the same name; Bizzocchi notes that the section dedicated to the figurative arts tended to be one of the most traditional parts of the magazine (“Biblioteca italiana” 97–99). On Biblioteca italiana see also Greenfield 150–52. On the commercialization of the pictorial, see Fusco 781; Gozzoli and Rosci 135–38.

4. “The Antipodes.” Cosmorama pittorico, 1836.

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Italian overlaps with those of Lombard and European in this instance as well. But the fit is not always so neat. A survey of the magazine in its first year of publication reveals a more complex articulation of Lombard identity in relation to other areas and peoples in Europe and in Italy itself.15 How does Cosmorama pittorico represent the Mezzogiorno? How, more precisely, does the magazine represent Lombard identity in relation to the Mezzogiorno? Not surprisingly, Milan and Lombardy-Venetia receive the most coverage in the magazine: one out of three illustrations deals with this area. Most of the remaining illustrations are distributed more thinly across the rest of Italy and Europe, scattered in concentrations of various sizes. Only one out of fifteen illustrations comes from beyond the borders of Europe. Among the areas that receive the most attention beyond Lombardy-Venetia is the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. There may be only one-third as many illustrations from the Mezzogiorno as there are from Lombardy-Venetia, but within a broader Italian and European framework, places and peoples of the south are clearly of some interest to the magazine’s readers. This is particularly evident in the inaugural issue, the cover picture of which is a scene from Naples (figure 5). Moreover, an illustration and article from Sicily in which Mount Etna figures prominently appear at the end of this issue (figure 6).16 Insofar as the first issue of any magazine, and the cover in particular, tends to have a special, programmatic function, it makes perfect sense that this journal dedicated to the “pictorial” and “picturesque” representation of the world would choose two of the most picturesque subjects in the European cultural imagination, Naples and Mount Etna, and more generally that it would begin with an illustration from the south. Let us consider a few of the salient features of the ten illustrations and articles dedicated to the south in 1835. In comparison to the forty representations from Lombardy-Venetia, the ten illustrations from the south provide a highly restrictive and uniform vision of the people and places of that region, from both a geographical and a thematic point of view. In the first place, the magazine covers only two southern areas: six of the ten ar15. A review of representations of the south in Cosmorama pittorico during the remainder of the 1830s reveals characteristics that are similar to those I shall analyze below. The magazine survived as a weekly until 1849; in 1851, it began a second series as a daily; see Giordano 72–73. 16. Each weekly issue of Cosmorama pittorico was numbered but dated only by the year. Unless otherwise noted, all references are taken from the 1835 volume, with the issue and page number included parenthetically in the text.

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ticles are dedicated to Naples and environs, the rest to the eastern part of Sicily. No other part of the south is mentioned in the magazine. More striking than these geographical limits, however, are those of a thematic nature. To be sure, the articles touch on a variety of subjects. The article that accompanies the cover illustration of Sant’Elmo Castle in Naples addresses Neapolitan history, art, and architecture; the article on Catania offers a varied description of its urban spaces and institutions. But one element connects all ten of the articles—the earth. In eight articles a volcano is mentioned (either Vesuvius or Etna), while the other two are dedicated to some type of speleological phenomenon (cave dwellings and subterranean chambers). All representations of southern Italy are inflected in some way by the force of the earth. Almost all the articles describe how human life in the south is enmeshed with, if not overwhelmed by, subterranean forces, whether on the slopes of Vesuvius and Etna or in the caves of southeastern Sicily. There is, then, a specific form of the picturesque that the south assumes in Cosmorama pittorico, one where the earth and, above all, volcanoes play a predominant role. In contrast to numerous illustrations from the centernorth, none from the south focuses exclusively on a monument or building, in short on an example of human civilization. The title of the first cover illustration directs our attention to Sant’Elmo Castle, yet the castle is curiously in the background (in the upper right-hand corner), perched on a hilltop and overshadowed by clouds. The waterfront scene with people on the shore, sailboats, and the white wall of the Castel Nuovo behind them occupies more of our attention. Certainly the single most striking southern image for Lombard readers in 1835 was Vesuvius in Eruption, the cover illustration from one of the last issues of the year (figure 7). Both this and the Sant’Elmo Castle illustration point to another aspect of the south that recurs in Cosmorama: the sea. The seashore is mentioned or depicted in relation to the two port cities discussed, Naples and Catania, and their two adjacent volcanoes (as we see in figures 5 and 7). This might escape our attention if it were not in marked contrast to the illustrations from the center-north. As we have seen, seaside scenes, along with volcanoes, constitute the two main visual commonplaces of the picturesque south from the end of the eighteenth century forward. But what of the social dimension of the south in Cosmorama pittorico? Are we presented with nothing but volcanoes, caves, and coasts? By no means. While the natural focus is evident, a two-part article on the Neapolitan lazzaroni discusses southerners themselves. Like most of the texts in Cosmorama pittorico, “Napoli and Environs” was written by Defendente

5. Sant’Elmo Castle in Naples. Cosmorama pittorico, 1835.

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6. Etna (Mongibello) in Sicily. Cosmorama pittorico, 1835.

Sacchi, the magazine’s founding editor.17 This is the one text to be considered in this chapter written by a central-northerner who actually visited the south. Yet it is equally significant that Sacchi’s observations are based on a trip taken to Naples in 1818, seventeen years earlier.Thus, while presenting his article as an eyewitness account, Sacchi nevertheless gestures, however slightly, toward a gap between his account and the contemporary social reality of Naples. Sacchi begins by lauding the beauty of this “enchanting corner of Italy,” with Vesuvius rising up “clothed in a column of smoke and announcing the overwhelming force of nature” (45: 354). Yet, he writes, however incomparable its beauty, this “smiling” display of nature and sky would be lifeless “if it were not for a numerous, vivacious people, full of fire” (45: 354). Sacchi appears concerned to inform the reader that the article will shift attention away from the more familiar aspect of Naples, its natural beauty, toward its anthropological dimension. At the same time he insists that he will not discuss another aspect of Naples, the fact that it is the capital of a flourishing kingdom, rich in agriculture, art, and commerce. Both these aspects

17. Defendente Sacchi contains a range of essays dedicated to his various intellectual activities as well as a complete bibliography of his writings. On his journalistic work in particular, see 287–301.

7. Vesuvius in Eruption. Cosmorama pittorico, 1835.

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of Naples would merit discussion, he suggests, “but the part of this city we are most curious about is the people, about which it will be useful to say a few things, for in our parts we still have false opinions of them” (45: 354). The people to whom he refers are the lazzaroni, that special class of indigents whom he equates with the Neapolitan people as a whole.18 It is notable that Sacchi introduces his observations as a form of counterrepresentation, going on to review and challenge a set of stereotypes propagated by “travelers.” The lazzaroni are not the “pariahs of Italy,” he writes, “not a hoard of brigands, not barbarians in the midst of Italian civilization. Here is what de Lalande and Madame de Staël said about them—all exaggerations” (45: 354). It is also striking that while Sacchi attributes the production of these stereotypes to “foreigners,” he acknowledges that “our” opinions of the lazzaroni are mistaken. Lombards, in other words, play a passive and derivative role in the production of these images; Sacchi frames his intervention as a patriotic refutation of foreign prejudices. Here, and in a few other places in a more blatant fashion, Sacchi marks his discourse as patriotic, as a valorization of a part of the readers’ patria. But this attempt to show the more favorable side of the Neapolitans and dispel the problematic aspects also needs to be understood in terms of the picturesque strategies of Cosmorama pittorico. The magazine’s aim is to inform and give pleasure to its Milanese readers, not to engage them in the consideration of serious social problems. Though there are suggestions en passant that southern society is inferior in certain respects to that of the north, on the whole the approach is nonevaluative.19 The function of the lazzaroni in this article is rather to provide Milanese readers with the delectation of cultural difference. Sacchi stresses that the people of Naples are in fact “different from the people in other cities of Italy” (45: 354). While attempting to counter the negative stereotypes he mentions at the outset, the overarching thrust of the article is therefore to depict a singular and curious people. He is quite above the board about this focus. With his initial shift of attention away from the more modern aspects of Naples—the rich agriculture, art, and

18. On the lazzaroni, see Galasso, “Magnifiche sorti” 252–53; Mozzillo, Frontiera 79–123, “Immagine del Mezzogiorno” 73–83, Napoletano 69–100; Valenzi. 19. The article accompanying the cover illustration from Naples states that the church of San Martino “combines that which you rarely find in the architecture of the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: richness, taste, majesty” (1: 2). The article on Catania notes that the university has worthy professors, “only that they lack many of those excellent means and conveniences that we have to assist us in instruction: the professor of botany, for example, has no other garden with which to teach his pupils than that of Etna” (5: 40).

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commerce that would link it to the north—Sacchi made it clear that he was interested in what was peculiar about the city. The rest of the article bears out this orientation, with its emphasis on what is “strange” and “curious” about the lazzaroni and Naples: their extraordinary passions, superstitions, customs, their voracious consumption of a strange food called pizza. This is, in short, a consummately picturesque people. Sacchi has thus added to the picturesque representations focusing on volcanoes a more anthropological form of the picturesque. Yet even this social dimension is inflected by the discourse of nature. In this article the lazzaroni are fiery like the volcano that looms over their shoulders. Although he begins by defending them from the harshest foreign stereotypes, his article remains characteristic of European views of the lazzaroni, and of Naples, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Atanasio Mozzillo observes, the lazzaroni are the very emblem of napoletanità, of a city “where nature excludes history, overwhelms it and forces it to revert to a state of primitive happiness.”20 Thus while Lombardy-Venetia is a varied world, the south is dominated by volcanoes and by nature more generally, and is populated by picturesque characters. Both this southernness and this contrast with Lombardy are emphasized in the last line of the article: “Such is this poor, clamorous people, which doesn’t have much, a great dramatic character from the southern part of Italy, unlike anything you could ever find in Lombardy” (46: 367). What can one find in Lombardy? We need not look far for an answer. The title of the next article a few lines below reads, “Navigational Canal between Milan and Pavia.” While the Neapolitans burst out in fits of allegria, dancing “a kind of fandango” called the tarentella (46: 367), the march of progress in Lombardy continues.

a different view from milan: carlo cattaneo Reckoned by many to be the finest intelligence of the Risorgimento, Carlo Cattaneo was an essayist of extraordinary scope and “a tireless publicist for scientific advance and technological improvement” (Thom, “More” 25). Few intellectuals of the nineteenth century expressed a more passionate and intelligent commitment to progress than Cattaneo, not only in his native Lombardy, but in Italy, Europe, and the world beyond. Cattaneo was, in the words of Luciano Cafagna, “a Lombard for Europe.”21 How did southern Italy fig-

20. See Frontiera 44–45, as well as Napoletano 69. 21. Cafagna sums it up thus: “Cattaneo is the great protagonist of a cultural operation for progress. And he is Lombard, profoundly Lombard. But he belongs to

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ure in his vision of Italian and European civilization more generally? It is well known that Cattaneo was primarily concerned with Lombardy in the broader context of northern Italy and western Europe; his attention rarely wandered south of Rome. For such a wide-ranging intellect, this geographical limit itself suggests that he viewed southern Italy as somehow extraneous to the more advanced European civilization of which Lombardy formed a conspicuous part. Cattaneo nevertheless had something to say about the south. In the following pages I shall attempt to provide a more detailed view of what the Mezzogiorno meant to Cattaneo, exploring the significance of his few observations on the subject in two texts from 1836 and 1845.22 The two texts we shall now consider undoubtedly have a good deal in common. In both, Cattaneo reviews texts by southern authors; he therefore represents the south through the citation from, summary of, and commentary on southern representations. Each text appeared in one of the two Milanese journals that, along with Cattaneo’s own Il Politecnico, most forcefully expressed the rational, progressive vision of Italian civilization in the decades before 1848: the first in Annali universali di statistica, the journal where Melchiorre Gioia’s response to Bonstetten’s Man of the South and Man of the North had appeared a decade earlier and with which both Cattaneo and his teacher, Giandomencio Romagnosi, were closely involved during the first half of the 1830s; the second in Rivista europea, with which Cattaneo was also closely associated between 1845 and 1848.23 Both texts are clearly motivated by a patriotic interest in the nation as a whole and are thus encouraging and supportive, avoiding any overt emphasis upon southern difference. Both texts nevertheless point out backward aspects of the south and suggest that the region lacks characteristic features of bourgeois civilization in the north. This is particularly evident in the second text, while the picture offered in the first is more mixed. The 1836 essay begins on an extremely positive note, clearly announced by the title itself, “The State of the Finances in the Kingdom of Naples, with Some Observations on the Growing Prosperity of that Country.” The text consists of Cattaneo’s review of a book by a European culture of which he is a champion in Lombardy—Lombards for Europe, we could say” (“Lombardo per l’Europa” 233). 22. I refer much more briefly to Cattaneo’s better-known essay of 1841, “Della Sardegna antica e moderna.” 23. On Annali, see La Salvia, Giornalismo lombardo; Garrone and Della Peruta 136–39; Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood 24–60. For the relevant scholarship on Rivista europea, see note 25 below.

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Giuseppe Della Valle, a functionary in the Neapolitan Ministry of Finance in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Cattaneo begins with two points of praise. First he commends Della Valle for his intelligence in the field of economic analysis; then he cites Della Valle’s own praise of Ferdinand II and the positive developments in the kingdom since 1830. Most of the article consists of Cattaneo’s summary of and citations from Della Valle’s account, which describes intelligent and largely successful attempts to administer the economy of the kingdom. He cites the statement, for example, that in 1835, “through increased vigilance and frugality, as well as through increased prosperity,” the finances of the kingdom are “in better shape than in many other states” (“Stato delle finanze” 103–4). This positive view is characteristic of the essay as a whole. Cattaneo essentially endorses the position of Della Valle; the last pages of the review, in fact, consist entirely of citations from Della Valle’s book, the overarching theme of which is progress in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Nevertheless in the immediately preceding pages a somewhat different perspective emerges, one that both is more negative and gestures toward an unfavorable comparison with areas in the north. In these pages, too, intermingled with italicized phrases from Della Valle’s text, Cattaneo insinuates some of his own views. The first point Cattaneo emphasizes is the problem of the lottery. Cattaneo takes up Della Valle’s suggestion that the lottery be suppressed, for the effects of the lottery in the kingdom are more pernicious than in any other country, because those peoples have for centuries been under the yoke of an arbitrary and prohibitive system, enemy of all industry, and are extremely inclined to trust in fortune more than in their own assiduous labors and savings. (“Stato delle finanze” 108)

This is an admixture of Cattaneo and Della Valle, with the latter’s words marked by italics. Together they highlight two interrelated points: that southern peoples lack good bourgeois habits, and that this lack results from centuries of misrule. Cattaneo then adds: “It would greatly relieve the misery and corruption [in the kingdom] if that money could be used in the creation of savings banks, which not only help commerce and agriculture, but help families cultivate a sense of measure and foresight, which is the foundation of public virtue and national honor” (“Stato delle finanze” 108). Cattaneo has highlighted in Della Valle’s text one of the key differences between the center-north and south before unification, the existence of savings banks in the center-north. This difference had profound implications for the differential paths of the two areas after unification, and Cattaneo was not

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the only Lombard to stress this special feature of his native region.24 In his response to Bonstetten, Melchiorre Gioia had celebrated the existence of banks in Lombardy-Venetia in the pages of this same journal a decade earlier. In Cattaneo’s review, savings banks in fact constitute the first in a set of manifestations of bourgeois society that he enumerates further below. As a conclusion to his own remarks and introduction to those of Della Valle he writes: We include below some passages in which the author informs us of the general progress of that country, which, if it remained behind many other parts of Italy in previous centuries, is now proceeding with such rapid prosperity that it will soon be an example and encouragement to all. But it is necessary for those men not to wait another century to institute savings banks, elementary schools (especially for girls), schools in prisons, nurseries, provincial roads, circulating libraries, and all the other noted stimuli to industry and the fiber of society. It is necessary for the spread of good economy to dissipate the dreams of Colbertism and to promote the rights of universal commerce. (“Stato delle finanze” 110)

The contrastive “but it is necessary” introduces Cattaneo’s own emphasis, which gestures toward the lack of various forms of infrastructure and civil society in the south. He also significantly warns against “Colbertism,” or the protectionist economic policy that the Bourbons would in fact accentuate in the coming years. Cattaneo thus offers a reasonably balanced view of the socioeconomic situation in the kingdom. With an overarching emphasis on the positive, he nevertheless mentions significant problems, connecting them to a long legacy of misrule. He also notes the absence of certain components of civil society and economy found in the north. There is a general appreciation for the current government’s policies, but there is also a fateful warning about protectionism. Nine years later, in the review article published in Rivista europea in 1845, Cattaneo’s attention to the ills in the south has considerably increased; almost nothing remains of his previous accent on the kingdom’s prosperity. It was not only Cattaneo’s thought but Milanese bourgeois culture that had evolved, and Rivista europea itself is a prime expression of that evolution. Founded in Milan in 1838, Rivista europea brought together many of the finest journalists writing in Lombardy in the decade before 1848.25 As its title suggested, the journal sought to discuss and promote Italian civilization in the 24. See the map of banks in Italy in 1878 in Polsi 372–75, where the densely dotted center-north contrasts dramatically with the south. 25. See Pettinari; Ambrosoli; Berengo, Intellettuali e librai 217–21; Meriggi, Milano borghese 115–17; Greenfield 186–90.

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broader context of contemporary Europe. Though it was primarily a literary journal, it espoused the view that “the progress of Italian civilization in the nineteenth century called for the active diffusion of science and industry” (quoted in Greenfield 186). The journal’s progressive liberalism was accentuated after 1844, when it became the unofficial organ of the Society for the Encouragement of Sciences,Arts, and Letters (Meriggi, Milano borghese 116). The next year Carlo Tenca assumed the editorship, signing Cattaneo on as the Rivista’s most prestigious regular contributor.26 According to Marco Meriggi, this society, and the Rivista europea with which it was closely linked, is the paradigmatic expression of the flowering of the bourgeois liberal “spirit of association” that took place in Milan during the 1840s.27 Cattaneo’s remarks on the south in this review were thus written for a readership that constituted a sort of progressive bourgeois vanguard, dedicated to a Lombardy and an Italy integrated with contemporary European civilization. Unlike the review for the Annali, the review for Rivista europea does not focus on the south but rather on Italy as a whole. For that very reason it provides a more revealing formulation of a differentiated imaginative geography of the peninsula. Cattaneo’s text consists of his review of the Annuario geografico italiano for 1845. Founded the previous year by the geographer Annibale Ranuzzi, the Annuario was a yearly volume of reports from every corner of Italy to the Office for Geographic Correspondence in Bologna. Cattaneo’s review consists of his summary and commentary upon nine of these reports, prefaced by an opening statement about the current state of the geographic enterprise in Italy. In the opening pages he notes the worthy efforts made by Italian geographers in recent years, despite the fact that their research, unlike that of their English, French, Dutch, and Russian counterparts, suffers from a lack of governmental support. More specifically he reminds readers of the aim of Italian geographers “to illustrate the bel paese piece by piece” (“Annuario” 80). Only in this way, he writes, will it be possible “to redeem Italy from the idealized and strange representations that foreigners usually produce of it” (“Annuario” 80). He notes that he himself had sought to do this in Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia, the essay he had published the previous year, and praises the editor of the Annuario for seeking to further this enterprise. Although the essay appears to be casually organized, a careful reading reveals that Cattaneo has sought, through his selection and summary of the nine reports, to offer his own kind of illustration of Italy “piece by piece.” 26. Cattaneo had just closed down his own journal, Il Politecnico, and was given a special contract with Rivista europea; see Armani 64–65; Ambrosoli 383. 27. Milano borghese 112.

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We find moreover that the essay has a kind of geographical symmetry: four of the reports he selects deal with the center-north and four deal with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while the first, on the topic of foreign-speaking populations in Italy, ranges from south to north up the entire peninsula. The first is by far the longest summary in the article. The overall structure of the article therefore suggests some sort of ideal balance between the northern and southern parts of the peninsula, a balance that is all the more noteworthy in that the actual proportion of reports in the volume is more than three to one in favor of the north. Yet Cattaneo’s actual observations on these different areas reveal a marked unevenness of perspective.To begin with, the first of these regional “pieces” is nothing less than the whole of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, its size in dramatic contrast to that of the next area discussed, the island of Capraia off the coast of Tuscany, “three miles across in the widest place” (“Annuario” 88).This contrast points more generally to the marked difference in the overall dimensions of the central-northern and southern areas Cattaneo selects, which are extremely limited in the former case and, with one exception, vast in the latter. The most significant contrast is at another level, however. A close reading of the text reveals that all four of the summaries from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies highlight problematic aspects of the southern society and economy, whereas those from the center-north tend to be positive or, in the case of rainfall measurements in Parma, scientifically neutral. From first to last the summaries from the kingdom offer a generally negative and in some cases dire picture of life. The first stands out in particular. This is a report by the Neapolitan economist Matteo De Augustinis that addresses “the causes that undermine population growth in the Two Sicilies” (“Annuario” 88). The topic itself is telling. Among many Italian social scientists during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, population growth and population density in particular were virtually synonymous with progress and civilization. As the Tuscan statistician Luigi Serristori had written a decade earlier, the “natural increase of the absolute population of a state is always a sign of progressive civilization.”28 For the Puglian statistician Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi, who completed his Saggio sulla Popolazione in 1839, the modest population growth in the kingdom constituted the “ineluctable proof of its relative backwardness.”29

28. Quoted in Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood 151. 29. Biagio Salvemini, Economia politica 134. Below I will discuss De Augustinis’s shift from an optimistic assessment of the situation in the kingdom during the first half of the 1830s toward a pessimistic position in the 1840s.

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In De Augustinis’s report, low population growth clearly signals a more general condition of backwardness. He begins by celebrating the natural advantages of the “envied kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” But, he continues, “instead of moving ahead of all the other states in Italy, across the Alps and beyond the seas, this kingdom has fallen very far behind and, if it is not the very last of all European countries, it is certainly among the slowest and in the greatest need” (“Annuario” 35). To support this general assertion De Augustinis then offers an impassioned and detailed description of the dire conditions in the southern countryside. Though much briefer, Cattaneo’s summary of De Augustinis’s report is equally damning and reveals a level of rhetorical intensity and verbal force unlike anything else in his article. The picture he paints is a harrowing one of “immense poverty and rudeness [rozzezza]” (“Annuario” 88). Because people in the mountains “lack local industries,” every year they must migrate to find work, returning home “tattered, exhausted, infected with fatal diseases.” The masses, he writes “go barefoot and half naked, sleep outdoors or in filthy, fetid shelters. Because of the poor state of the roads, many loads that could be carted are carried on their backs or heads: the head of a woman or man equal to the back of a donkey. They eat wild greens or nothing at all, meat only rarely” (“Annuario” 88). The list of social ills goes on. The region, in sum, is a bourgeois nightmare. If, as we saw in Forti’s text, the Sicilian efforts at progress brought honor to the Italian name, “these miseries,” Cattaneo writes, “are unfortunately a disgrace to Italian agriculture” (“Annuario” 88). There is nothing resembling this in any of the following summaries, from the center-north or south. Nonetheless, the others from the south tend to emphasize the negative as well. What we find more precisely is that the first and last of the local summaries contain the most markedly negative statements in his article and thus create a kind of rhetorical frame for Cattaneo’s representation of the south as a whole. If he began with a portrait of the miseries of southern “agriculture,” he ends with a note on the paltry manufacturing sector in Sicily, based upon the report of the Sicilian contributor Vito d’Ondes Reggio. “If two million people have no more manufacturing than this,” Cattaneo concludes, “we must indeed lament the events that reduced to such a state an island that in antiquity was the principal seat of European commerce” (“Annuario” 96).Also unique to Cattaneo’s southern discussions are his expressions of regret: the “miseries” mentioned at the end of the first piece are “unfortunate”; the historical events that reduced Sicily to its current state are “lamentable.” There is nothing unfortunate or lamentable in the center-north about the “nice-looking houses and churches”

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on the island of Capraia, the model system of government in the republic of San Marino, the “populous and beautiful shores” around Lago di Como, or the amount of rainfall in Parma. The southern summaries are also distinguished by their historical dimension. In the summaries from the center-north, there is almost no historical depth. But in the last summary on Sicily, and in the penultimate summary on the port of Brindisi, Cattaneo stresses the contrast between a glorious commercial past and the miseria of the present.We saw this in Forti, too, and Cattaneo similarly identifies and lauds signs of progress. At the conclusion of his summary on the port of Brindisi he writes: “After so many centuries of lugubrious degradation, commerce seems to promise a new life to that southern Italy that was the original and flourishing seat of commercial activity” (“Annuario” 95). Yet in contrast to his earlier review, as well as to Forti’s piece, Cattaneo’s general emphasis in this article is on the “lugubrious degradation” as opposed to the signs of improvement. For this champion of bourgeois civilization in Lombardy and other parts of Europe, the south is clearly “other.” Its ills mark it as struggling in a condition of backwardness that sets it dramatically apart from the more advanced areas of Europe. But the extent to which the south is the specular opposite of Cattaneo’s native Lombardy becomes most clear if we briefly consider the review article in relation to the essay he had written the previous year, Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia. At the beginning of his review of Annuario geografico italiano, Cattaneo cites his earlier essay on Lombardy as an example of the type of local study needed for other parts of Italy. The essay on Lombardy, with which he could presume many of his readers were familiar, thus stands as the model form of self-representation in relation to which these other regional reports are to be understood. Considered in this light, we can see that whereas the reports from the centernorth have complementary or supplementary relationships with Cattaneo’s writing in Notizie, those from the south are almost the reverse. Briefly put, those features through which Cattaneo defines the triumph of bourgeois civilization in Milan at the end of Notizie are the same ones whose absence marks the backwardness of the south in his review article: flourishing agriculture and industry, good roads, no bare feet, no filth, plenty of work, no huts but houses, a general lack of rozzezza (rudeness) (see 770–81). As we saw in the 1836 review article for Annali, Cattaneo had called attention to certain key absences in the social and economic infrastructure of the south, from banks to elementary schools to roads. But his emphasis there upon the growing prosperity of the southern kingdom pushed those negative features into the background. In the article for Ri-

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vista europea, instead, the proportions have been reversed, the emphasis shifted to the degradation of the kingdom, with few hopeful signs on the horizon. How can we explain this shift of perspective between 1836 and 1845? In the first place it reflects the changed atmosphere in the south itself and the shift in attitude among the southern intellectuals who provided Cattaneo and other Lombard journalists with a picture of life in the kingdom. The date of Cattaneo’s first article on the growing prosperity in the south coincides, in fact, with the end of a period of relative political stability and optimism in the kingdom. Biagio Salvemini notes that the decade before 1835 was “one of those moments when many thought that the backwardness of the kingdom might be overcome” (Economia politica 110). The year after the publication of Cattaneo’s article there was a turn for the worse, marked by the revolts in the south in 1837 after the cholera epidemic. This was the beginning of the regime’s antiliberal course, of a more isolationist stance, of the reinforcement of protectionist policies.30 It was, in short, the beginning of a shift in direction that disappointed and alienated liberals in the south and elsewhere in Italy, and that would feed into the anti-Bourbon campaign of the 1850s.31 In this regard, Matteo De Augustinis’s trajectory is emblematic. In the early 1830s, he had been one of the most outspoken optimists about the economic situation in the south and a staunch supporter of Bourbon policy.32 In the mid-1830s, as Ferdinand II began his repressive course, De Augustinis’s own writings were censored, and in 1837 he was arrested for the first time. Subsequently his assessment of both the Bourbons and the situation in the kingdom became increasingly critical, leading to his second

30. See Scirocco, “Dalla seconda restaurazione” 706–11 as well as Palazzolo, “Intellettuali” 59. Spagnoletti writes that after the cholera epidemic “the expectations of progress that had accompanied the crowning of Ferdinand II were profoundly diminished” (234). In particular, he writes, the epidemic “marked the beginning of the end of hopes for a form of industrial growth in the south that might change the economic destiny of the country” (264). 31. Scirocco writes that in 1836–37, Ferdinand II “disappointed the hopes for renewal that had animated the best part of the bourgeoisie on the continent and in Sicily. . . . The brief illusion that the king would pursue reforms in accord with the progressive part of the country was finished” (“Ferdinando II e la Sicilia” 298). 32. De Augustinis’s major expression of this view was his Della condizione economica del Regno di Napoli of 1833 (see Parente 35–38). Luca de Samuele Cagnazzi lambasted the text as so much pro-Bourbon propaganda and suggested that the Ministry of Finance had paid De Augustinis to write it (Parente 38). On De Augustinis’s optimistic perspective, and on the “ingenuous enthusiasm of the optimists of the early 1830s” more generally, see Salvemini, Economia politica 111–14, 132–35; Spagnoletti 234.

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arrest in 1844.33 Nor is it coincidental that during these years he and many others converted from protectionism to free trade. In a text of 1841 on customs tariffs he severely criticized the protectionist policies he had supported a decade earlier (Salvemini, Economia politica 115–16; Parente 97–107). Cattaneo’s description of the conditions in the south in the Rivista europea enable us, then, to see how the negative shift in attitude among southerners was reproduced by a northerner and published in a journal that shaped public opinion in the north. Yet, as I suggested above, Cattaneo did not simply change his mind about the south because southerners had, as it were, changed theirs. His thoughts about bourgeois civilization had evolved as well, independently of what he read about the south. Between 1836 and 1845 Cattaneo, writing in the context of a flourishing bourgeois civilization in Lombardy, through the experience of the Annali universali di statistica, of Il Politecnico, and of Rivista europea, had focused his definition of progress and civilization. Among the articles he wrote during these years was “On Ancient and Modern Sardegna,” published in Il Politecnico in 1841, where he outlines a condition of backwardness broadly in line with his article in Rivista europea. Finally, the writing of Notizie had marked a kind of culmination of his vision of progress, and the clarity of that vision is reflected in his depiction of the south in his review article. For the rest of Cattaneo’s career, the south would remain marginal to his concerns, and that very marginality would be a sign of its backwardness. But in the margins, it would continue to represent a dramatic, defining contrast with Lombardy and the center-north more generally. We find this, for example, in another of Cattaneo’s manifestos of northern greatness, the noted 1858 essay “La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane.” Toward the end of these reflections a strong differentiation between central-northern and southern Italy emerges. What Cattaneo terms “the ancient Italic principle,” the municipal principle that he champions as the animating force of Italian histories, was “distorted” in the south at the moment in the Middle Ages when it triumphed in the center-north. The “divergence” between “the vast and infirm kingdom” in the south and the diminutive yet flourishing laguna of Venice was, for example, “immense” (“Città” 431). In Cattaneo’s view the municipal principle is the very soul of Italian civilization, and a crucial part of Italy’s contribution to the making of modern Europe.34 As in his review article, Cattaneo suggests here that 33. See Parente 97, as well as the entry on De Augustinis in the Dizionario biografico 33: 332–37. 34. On Cattaneo’s celebration of cities, see Thom, “City.”

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southern Italy had formerly been more civilized than the cities of the centernorth but had then been surpassed by them and by Europe from the age of the communes forward.35 This conceptual interlinkage of the center-north, Italy, and Europe under the sign of modernity will, in fact, become the dominant vision of Italian history after unification.36 While Cattaneo stops short of saying that Italy ends at the Garigliano, he nevertheless marks the south as an other realm, distinct from the core of modern Italian and European civilization.37

the moral geography of a moderate: the south in vincenzo gioberti’s primato The Lombard journals Annali universali di statistica, Il Politecnico, and Rivista europea significantly fostered and shaped liberal public opinion in the decade before 1848. At the same time, the political tendency known as moderatism gathered strength in Piedmont and gave new impetus to the nationalist movement.38 The Moderates aimed to achieve independence through gradual social and economic reform, occupying the ideological middle ground between defenders of the status quo and radical Mazzinians seeking independence and unity through armed struggle.39 By the early 1840s “Moderate writers had won the support of sectors of educated public opinion by their cultural patriotism and their social and economic proposals for gradual, peaceful change” (Woolf, History of Italy 338). From this point on, the ideology of moderatism and Piedmont, its chief base and cen35. See also Galasso’s comments on this section of Cattaneo’s essay in “Considerazioni” 16–17 n. 1. 36. I return to this point in my discussion of Illustrazione italiana in Chapter 6. 37. After unification, however, Cattaneo’s emphasis on the gap between Lombardy and Sicily becomes, at least on one occasion, vehement. In a letter addressing the plan for a reorganization of communal districts in 1864, his sarcasm about the idea that Sicily might offer a useful administrative model is evident: “Oh blessed Sicily, which has no roads, or doctors, or schools! . . . While there is an average of 358 inhabitants per commune in Lombardy, those in Sicily have an average of eighteen times that number. . . . So the communes in Sicily are eighteen times more robust and efficient than those in Lombardy? No, dear sirs, size does not equal vitality” (quoted in Rotelli 107). 38. Greenfield 149. For a concise discussion of the relations between the journalistic activities of the Lombards and Tuscans and the ascendancy of moderatism, see Candeloro, Storia 2: 341–71. 39. On the Moderates and moderatism, see Salvatorelli, Pensiero politico 262–93; La Salvia, “Moderatismo”; Carpi, “Egemonia moderata.” La Salvia addresses the difficulty of defining moderatism in “Moderatismo” 169.

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ter of elaboration, would play an increasingly important role in the nationalist movement. The text that helped most to galvanize the national movement and to garner support for the Moderate camp was the 1843 treatise Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians by the Piedmontese priest Vincenzo Gioberti.As the title suggests, the main emphasis of the Primato is the moral and cultural superiority of Italy vis-à-vis other European nations. But as with the other texts considered in this chapter, the Primato also aims to form a new picture of the nation and to outline a unitary relation among its diverse parts. At the same time, because the Primato also contains a program for political action, it is more explicit about the way in which these different parts should interrelate: namely, in a confederation under the leadership of the pope. Gioberti’s overarching point is that Italy’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths. Indeed, the country’s “ethnographic variety” is one component of its primacy vis-à-vis other nations. In contrast to other European countries that, he suggests, comprise only one ethnographic type, Italy contains a multitude. Gioberti insists that there is no tension between this ethnographic diversity and the ideal unity of Italians, but acknowledges the need to figure out what the best relation between parts and whole might be in the future nation. It is therefore necessary “to study the different specialities of Italy’s provinces . . . noting virtues and defects and showing which of the former can be valorized and increased and which of the latter corrected” (3: 160). What is needed, in short, is a “moral geography of Italy” (3: 160). While such a survey would require “extensive research,” it is nevertheless his intention to outline “some of the specific qualities that characterize the inhabitants of the various Italian provinces” (3: 160). The first thing to note about Gioberti’s moral geography is its exceptionally figurative quality. What we find, in fact, is that he superimposes a number of different figures of the nation and its constituent parts upon one another. The first major figure used to emphasize the relation between parts and whole, and more specifically to highlight Italy’s diversity, is that of Italy as a microcosm of Europe: Italy is “the synthesis and mirror of Europe and contains within its limited scope all those ethnographic varieties that are spread across the rest of the continent” (3: 159). Italy therefore contrasts favorably with certain countries “in which an excessive emphasis on unity prevails” (3: 159). In this way Gioberti makes it clear from the outset that his ensuing discussion should be read as both a celebration of Italy’s ethnographic variety and a defense of his confederated vision of nationhood, against those fools “who would like to cancel such contrasts and diversities, reducing all the Italian states to the same form, and giving the various

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provinces a similar look” (3: 160). This is unthinkable for the “little Europe” that is Italy: “From the English and Scandinavians to the Spanish and Greeks, every nation on our continent corresponds to an Italian province, from cold Piedmont to torrid Sicily” (3: 160).40 For the moment Gioberti does not comment on the geopolitical hierarchy implicit in this set of correspondences between north and south; this issue will emerge later on in the text. Instead he proceeds to introduce a second figure, that of the human body. How do the different parts of Italy interrelate? The first image he offers is that of a “national personality” divided into various provinces “as the human body is divided into various organs and members, each of which, besides its participation in the common life, has a mode of existence and life proper to it” (3: 161). Here, too, the moral and geopolitical implications in this scheme will not be clarified until later in the text. Nevertheless, the reader’s hunch that Gioberti envisions the national body in a vertical position, with the head up in the north, and that the value attributed to the head is informed by the hierarchical view of the body present in the Western tradition from Plato forward, is not far off. The third figure that Gioberti employs is more strictly geographical, that of the Italian peninsula itself, stretching from north to south. He had already presented that sweeping, longitudinal view when introducing the comparison between northern and southern Europe and northern and southern Italy. There he figured the peninsula in terms of northern and southern extremes “from cold Piedmont to torrid Sicily,” and his discussion as a whole replicates this view, beginning with Piedmont and ending in Naples. What soon becomes clear is that Gioberti champions neither extreme but rather the center. Moving from Piedmont down the peninsula, he has words of praise and constructive criticism for each major city and region; all are part of “Italy.” Nevertheless, he privileges two provinces and their capital cities: Tuscany and Lazio, Florence and Rome. These he describes as “the two indivisible centers of the language, civilization, and religion not only of Italy but of Europe and the world,” and to these two areas he dedicates more attention than to all the others combined (3: 168). Italy is superior because of its geographical centrality in the world (see 1: 42–46). Tuscany and Rome are superior because of their centrality within Italy. Generally this means that the extremes of north and south are both de-

40. Less than a year after the appearance of the Primato, Cesare Balbo would reiterate this motif in his Delle speranze d’Italia, writing that from north to south Italy contains within it “provinces and peoples almost as different from one another as are the most northern and southern peoples of Europe” (34).

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fective; Piedmont and Naples in particular are removed from the perfection of the Tuscan-Latin center. He writes at the beginning of his discussion of Naples: Thus, as one moves from Susa [Piedmont] to Reggio [Calabria], we see the Italian genius take form, develop, and gradually grow, achieving perfection in the bicipital and monolingual center of the peninsula. But, after passing Rome, the Italian genius becomes excessive and moves away from the right temperament due to a surplus of force, just as it had fallen short of the right temperament before reaching Florence due to a lack of force. (3: 182)

Both the Piedmontese and Neapolitans need correction. Nevertheless, in their common “distance from the salubrious effects of the center” (3: 186), their defects are not equivalent. The two extremes are not equal. To begin with, there is a difference in the very makeup of the two provinces. Gioberti divides Italy into seven provinces: Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, Liguria, Tuscany, Lazio, and Naples-Sicily.41 He does not refer to these provinces as political units and makes only a glancing mention of their political situation. Gioberti’s survey is “ethnographic.” There is, however, one significant exception: he introduces the seventh province as “the kingdom of Naples with Sicily” (3: 474), thenceforth referring to it as Naples. The ethnographic province of Naples is unique in being aligned with an existing political territory. But this is not the only difference between the two provinces. Naples is almost as large as all the other provinces combined, a disproportion that reminds us of the geography outlined by Cattaneo. Moreover, its inhabitants form a relatively undifferentiated block, characterized by a certain “southernness.” Unlike any of the northern provinces (i.e., Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, Liguria), Naples is coextensive with all the “southern peoples of the peninsula” (3: 185). How, then, does Gioberti characterize the Neapolitans or, alternatively, the “southern peoples of the peninsula”? In the first place, they are introduced contrastively: the Neapolitans “are the opposite of the Piedmontese and err in excess as the latter do in lack: in the Neapolitans imagination, boldness, impetus, mobility, luxuriance of thought, of affect and of style are excessive and overflow, while in the Piedmontese they are often missing” (3: 182). The positive characteristics of the Piedmontese had been outlined at the beginning of Gioberti’s moral geography: what they lack in excite41. In conclusion Gioberti briefly discusses a number of zones that are not strictly part of Italy but “noble appurtenances of Italy in different ways”: Savoy, Sardegna, Corsica, and parts of Illyria and Dalmatia (3: 189).

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ment they make up for in strength, tenacity, moderation, a love for stability and order (3: 162). Because of these qualities they are the people “best suited for government” (3: 162; emphasis in original).42 Their “speciality,” he suggests, is to command the ship of state. The Neapolitans clearly shine in other areas. What distinguishes them is their tendency toward excess, their excellence in the arts, and their close link to nature. As we shall see, Gioberti’s insistence on this last point at the end of his discussion will ultimately redefine the meaning of the Neapolitans’ achievements in the arts. In order to explain why the southern character “tends toward the superlative,” Gioberti begins by revisiting his earlier analogy between Sicily’s moral position in Italy and those of Spain and Greece in Europe. The southern tendency to exaggerate is not due to the long Spanish domination, he writes, but rather “to the exuberance of the climate and to the [natural] qualities of the country that, situated in between Greece and Spain, participates in different ways in the nature of the Greeks and Spanish” (3: 182). But if Gioberti looks to the climate of Greece and Spain to explain the exuberant character of the Neapolitans, he turns to the ancient Greeks to account for their excellence in the arts. Southern Italy is today, “in many respects, the Greece of Italy” (3: 182). His praise for Neapolitan excellence in the arts is profuse. The Neapolitans are superior in music, “the most potent and sublime of arts,” as they are in philosophy, “the queen of human sciences.” It is clearly the latter that interests this philosopher most, for he proceeds to catalog a long line of famous southern philosophers from Pythagoras to Thomas Campanella. Gioberti’s attention then shifts to another positive attribute of the southern peoples, their military valor. “From the Sicilian Vespers to Masaniello to the most recent wars in Calabria,” he writes, “the most daunting Italian revolts against foreign occupation took place in those torrid regions, where it seems that the violence and tumult of men vie with the subterranean fires and disastrous tremors of the earth and sea” (3: 184). Here Gioberti fuses two commonplaces, one about southerners, the other about the south. On the one hand, southerners are violent, rebellious, agitated; on the other, the south is a land of volcanoes and earthquakes. A few pages later he stresses that both Sicily and the mainland south are “equally volcanic” and that “Vesuvius and Etna are probably two mouths or chimneys of the same furnace” (3: 184). This is a prime example of the close connection between southerners and nature, the earth in particular, that we have seen on other

42. Gioberti is citing a phrase from the Piedmontese historian Carlo Botta.

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occasions. From this point in Gioberti’s text forward, this linkage will become the key to his interpretation of the south. In the rest of his discussion of Naples, Gioberti develops an interlocking set of oppositions between art and nature, modernity and antiquity, north and south. The first gesture toward this set of binarisms appeared earlier in his defense of Neapolitan military valor. There he wrote that the Neapolitans “do not lack military valor, whatever the French say to the contrary. And they should remember that where the natural valor of the individual is in play, and not skill (which is almost everything in modern wars), the Neapolitans will not yield to the inhabitants of any country” ( 3: 184). One wonders at first whether this is more compliment or disparagement. The passage begins as a challenge to a stereotype that Gioberti attributes to the French.43 But Gioberti’s point in support of Neapolitan military valor is undercut by the parenthetic proposition that in modern war the valor of the individual does not count for much. While countering one stereotype, Gioberti in fact consolidates another of a broader scope.44 It is a stereotype informed by the general opposition between nature and culture that will structure the remainder of his discussion of the south. In this somewhat oblique way Gioberti introduces the interpretative framework through which all he has to say about Naples, and about the contrast between Piedmont and Naples, comes together. Through it, in fact, the disparate figures in his discussion are interwoven: Italy as little Europe, north and south, Piedmont and Naples, modern and ancient, art and nature. His conclusion about southern Italy significantly serves as the occasion for mapping out the direction of both Italian and world civilization more generally and is worth quoting at length: The hopes that the common patria places in the fervent spirit of the southern peoples of the peninsula are great; peoples that will overcome themselves and their memories when the assistance of art is conjoined 43. His attribution of this stereotype to the French is striking in that the stereotype also circulated in Piedmont at the time (Romeo, Piemonte 271). 44. It is this very point that is formulated fourteen years later by the Neapolitan publisher Francesco De Bourcard in Usi e costumi del popolo napolitano of 1857. There De Bourcard makes a point of distinguishing between the courage of peoples and their capacity in war: “the courage of peoples has nothing to do with the difficult and complicated art of war.” As Giuseppe Galasso notes, De Bourcard thus touches upon a key element in the genesis of the anti-Neapolitan stereotype. Recapitulating De Bourcard’s observations, Galasso writes, “War is one thing, a problem relating to the organization and leadership of the state, of its resources and instruments of action; the courage and mettle of individuals another” (“Stereotipo” 153).

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to the natural qualities that they abundantly possess. It is to be noted, in fact, that whatever southerners have done that is beautiful and great in endeavors of the spirit, of the hand, of the mind—and I speak not only of Neapolitans and Sicilians but of all the southern nations of the world—has been more the result of nature than of social efforts, more the work of individuals than of institutions, more the industry of instinct and native powers than of discipline and organization, whether public or private. In fact, public and private organizations instead of favoring the exercise of the noble faculties in those places where they are most abundant, either neglect or oppose it, seeking to squelch it. And thus in these countries the most exquisite fruits of the mind are, as it were, a spontaneous gift that comes into being and endures in spite of the neglect or ill will of men, like those precious fruits of the soil that nature generously plants there, and that are sought and acquired only at great price by inhabitants of less happy regions. (3: 185)

This is a striking variation on the theme of “a paradise inhabited by devils.” Humans themselves have played no role in the diverse accomplishments of southern peoples; southern Italian society has in fact stood in the way. Even the finest intellectual achievements are the “fruit of nature . . . [produced] in spite of the neglect or ill will of men.”45 Gioberti is thus clear about the specialty of this province and its role in the nation; it is, first and foremost, the delegated province of the natural. In his continuation of this passage he clarifies the broader geographical and historical dimensions in which he locates southern Italy. Now if in the northern countries of our Europe man’s will and perseverance have been capable of conquering the resistant conditions of the earth and sky and produce all those marvels of civilization that we see; if in inhospitable Britain, in the marshy fog of the Thames, the preeminent monarchy and city in the world now arise—Then of what prodigious things would the outer edge of Italy be capable if human art were to equal omnipotent nature? The balanced interaction of these two forces has, up to now, been rarely seen in the world; one was almost always detached from the other. And just as in ancient times southern nature prevailed, so in modern times northern art has predominated. Their union will take place when civilization, which Christianity carried northward, and established there with incredible efforts and travails, will

45. As we saw in Chapter 2, this view was formulated in equally extreme— and absurd—terms by Charles Dupaty in 1785: “Artistic talent is not rare in Naples: the climate and geographical location favor it. This very land, this very sea, this very sun, with a little help from Augustus and Homer, gave birth to the Aeneid” (3: 72).

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flow back south, and will pass from Europe across the rest of the world. (3: 186)

This passage serves to link up a number of issues. It situates the south in a global context, clarifying the significance of the opening equation between England-Scandinavia and Piedmont on the one hand and Spain-Greece and Sicily on the other.At the same time it offers a historical framework in which to understand “southern nature.” In a manner similar to Leopardi, the south, and nature, dominated in the past; the great civilizations are now in the north. But in contrast to Leopardi, Gioberti imagines the possible attainment of a balance between these forces in the future: in Italy, north and south, nature and culture, the ancient and modern will find their perfect equilibrium. Gioberti thus reelaborates and consolidates a number of commonplaces about the south that were current in Italian and European culture more generally during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. At the same time, we see that he offers not only his patriotic encouragement to southerners, as did Forti and Cattaneo, but tends to valorize certain aspects of their southernness. In contrast to Cattaneo, he does not evaluate the south solely according to the achievements of bourgeois civilization in northern Italy and western Europe.The overarching thrust of the Primato instead is to challenge those dominant northern models. In this broader scheme, as we saw, Gioberti championed the center, Tuscany and Rome, insofar as they constituted points of mediation between north and south, both in Italy and the world. This valorization of a Mediterranean, “central,” and to some degree “southern” civilization played no small part in the Primato’s success when it appeared in 1843. It provided Italians with a way to dignify their nation vis-à-vis the dominant “northern” powers, the French and English (see Bollati, 1008–9; Croce, Storia della storiografia 151). But while the Primato stirred the hearts and minds of Italian liberals in the 1840s, it was ultimately a more northern, Eurocentric orientation that prevailed among the Moderates when they asserted their direction over the national movement in the 1850s (Salvatorelli, Pensiero e azione 123–24). Gioberti himself, in subsequent writings, would revise his claims to an Italian, Mediterranean primacy. Already in the Prolegomeni, written the year after the Primato, Gioberti modified his position, more openly acknowledging Italy’s inferiority with respect to a number of European nations.46 By 1851 the focus of Del rinno46. Salvatorelli, Pensiero politico 278; Omodeo 146–48. In the Primato Gioberti had acknowledged Italy’s material, economic inferiority with respect to the English but argued that the spirit was the real measure of a people’s worth.

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vamento civile d’ Italia, his last major text, had clearly shifted northward. There, with his theory of Piedmontese hegemony in the national movement and his vision of Italian nationality not superior to but integrated with contemporary Europe (Salvatorelli, Pensiero politico 292–93), he articulated a position more closely aligned with the core of the Moderate leadership. And as we shall see in the following chapter, the mounting pressure of this European vision of Italy would significantly affect the representation of the south from the 1850s on.

the view from vesuvius: leopardi’s “la ginestra” We have seen that the natural dimension of the south was emphasized in the texts and illustrations considered in this chapter in a variety of ways— each, however, from what could be termed a “northern” perspective. For Forti, Sicily was exceptionally “favored by nature” but in a dismal state and required the kind of economic development exemplified by Tuscany. Cattaneo emphasized the lack of (northern) civilization in the south in different terms. He significantly avoids the commonplace of natural southern fertility while still stressing the prominent role of nature in the south, articulating it, however, under the sign of rozzezza (rudeness). In the south, civilization does not master and therefore enhance nature, as it does in Lombardy; civilization and nature are enmeshed instead in a perverse form of equivalency: “the head of a woman or man [is] equal to the back of a donkey. They eat wild greens or nothing at all” (“Annuario” 88). In Cosmorama pittorico, the prominence of nature was not a cause for dismay but a privileged source of aesthetic interest and delectation. The fact that volcanoes and the earth were “overwhelming” and that there was a special synergy between the fiery nature of southerners and their volcanoes was curious and interesting. Gioberti, finally, combines elements of the modernizing perspective of Forti and Cattaneo and the picturesque perspective of Cosmorama pittorico. He praises the “natural” spirit of the Neapolitans, a tendency toward excess and agitation, but urges that it be tempered and governed by the more levelheaded forces of the north. The excesses of Vesuvius and Etna must be avoided, but their energy constitutes a national resource. From the mid-1800s forward, the notion of a natural, earthy, volcanic south will be an increasingly significant part of the geographical imagination of Italian elites. Conceived either as backward and as needing northern civilization in order to progress or as picturesque and as providing northern civilization with a form of nature that it either lacks or that is disappearing, southern difference will be alternately condemned or celebrated.

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In conclusion, I turn to a text that offers a radically different view of both nature and the south, Giacomo Leopardi’s last great poem, “La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto.” Written in a villa at the foot of Vesuvius one year before Leopardi’s death in 1837, “La ginestra” is an extended poetic meditation on man’s frailty and vulnerability before the force of nature.47 Using Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii to dramatize nature’s capacity to reduce all human endeavors to naught, Leopardi attacks the myths of progress and human perfectibility of the “vain and fatuous” nineteenth century. In opposition to those who champion the “magnificent and progressive destinies” of humanity, he presents the figure of the broom flower— “la ginestra”—whose nobility lies in the acceptance of its inevitable destruction by the “cruel power” of the mountain. I want to argue that there is a geographical dimension to Leopardi’s polemic in “La ginestra.” It is highly significant that the critique of modern civilization that Leopardi had elaborated over the course of his career comes, finally, to sit at the foot of Vesuvius. Refiguring Vesuvius and refiguring our perspective on the south prove to be crucial in rethinking the meaning of modern civilization and human history as a whole. As with Giovanni Verga, by shifting his perspective and situating his point of view in the south, Leopardi is able to make an extraordinarily powerful critique of the myths of bourgeois civilization. As we saw in Chapter 1, Leopardi was hardly an enemy of the modern world. In the Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians, he expressed his qualified appreciation for the forms of modern civilization and bourgeois society that had developed in the north (England, France, and Germany), while arguing that Italy was a southern country cut off in certain key ways from the experience of modernity. After he composed the Discourse in 1824, however, both Leopardi’s prose and poetry would be increasingly explicit about the limited capacity of modern civilization to decrease the suffering and unhappiness that is mankind’s lot.The triumphalism of Italian liberals, particularly those associated with the Florentine journal Antologia, and the expansion of bourgeois civilization in Italy more generally, provoked a thoroughgoing critique from Leopardi from the end of the 1820s on.48 In 1832, for example, he drew up plans for a new journal that, 47. Leopardi settled in Naples and environs in 1833, remaining there with his faithful companion Antonio Ranieri until his death. For a rich set of articles and documents relating to Leopardi’s years in Naples, see the exhibit catalog Giacomo Leopardi da Recanati a Napoli, as well as Damiani, Leopardi e Napoli. 48. See Carpi, Poeta 126–56; Panicara 1–5;Timpanaro, Antileopardiani 145–97; Botti 86. Carpi, “Egemonia moderata” 438–39 and Bellucci, G. Leopardi 91–103 em-

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although it never saw the light of day, was in essence an anti-Antologia. His “Florentine Observer,” he wrote, would not concern itself with “the increase of industry, nor with improvements to the social order, nor with the perfection of man” (quoted in Panicara 2). But it is in the “Palinode to the Marquis Gino Capponi” of 1835 and “La ginestra” of 1836 that he most forcefully articulates his critiques of modern civilization and historical progressivism. In both poems, what is essentially wrong with modern civilization is its conception of and relation to nature. In the “Palinode to the Marquis Gino Capponi,” Leopardi launches an all-out attack on bourgeois civilization and the Italian liberals—those associated with Antologia in particular—who champion the ideals of progress, increasing prosperity, and social harmony.49 “Universal love,/railways, thriving commerce,/steam power, the press” can do little to mitigate the cruelty of nature, the “unmedicable ills and sufferings/that assail frail mortals, who are born to perish,/irreparably” (vv. 42–44; 174–76). Old age and death cannot be cured by the “happy/nineteenth century any more than they could/by the ninth or tenth” (vv. 186– 88). There is little doubt that the rituals and idols of bourgeois civilization described in the “Palinode” are those of the “northern” civilization to which Leopardi had offered his praise, however qualified, in the Discourse, and which he now utterly revokes. In the “Palinode,” the description of nature’s destructive force is an interlude in an extended satirical description of liberal bourgeois culture; “La ginestra” instead shifts from the satirical mode and focuses from start to finish on nature’s destructive force and its capacity to annihilate human civilization. The myths of progress and civilization, described in such detail in the “Palinode,” are condensed in the phrase “Le magnifiche sorti e progressive” (the magnificent and progressive destinies [of mankind]) (v. 50; emphasis in original), which Leopardi quotes from another Antologia collaborator, Terenzio Mamiani, and which he glosses in a footnote as “the words of a modern man.” 50 Central to the polemical force of “La ginestra” is Leopardi’s revision of the picturesque image of Vesuvius. As we have seen phasize Leopardi’s divergence from the liberal bourgeois cultural milieus of both Florence and Milan. 49. Gino Capponi was a key member of the Antologia group. Rigoni offers a concise gloss on Leopardi’s critique in his note to the poem in Leopardi, Poesie 981–83. 50. See Nacinovich on Mamiani; Timpanaro on the particular emphasis Leopardi gives to the word progressive, which, as Timpanaro notes, was a neologism in Italian when Leopardi wrote “La ginestra” (Aspetti e figure 287–93).

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in this and the preceding chapter, from the mid-eighteenth century on Vesuvius had become a figure for Naples, for Naples and the south as a whole, and for a south under the sign of nature. From the opening lines, Leopardi makes it clear that his Vesuvius is different, a “terrifying mountain, Vesuvius the exterminator”: Qui su l’arida schiena Del formidabil monte Sterminator Vesevo . . . (vv. 1–3) Here on the arid back Of the terrifying mountain Vesuvius the exterminator . . .

These lines announce two radical and interrelated re-visionings of Vesuvius, and of nature and the natural south as well: the traditional, picturesque point of view of the volcano is absent, and the picturesque object has been transformed into a menacing, destructive force. The word Qui (here), which begins both this and the following stanza, emphatically announces the first re-vision.This is not Vesuvius viewed from across the bay, the Vesuvius on the cover of Cosmorama pittorico, or more generally, the Vesuvius that helped make the bay of Naples a privileged emblem of the picturesque from the mid-eighteenth century forward.That Vesuvius, reproduced in various media over the course of the nineteenth century, is almost always lì (there). It is just this distanced, picturesque perspective that enables the idyllic and consolatory character of the object itself. In “La ginestra” the distance of the picturesque perspective has been replaced by a new proximity. Here (qui, precisely) we are positioned on the “arid back” of the mountain. It is formidabil, not pleasing and consoling but menacing. This is Vesuvius the destroyer, which has the power to wipe out part of the human species “in a moment” 51: Dipinte in queste rive Son dell’umana gente Le magnifiche sorti e progressive. Qui mira e qui ti specchia, Secol superbo e sciocco . . . (vv. 49–53)

51. Further evidence of the greater symbolic concentration of “La ginestra” with respect to the “Palinode” is the fact that the word secolo (century), which appears ten times in the latter, appears only on this occasion in “La ginestra.”

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Portrayed on these slopes are mankind’s Magnificent and progressive destinies. Look here, gaze on your reflection here, Vain and fatuous century . . .

Hand in hand with this new proximity is the low, ground-level position that is emphasized throughout the poem. Leopardi attacks those who seek to elevate and exalt humankind, those who praise man’s state even “above that of the stars” (v. 86, as well as v. 38). The “vain and fatuous century” that Leopardi castigates cannot accept “il vero/dell’aspra sorte e del depresso loco/che natura ci diè” (the truth of the bitter fate and the low place that nature gave us, vv. 78–80). In the next stanza he writes that it is noble to acknowledge “il basso stato e frale” (the low and frail state) that destiny assigned us (v. 117). In the stanza after that, he asks mankind to remember its “stato quaggiù” (state down here, v. 186). Proximity and lowness are crucial to the representation of the true condition of humankind, finally, because our destiny is in the earth, in the most material, mineral sense. There is perhaps no poem in modern Italian literature that dwells in more detail on the earth in its geological materiality. The landscape of “La ginestra” comprises “sterile ashes,” “hardened lava,” “ashes, pumice, and rocks,” “liquefied masses,” “metals,” “fiery sands,” “dead and ashened clods,” and various other mineral forms. The earth itself is nothing more than a “grain of sand” (granel di sabbia, v. 191). And in one of the poem’s most memorable similes, humans are likened to “un popolo di formiche” (a population of ants) whose homes are hollowed out of “soft soil” (vv. 205–6) and can be destroyed in an instant.52 The poem’s geographical critique in a southern key is thus enabled by a double shift of perspective, from far to near and from high to low, summed up by the adverb quaggiù. Vesuvius is not so much a specific geographical location in “La ginestra” as a critical position and an alternative perspective on bourgeois civilization, progress, modernity, and human existence in gen-

52. Leopardi concludes this stanza-long simile with the statement: Non ha natura al seme dell’uom più stima o cura che alla formica (vv. 231–33) Nature cares no more for man’s progeny than it does for the ant

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eral. Everything looks different from the critical position that is the view from Vesuvius, “here on the arid back/of the terrifying mountain.” What is left of the north as an ideal category after the “magnificent and progressive destinies” of humanity have been shown to be illusory? And what is left of the backward south if all “forward” movement is irrelevant before the destructive force of nature, which, cycle after cycle, brings humanity back to square one (vv. 289–94)? Or, for that matter, what is left of the picturesque south, if nature promises death and destruction rather than comfort and delight? Without speaking specifically of north and south, “La ginestra” provides a radical critique of these categories and perspectives and offers an invitation to think beyond them.

4

Of Bourbons and Barbarism, 1848–1860

The years between 1848 and 1860 constitute a distinct and decisive phase in the history of imagining the south. After Ferdinand II turned against the liberal movement in Naples in May 1848, imprisoning and exiling thousands, an intense propaganda campaign was mounted against the Bourbon regime. This campaign, and widespread anti-Bourbon sentiment more generally, helped to delegitimize the regime within Italy and beyond, preparing the symbolic terrain for its growing political isolation and final military defeat in 1860–61. It was not just the Bourbon regime that was damaged by this decade of disaffection and denunciations. Though anti-Bourbon discourse had a political focus, it interacted with and ultimately reinforced certain stereotypes about southern Italian society that had taken form in Italian and European culture over the previous century. This chapter analyzes some key anti-Bourbon texts of the 1850s, exploring how they contributed to the accentuation of a negative image of the south in Italy at midcentury. Through an examination of the language employed in a variety of pamphlets, histories, and essays, I shall explore the relations between this political discourse and some of the traditional modes of representing southern Italy considered elsewhere. I begin by outlining the important role that two convergent tendencies played in defining the south as a subordinate and inferior part of the nation during the 1850s: the growing consensus for the Piedmontese leadership of the national movement and the heightened tendency to envision Italy in accord with western Europe. There was, if you will, a northernization of the national movement during the 1850s, and it is within this context, I argue, that the south was marked as different. Southerners themselves, exiled in the north, played a crucial role in this process, but the anti-Bourbon text that had the most profound effect upon public opinion both in Italy and Europe more widely was 126

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William Gladstone’s Letters to Lord Aberdeen of 1851. Gladstone’s Letters provide a good point of departure for a number of reasons. In the first place, they demonstrate some of the interrelations between denunciations of the regime and negative representations of southern Italian society. At the same time, Gladstone’s Letters signal the convergence between the European and Italian dimensions of anti-Bourbon discourse. As we shall see, the question of Italian nationhood does not figure in Gladstone’s discussion of the Bourbon regime; in the 1850s he did not actively support it (see Schreuder 484). For Italian patriots, southerners primarily, who wrote against the Bourbons, Gladstone’s Letters were nevertheless an obligatory point of reference.Their insistent citation of his text reflects not only the power of his rhetorical performance but an overlap between his vision of European civilization and the Italian liberals’ vision of an Italy aligned with Europe. In the second half of the chapter I turn to a selection of anti-Bourbon texts written by Italians. Each of the texts to be considered addresses and, at least in one case, reinforces the idea that it is not only the Bourbons who deviate from “Europe” and “Italy” but the society and culture of the south more generally. These documents of the anti-Bourbon campaign provide an important illustration of how a vision of southern difference was discursively constructed in the context of a specific political and ideological struggle. It was not so much the south that changed during the 1850s as the ideological framework within which it was conceived.

europe and italy, north and south In my discussion of Carlo Cattaneo, I argued that the conservative turn taken by Ferdinand II in the second half of the 1830s helped to turn many liberals against the Bourbon regime in both the south and center-north, tempering the optimism of supporters, reinforcing the doubts of those who had originally offered a more sober diagnosis of social and economic conditions in the Mezzogiorno. When Cattaneo summarized the reports sent north by southern liberals in 1844, he no longer highlighted the “growing prosperity” of the southern kingdom—as he had in 1836—but rather its “immense poverty and rudeness.” As liberals in the center-north looked for ways to increase the economic integration among their regions and, in turn, to connect their regions to the rest of Europe, the south increasingly appeared to stand apart. When, in 1840, an agreement was drawn up in Vienna to establish copyright on the Italian peninsula, every Italian government adhered to it except that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Henceforth literary piracy would be subject to prosecution by governments of the center-north;

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only south of the Garigliano would it still be condoned (Berengo, “Intellettuali e organizzazione della cultura” 307).1 The reputation of the Bourbons, and the image of the south, thus was far from rosy before 1848. Yet, as Marta Petrusewicz shows in her study Come il Meridione divenne una Questione, disenchantment with the Bourbon regime and concerns about the south increased dramatically in the aftermath of 1848. It is, indeed, during the 1850s that the reputation of the Bourbons was damaged irrevocably. Through the cultural elaboration and ideological contest of these years, the idea of Bourbon bad government (malgoverno) was established as one of the enduring myths of the united Italy. It was not until the 1990s that this black legend came under serious scrutiny and a broader movement to revalorize the Bourbons emerged in diverse sectors of southern Italian culture.2 Before examining the specific concepts and figures that were used to inflict this damage, it will be helpful to consider some of the reasons this rhetoric was so effective. The first point, most directly related to the repression of the southern liberals after 1848, is that many leading southern intellectuals, and thousands of others, were forced into exile, mostly in Piedmont but in Liguria, Switzerland, France, and England as well.3 For obvious reasons they were disenchanted with the Bourbons, and many were active in the campaign to denounce them. But many also were frustrated with their countrymen who remained behind and who appeared to offer no resistance to the repressive regime that had imprisoned, tortured, and exiled them (see Petrusewicz 105–58). The significance of the southern exiles’ denunciations, however, becomes clear only in light of their exaltation of Piedmont and in relation to the ascendancy of Piedmont more generally within the nationalist movement over the course of the 1850s. For many southern exiles, as for many patriots from other regions, Piedmont, and the House of Savoy, was becoming the great

1. On the cultural isolationism and economic protectionism of the Bourbon government during the 1830s, see Palazzolo, “Intellettuali.” 2. This new tendency has assumed a variety of forms, ranging from the serious and balanced scholarly reevaluation of the Bourbons in Angelantonio Spagnoletti’s Storia del Regno delle Due Sicilie to the neo-Bourbon chauvinism of numerous journalistic publications, e.g., Il tempo dei Borboni: La memoria del Sud by Roberto Maria Selvaggi (a book prominently displayed at one newsstand in Naples throughout the second half of the 1990s). Another sign of the times is “The Bourbons: A Journey into the Past, 1734–1861,” a set of exhibits and events sponsored by various public agencies in Campania and other southern regions between May 2000 and April 2001. 3. Scirocco calculates that over thirty thousand Neapolitans took refuge in Piedmont at this time (“Periodo” 19).

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hope for national independence. For all patriots outside of Piedmont, support for Piedmont involved a certain renunciation of regional identity, whether Lombard, Venetian, Emilian, Tuscan, Neapolitan, Sicilian, or other. But for Neapolitans the rupture was more dramatic in two respects. In the first place, the Neapolitans were subjects of the only other kingdom on the peninsula, the kingdom, as it was known, a kingdom, moreover, of vastly greater proportions than the Kingdom of Sardinia. To envision the nation under the aegis of the House of Savoy was to articulate Italian national identity in a radically new way, to shift the center of political gravity northward. The Neapolitans’ support for Piedmont differed from that of many centralnortherners in another way as well. Liberals of the center-north had established some common bonds over the previous half century. Ever since the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, central-northern elites had grown accustomed to interaction and collaboration with one another at an administrative, economic, and cultural level. By 1850 the sense of a common habitus had developed, among Piedmontese and Lombards especially, but among Tuscans, Emilians, and others as well. Contacts between central-northerners and southerners had not developed to the same extent. In shifting their allegiance to the Kingdom of Sardinia, southerners thus supported a state that was much more “foreign” to them than to central-northerners, whereas centralnortherners were seeking to consolidate a process of amalgamation that was well under way.4 Central-northerners also were aiming to consolidate a process of amalgamation between their regions and the rest of Europe. As we saw in Chapter 1, the tendency to define Italy vis-à-vis western Europe, France, and England, in particular, was a crucial component of Italian culture from the mid-eighteenth century forward. In the 1850s this emulative and integrative vision of Italy’s relationship to modern European civilization intensified. In her study of patriotic statistics in nineteenth-century Italy, Silvana Patriarca highlights this tendency in the statistical investigations of the 1850s. Over and above their differences of ideology and approach, they all “aimed at establishing a positive identity for Italy and its inhabitants . . . such as that possessed by the nations of north-western Europe, the leaders of political and economic progress” (Numbers and Nationhood 153). Gioberti’s 4. For a general overview of these developments, see Meriggi, Breve storia 3–47, as well as Romanelli, Italia liberale 19–27. Greenfield provides a more detailed documentation of the interactions among Lombards and Piedmontese in the decades before 1848, noting, for example, how in the Milanese Rivista europea “the reader is given the impression that Piedmont and Lombardy are one country except for the political contrast between them” (275).

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idea of an Italian primato had stirred the hearts and minds of patriots in the mid-1840s, but after 1848 the vision of nationalists became more focused and practical. As Raymond Grew notes with regard to the National Society, which played an important role in furthering the movement for unification in the late 1850s, “the dream was no longer of an Italy different from or better than the other European states. The goal was to see that she caught up with her sisters” (150).5 This tendency was inseparable from the ascendancy of the Moderate leader Camillo Cavour within Piedmont and of Piedmont within the national movement over the course of the 1850s. Cavour’s entire career as a thinker and statesman is animated by a fervent desire to make Italy a more European country (Cafagna, Cavour 81–87). After 1848 it was precisely Piedmont under his leadership that provided patriots with the example and experience of an Italian state aligning itself with the political, social, and economic movement of western Europe (see Castronovo, Piemonte 7–8). Increasingly, patriots looked to Piedmont and its monarchy not only as the instrument of Italy’s liberation from foreign rule but as the nucleus of the new nation (Romeo, Piemonte 115–80). What took place in effect was a remapping of the imaginative geography of the nation, a gravitation toward the north and toward Europe. But this northern tendency was not only a function of the rise of Piedmontese political power and prestige. Elites from other regions of the north and center also conceived of independence in terms of consolidating the political, economic, and cultural ties between their areas with the most advanced parts of Europe. Marco Minghetti and Stefano Jacini of Lombardy, Luigi Carlo Farini of Emilia, Bettino Ricasoli of Tuscany—these are just a few of the Moderate leaders of the center-north who embraced this vision and who, together with the Piedmontese, would direct the movement of independence and form the core of the government of the Right in the first decade and a half of unification.6 The central-northern focus of these Moderate leaders is reflected by the fact that, until 1859, they tended to conceive of independence in terms of the formation of a Kingdom of Upper Italy under Piedmontese leadership, in some type of confederation with kingdoms of the center and the south. It is striking that, while opinions about the specific political form and territorial outlines of the independent Italy differed, both among the Moderates and, a fortiori, between the Moderates and those of more rad-

5. More generally, for an incisive set of observations on the relation between what Caracciolo terms “Europocentrism” and Italian unification, see Caracciolo, Istituzioni 20–21. 6. On this aspect of the Moderates, see Romanelli, Italia liberale 19–27.

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ical views like Carlo Cattaneo, they nevertheless shared a common vision of a European future for the regions of the center-north within the context of an independent Italy (Salvatorelli, Pensiero e azione 122). During the 1850s, then, various interconnected forces contributed to an accentuated vision of southern difference among Italian liberals. The Bourbon regime was out of line with an Italy that was to conform to the spirit and models of western Europe. But as we shall now see, it was not only the Bourbon regime, but the people and culture of the south that appeared to deviate from the new Euro-Italian norm.

gladstone and the negation of god In the autumn of 1850 William Gladstone, at the time a forty-year-old Conservative member of the English parliament, took his family to southern Italy.7 After a month of relaxation and sight-seeing around Naples, his attention was drawn to the case of Carlo Poerio, a prominent Neapolitan liberal who, together with many others, was being tried for his involvement in the Neapolitan constitutional government of 1848–49. Outraged by the violation of these defendants’ legal rights and by the conditions of the prisons where they were being held, Gladstone returned to England in February 1851 and attempted to remedy the situation through diplomatic channels, writing a letter to his party leader, Lord Aberdeen, in which he denounced the situation in Naples. The effort came to naught, however, and three months later Gladstone opted for a more aggressive course, going public with his letter to Lord Aberdeen and thereby creating an international diplomatic scandal. The resonance of Gladstone’s pamphlet (which included a second letter to Lord Aberdeen) was extraordinary, discussed in nearly every major European newspaper of the day, published in eleven editions in 1851 alone, and translated immediately into French and Italian (Zumbini 217–18). Gladstone’s Letters inform nearly every anti-Bourbon text written over the next decade, the majority of which were authored by southerners. And if, in the first place, the Letters highlight the European ideological framework of anti-Bourbon discourse, their utilization by southerners also calls attention to the way the problem of European civilization intersects with that of Italian nationhood. It is striking that the most famous phrase in Gladstone’s Letters, frequently cited by Italians thereafter, is itself a citation and

7. Accounts of this trip can be found in Jenkins 110–11, 116–26, and Shannon 1: 228–42.

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translation from the Italian. “I have seen and heard the strong and true expression used,” Gladstone writes about the Bourbon regime, “This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government” (Gleanings 7). The original, “È la negazione di Dio eretta a sistema di governo,” appears in a footnote. We do not know the source of the phrase, yet the act of citation here calls attention to the way locals informed foreigners, providing them with perspectives and patterns of representation that foreigners put into wider circulation. At the same time, the utilization of Gladstone’s Letters by southerners reveals the way such foreign views were then reappropriated within Italy. This “translation” of Gladstone’s Letters into the Italian context was the work of Giuseppe Massari, a native of Puglia active in Neapolitan politics during the 1840s (see Cotugno). After being forced into exile in Piedmont for his participation in the 1848 constitutional regime, Massari became a close associate of Gioberti’s, a faithful ally of Cavour, and as we shall in the next chapter, the author of some particularly vivid denigrations of the south and exaltations of the north after unification.8 In 1849 Massari had written one of the first denunciations of the Bourbon repression of the liberals, I casi di Napoli dal 29 gennaio 1848 in poi, and it was this text, in turn, that formed the basis for Gioberti’s account of the Bourbon regime in his Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia.9 There Gioberti wrote that “the sins of the Bourbons are so manifest, enormous, and atrocious, that it would be a waste of time to speak of them” (2: 71). Massari was responsible for publishing the Italian edition of Gladstone’s Letters, together with a number of other related documents.10 If Gladstone’s voice had the authority of an English parliamentarian, Massari conferred his own “native” authority upon it as a southerner who could both confirm the authenticity of Gladstone’s account and accentuate its pathos as one of those persecuted southerners on whose behalf Gladstone spoke.11 8. After unification, Massari was also the head of the widely publicized parliamentary inquiry into brigandage; see Inchiesta Massari. 9. See the letter of 1 July 1850 to Luigi Carlo Farini in which Gioberti describes his reliance upon “Massari’s excellent report” on the situation in Naples (quoted by Sforza in the introduction to Del rinnovamento civile xv). 10. These include both of Gladstone’s letters and his “Examination of the Official Reply of the Neapolitan Government.” 11. At the conclusion of his remarks, Massari writes: “In putting together this collection I know that I fulfill a debt toward my country and toward the truth, putting before the eyes of every Italian those documents that most directly concern my beloved and most unhappy native land. In the accusation issued in the so-called ‘trial of May 15,’ the attorney general accuses me of having fomented rebellion on that

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Gladstone’s Letters thus reflect the interplay between foreign and southern views characteristic of so many important texts about the south produced after the mid-eighteenth century. At the same time, Gladstone’s famous jibe constitutes a prime example of the role hyperbole often plays in defining an image of the south. Though not directly related to the phrase “a paradise inhabited by devils,” Gladstone’s “negation of God erected into a system of government” has an affinity with its air of paradox and its conceptualization of moral extremes in terms of the scrambling of high and low. While it would be going too far to say that Gladstone set the tone of subsequent anti-Bourbon writings, he had nevertheless struck a chord among Italian liberals and had provided a signal example of effective rhetorical extremism. Thus Massari, in his foreword to the Italian edition of the letters, argued that what was in the balance in the struggle against the Bourbons was nothing less than the “great battle between civilization and barbarism, knowledge versus ignorance, virtue versus vice, innocence versus iniquity” (Signor Gladstone 11). One of the dominant figures used to construct this dramatic dichotomy between the Bourbons and the forces of civilization opposing them was that of Europe. The “civilization” to which Gladstone, Massari, and others referred was virtually synonymous with “Europe.” As mentioned in the previous section, it was the conceptualization of the Bourbons as divergent from contemporary European civilization on a number of fronts that marked them indelibly. Gladstone, for example, began his Letters with the comment “I do not know that there is any other country in Europe, I am sure there is none unless it is in the South of Italy, from which I should have returned with anything like the ideas and intentions which now press upon my mind” (Gleanings 2). Contemporarily, Massari, in his introduction to another antiBourbon pamphlet of 1851, cites Lord Palmerston’s words of consternation over “a system of illegality, injustice and cruelty . . . such as might have been hoped would not have existed in any European country at the present day.”12 The noted economist Nassau William Senior, a traveling companion of Gladstone’s in Naples, quotes in turn the observation made by the Neapolitan liberal Carlo Troya that “Naples is no longer part of Europe” (Journals 2: 2). It was precisely this vision of Naples cut off from Europe that was summed

terrible day, and of having participated in the construction of the barricades” (Signor Gladstone 13). Zumbini also highlights the importance of Massari’s role in publishing the Letters as a southern Italian residing in the north (12). 12. Atti e documenti iii. These are the proceedings and other documents relating to the trial against Poerio et al.

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up by the oft-repeated expression that the Bourbons had constructed a “wall of China” (muraglia cinese) around the kingdom.13 This last image provides another example of the intersection between representations of the south and of the Orient at midcentury that we considered in relation to Ernest Renan in Chapter 2. The idea that the Bourbons had constructed a wall of China served to redraw the border of Europe, gesturing toward the overlap between southern Italy and the Orient. More specifically, it formulates the despotism and isolationism of the Bourbons in extreme terms, redeploying the trope of Oriental despotism inherited from Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers.14 The popularity of this figure during the third quarter of the nineteenth century can be related to the contemporary decline of China in the European imagination, particularly evident in the 1840s after the Opium Wars.15 But other countries of the Orient also served the symbolic function of calling attention to a contiguity or confusion between southern Italy under the Bourbons and areas to the east. One of the most influential texts written against the Bourbons, Luigi Settembrini’s Protest of the People of the Two Sicilies of 1847, begins by calling attention to the scandalous fact that the Turks are better off than the southern Italians.16 On the opening page Settembrini cautions the reader not to be deceived either by “the tranquil beauty of our sky and the fertility of our fields” or by the “talk of progress and civilization and religion.” For, he writes,

13. See, for example, the article in the Milanese journal Il Crepuscolo from 1858 that speaks of the “Chinese wall” separating Milan and Lombardy from the south (quoted in Della Peruta, “Conoscenza dell’Italia reale” 9–10). This image seemed particularly apt after October 1856, when the British and French broke off diplomatic relations with the Neapolitan government (see Moscati, Ferdinando II 158–73). It remained current in the 1860s and 1870s to describe how the Bourbons had cut themselves off from the rest of Italy and Europe. A signal example is provided by Pasquale Villari in the conclusion to his Lettere meridionali of 1875, where he uses it to reprimand those central-northern elites who would like to keep the north and south separate. If northerners had wanted to keep to themselves, he writes, “they should have thought about it earlier, leaving intact the Wall of China that the Bourbons had constructed” (70). I discuss this passage in more detail in Chapter 7. 14. See Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” in Italy and the Enlightenment 41–51. 15. On the fall of China in the European imagination at midcentury, see Bernal: “From being a model of rational civilization China became seen as a filthy country in which torture and corruption of all sorts flourished” (237–38). See as well Woolf, “Construction of a European World View” 85; Caracciolo, Istituzioni 19. 16. The date serves as another reminder that the Bourbons had what might be termed today a serious public relations problem before the repression of 1848.

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no other European country is in worse conditions than ours, not even the Turks, who at least are a barbarian people who know they have no laws, and are comforted by religion to submit to a blind fate, and who nevertheless are improving their conditions with each passing day. But in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in the country known as the Garden of Europe, people are dying of hunger and live worse than animals, the law itself is caprice, progress is retrogression and barbarization, and in the name of Christ a Christian people is oppressed. (Opuscoli 3)

This passage constitutes a veritable reprise of many key motifs and rhetorical strategies used to represent the south in the century before unification. In this topsy-turvy world, everything is perverse, paradoxical, outrageous. The contrast between natural fertility and human degradation is salient. But the overarching perversity, and thus what gives force and meaning to the entire passage, is that the dividing line between Europe (the site of civilization, Christianity, law, progress) and the Orient (barbarism, lawlessness, fatalism) has broken down. Southern Italy, in its present state, has fallen so far on the scale of European civilization that it has been displaced by a barbarian people, overtaken by the Turks in the march of progress. Settembrini is in fact playing a dangerous double game here. For while his use of Orientalist discourse appears to be aimed at reconsolidating a southern ItalianEuropean identity that the Bourbons are subverting, he reinforces the imaginative link between the southern Italians and Orientals that structures many representations of the south in the coming decades. Even before the reactionary turn of 1848–49, then, the Bourbons were being attacked as a regime that deviated from the mainstream of European civilization. In the 1850s, however, this point became insistent. In certain instances this deviation from European civilization was explicitly indicated, as in the examples just cited. But it was certainly unnecessary to invoke Europe in order to stigmatize the Bourbons as anti-European and, in effect, anticontemporary. To be anticonstitutional, protectionist, and isolationist, to disregard civil rights, suppress freedom of speech and assembly, to antagonize the middle classes—each of these was an offense against key aspects of western European identity during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is in this sense that Gladstone brings the full force of mid-nineteenthcentury Eurocentrism to bear upon the Bourbons. Gladstone condemns the regime for a variety of offenses that constitute, in his view, outrages within the context of European civilization. Theirs is an “unparalleled tyranny”; they practice the rule of force over law, the barbaric treatment of prisoners, obscurantism, the suppression of free speech. Yet, as one of Gladstone’s biographers notes, “what most aroused his ire

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against the tyranny of the Neapolitan government was that it was specifically directed against the bourgeoisie.”17 In the diary entry for the crucial day of his visit to see Carlo Poerio he writes, “The class persecuted as a whole is the class that lives and moves, the middle class, in its widest acceptation, but particularly in that upper part of the middle class which may be said embraces the professions, the most cultivated and progressive part of the nation” (Gladstone Diaries 4: 307–8). In the Letters themselves he speaks of the government’s “hostility” to the class that “forms the mainspring of practical progress and improvement” (Gleanings 6). What is being persecuted in Naples, in other words, is the political, economic, and ideological protagonist of European civilization at midcentury, that liberal bourgeoisie whose ascendancy over the next three decades seemed “beyond doubt or challenge” (Hobsbawm, Age of Capital 276). Gladstone, and the Italians who wrote against the Bourbons, was thus promulgating the view that the Bourbon regime was incompatible with the political and ideological framework of contemporary Europe. Considering anti-Bourbon discourse from this point of view helps bring into focus the conceptual overlap between condemnations of the Bourbons and negative reactions to southern Italy more generally. We can, for example, see an affinity between Gladstone’s reactions and those of Ernest Renan who, it happens, wrote his letters from Naples in the same months as Gladstone’s visit. As we saw in Chapter 2, Renan is not in the least concerned with the Bourbons, focusing instead on Naples’s social and cultural failings. Renan’s standard of civilization is moreover represented by Paris, while Gladstone’s is England (see, for example, Gleanings 18).Yet they share a vehement sense that something about this place is at odds with a civilization that they both conceive of in terms of bourgeois society and Europe. Let us take a closer look at how conceptualizations of the regime and of southern Italian society interrelate, both in anti-Bourbon discourse and in the broader field of representations of the south in the 1850s. In both Gladstone and the Italian writers, the Bourbons are usually conceived in opposition to the people of southern Italy.The first major tract against the Bourbons, Giuseppe Massari’s I casi di Napoli of 1849, attempts to revise a familiar topos in order to make this very distinction: “It has been said that Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils,” he writes in the opening paragraph. “I think that this saying would be more on the mark if one said that Naples is 17. Jenkins 123. Shannon offers a more specifically psychological reading, observing that what disturbs Gladstone most is witnessing “the treatment as common criminals of persons he could identify with himself as a gentleman” (1: 232).

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a paradise GOVERNED by devils” (7; emphasis in original). But Massari’s citation of the original saying makes it clear that his readers may not necessarily give the Neapolitan people the benefit of the doubt. Certainly the distinction is rarely as simple as most writers, for the sake of anti-Bourbon polemic, would lead their readers to believe. Part of the problem is that the Bourbons have had a negative impact on the people and land under their rule; they are not somehow extraneous to it. I shall take up this question further below. For the moment, let us simply note that negative representations of the Bourbons and of southern Italian society seem to tap into similar emotions and draw upon kindred imaginative patterns. They both tend to come from a bourgeois and European point of view; the representations of the south in Renan and Gladstone are more closely related than might first appear. This link between the political and sociocultural dimensions can be brought into relief further by considering the reactions of Gladstone’s fellow traveler, the economist William Nassau Senior. Nassau Senior, too, had harsh words for the Neapolitan regime, but his harshest were reserved for another side of Naples. In the same week that Gladstone was attending the trial of Carlo Poerio, Nassau Senior was out on Via Toledo, which, he notes, has been called the “liveliest street in the world.” But, he writes, “I think it the most hateful place that I ever had the misfortune to traverse. Now, after a fortnight’s fine weather, its dirt is indescribable. Filthy carriages, full of filthy people, threaten every instant to crush you. Filthy pedestrians, whose contact is loathsome, elbow you at every turn; the air is full of dust and stink; horrible beggars swarm round” (2: 2–3). We would like to think he was just having a bad day. But in his description of a walk along the Villa Reale, Mergellina, and up the Vomero hill a few days later, he is in fact more adamant: It was almost unpleasantly hot. The disgusting population of Naples was all abroad—basking, quarrelling, gambling, and begging over the whole road. In cold countries the debased classes keep at home; here they live in the streets . . . you never are free from the sight, or, indeed, from the contact, of loathsome degradation. I never saw so hateful a people; they look as wicked as they are squalid and unhealthy. (2: 7)

What Nassau Senior is attacking here is not just a social group—“the disgusting population of Naples”—but a habitus, with its modes of behavior, social interaction, spatial organization, and hygienic practices so dramatically different from those in the “cold countries.” Nor does Nassau Senior have a problem only with Naples, a sensory reaction to its famously crowded and dirty streets, which provoked intense reactions from many travelers be-

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fore him. Commenting on the Sicilian rebellion against Naples in 1848, he offers an interpretation of the south in a more political and explicitly Eurocentric vein. The Sicilians, he writes, “behaved with a perverseness, a rashness, and a childishness which are not European, and can be accounted for only by the mixture of Saracenic blood” (2: 14). Reading Gladstone and Nassau Senior alongside each other, together with Renan, helps to underscore the specifically bourgeois dimension of these reactions to diverse aspects of southern Italy, not to mention their emotional intensity and rhetorical extremism. To quote the response of German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, after his first visit to Naples in 1853, “there is something repulsive about Naples.”18 That something variously includes the Bourbons, the urban reality of Naples, and the barbarism of the provinces. It is not just the regime that provokes reactions of “disgust and horror,” as Massari put it in his foreword to Gladstone’s Letters. What is clear in all these representations of the south is the intense emotional investment, an anxiety and uneasiness produced through the encounter between the bourgeois European subject and southern Italy. But how within the Letters themselves does Gladstone address the link between the regime and the sociocultural reality of the south? Although he insists on a neat, moral distinction between government and people throughout his Letters, at one point he notes that “there are two possible inferences from what I have written, against which I must endeavor to guard” (Gleanings 66). The first, he writes, “is this: some will say, all these abuses and disgraces [of the government] are owing to the degradation of the people” (Gleanings 66). The second, which is a minor offshoot of the first, is that all of southern Italy is not like the “populace of Naples.” In other words, he anticipates the possibility that his readers will collapse in one image the Bourbon government, the Neapolitans, and the inhabitants of southern Italy more generally. He attempts to counter this impression, firstly by arguing that “the Neapolitans are over harshly judged in England. Even the populace of the capital is too severely estimated”; secondly by listing the positive qualities that even the maligned “populace of Naples” possesses (“their mildness, their simplicity, their trustfulness, their warm affection, their ready anxiety to oblige”); and finally by attributing to southern Italians more generally a spirit of “patient endurance,” “elasticity,” and “buoyancy” that “lives under a weight that would crush minds of a more masculine and tougher texture” (Gleanings 66–67; my emphasis).

18. On Gregorovius’s reaction to Naples, see Mozzillo, Cafone conteso 303–5.

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Gladstone mounts a rather peculiar defense of both the people of Naples and southern Italians as a whole. He clearly admits that unfavorable judgments of the people of Naples are not wholly out of line but, rather, just too severe. If the distinctive feature of the southern Italians is a certain effeminacy that helps them to endure their hardships, the positive qualities of the populace of Naples broadly correspond to those one would desire in a maidservant. It is therefore not surprising that Gladstone writes, “I do not deny that there is some share of what we think degradation there; nor can it be wondered at, when we consider from what source the polluted waters of fraud and falsehood flow” (Gleanings 66). Gladstone therefore admits that the southern Italians have been degraded by the Bourbons. Broadly speaking, this will in fact be one of the standard explanations for the various problems besetting the south in the first ten years after unification, from brigandage to the lack of public spirit to the deformities of the southern middle class. What Gladstone does not accept, however, is the inference that the ills of the Bourbons “are owing to the degradation of the people” (my emphasis). He does not, in other words, support the view that southern Italians are fundamentally different from and inferior to other Europeans. This is another point altogether: namely, that there is a more basic problem in southern Italy, a form of sociocultural degradation of which Ferdinand II is not so much the cause as he is the manifestation and expression.This is the problem that we will find variously expressed in the texts written by Italians to be considered in the remaining sections of this chapter. But whereas for Gladstone the Bourbons posed a problem within the context of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, for the Italians they pose a problem within the context of the new Italy in the process of affirming itself in Europe as an independent nation.

“italy ends at the garigliano” (revisited) The Recent Italian Revolutions by Filippo Antonio Gualterio is one of the major early reflections upon the national movement produced in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848–49 in Italy. Written in Turin and published in Florence in 1850–51, it appeared at the same time as works by Luigi Carlo Farini, Vincenzo Gioberti, and Giuseppe La Farina, all of which had considerable impact on Moderate public opinion.19 An Umbrian aristocrat and fer-

19. In the same two years appeared Luigi Carlo Farini’s Lo Stato Romano dall’anno 1815 all’anno 1850 (1850–53), Giuseppe La Farina’s Storia d’Italia dal 1815 al 1850 (1851–52), and Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia

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vent supporter of the House of Savoy, Gualterio volunteered to fight in the war against Austria in 1848, obtaining a medal of honor from the Piedmontese king Charles Albert. During his years of exile in Turin in the 1850s, he became part of the core of the Moderate Party that sought an independent Italy composed of a federation of Italian states under Piedmontese leadership.20 As in Gioberti’s Primato, Gualterio takes up the question of Naples from a federalistic point of view; he conceives of its future as a sovereign state. There is an important difference between the two historical moments in which these authors wrote, however. As Gualterio makes clear in the opening lines of his chapters on “Naples,” after the revolutions of 1848–49, Naples’s relation to the broader movement for national independence has become more problematic; the distance between the kingdom and the rest of Italy seems to have increased. Gualterio offers an extensive account of the malgoverno and degradation of the kingdom. What distinguishes his perspective on the post-1848 kingdom from the anti-Bourbon texts of Gladstone and many southern exiles is his measured and historicizing approach. What interests me in particular about his account is the opening page of his chapter on Naples, for it is here that we find an unusually explicit articulation of the imaginative problem of southern difference after 1848. At the center of his opening observations is the statement attributed to Francesco Forti that “Italy ends at the Garigliano.” What is striking about these opening lines is how they use Forti’s view to pose the question of southern difference. Gualterio begins his discussion on Naples thus: Finally, it remains for me to speak of the Neapolitan kingdom and thus complete my survey. The intimate conditions of this part of Italy are relatively unknown, because it exists separately from the other Italian states due to its natural location at the end of the Peninsula. It is a large and powerful kingdom, so much so as to be a thing unto itself . . . ; far from joining with the other states as was generally hoped, it has remained, because of its nature, because of its autonomous

(1851). On the significance of this set of texts in the context of the Moderate movement, see Coppini 399–400. 20. See Maturi 205. In the summer of 1860 Gualterio was Cavour’s main political organizer in Umbria (Grew 373–74). In 1865 Gualterio was appointed prefect of Palermo and, within days of his arrival, authored a report that contains the first mention of the “maffia” in an official document; see Duggan 26–27, and on Gualterio’s activities as prefect, Riall, Sicily 5–6, 183–90. While he was minister to the Royal House in 1868–69, Gualterio’s political power was said to exceed that of the prime minister himself.

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traditions, and, I was about to say, because of its racial diversity, distinct and separate from the rest and almost desires to be and to appear such. The country’s history and the intrinsic conditions of the country prompted people to think of the Garigliano not so much as the border of a state as the actual border of the Italian nation. This is what that genius, Forti, had in mind when he used to say hyperbolically that Italy ended at the Garigliano. But this was nothing but hyperbole. For if the Neapolitan tends to think less about his Italic nationality than other Italians, by no means does he reject it, by no means does he lack a feeling of appurtenance. No, nature itself, which flourishes there more than elsewhere, the sky, which is brighter there than elsewhere, speaks to him of Italy. And everything reminds him that his land is the most beautiful and envied part of the nation. (3; my emphasis)

This opening page both deploys and critiques the commonplace view that the kingdom is distinct from the rest of Italy. Gualterio counters this notion with a second commonplace about the south, that it is an exceptionally fertile and beautiful land; “nature itself” provides Neapolitans with a sense of appurtenance to Italy. Though it is further testimony to the staying power of this commonplace at midcentury, this proposition constitutes in fact the weakest and least interesting part of Gualterio’s argument. Indeed, no sooner has he mentioned it than he proceeds to enumerate “the many causes [that] have kept the sentiment of italianità less alive there than elsewhere” (4). It is precisely this conceptual back-and-forth that marks this passage. We find a striking counterpoint in it between assertions of southern difference and of southern commonality. Gualterio is emphatic that Forti’s view that “Italy ends at the Garigliano” is hyperbolic (he says it twice), and he goes on to offer a thoroughly historical analysis of the conditions in the kingdom which suggests that the laws of history and human behavior are the same there as in the rest of Italy. Yet a few lines earlier, he makes an interesting comment: “I was about to say,” he writes, that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is separate and distinct, “because of its racial diversity.” What are we to make of this striking formulation, which on the one hand seems to proffer a racialist interpretation of southern difference and on the other to retract it? Read in the context of both the passage and the text as a whole, Gualterio’s statement can be glossed as follows. So much of the history and culture of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies differs from the rest of the country that one is tempted to consider its inhabitants to be of a different race. These historical and cultural differences, moreover, have prompted others to see the kingdom not as one among other Italian states but as a nation unto

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itself: “Italy ends at the Garigliano.” But, he writes, this is hyperbolic. While his initial example of natural southern italianità does not appear to strengthen his claim greatly, the rest of his discussion of the recent history of the kingdom amounts to a sustained argument for the commonality of Neapolitans and other Italians. After his initial appeal to nature, Gualterio’s first move is to outline, in some tension with his preceding statement, “the many causes [that] have kept the sentiment of italianità less alive there than elsewhere” (4). Here as elsewhere, the main thrust of his argument is to historicize. Thus, with respect to the relative lack of Italian sentiment among Neapolitans, he writes, “Sentiments are only generated by facts, they are only instilled in a people by the work of history.” A related aspect of this historicizing approach is the noticeable lack of recrimination. Though the existence of national sentiment in the center-north is clearly the benchmark, it does not constitute the sole norm. Considered in relation to the history of that part of the peninsula, Gualterio presents the “local sentiment of independence” among Neapolitans as valid and reasonable. Gualterio’s historical perspective by no means prevents him from outlining an extensive critique of Bourbon rule since the late 1830s, nor from describing the disastrous conditions in which the kingdom currently finds itself. The overarching theme of these chapters is the “miserable state of the kingdom” (34). The “people” are “poorly governed, condemned to ignorance, degraded, and kept out of contact with the society of civil nations” (116). Gualterio furthermore frames a number of his critical remarks in terms of the kingdom’s exclusion from modern European civilization: “Nothing similar could be found among any other people of Europe,” he writes with respect to the corruption in the regime of Francis I (31). One act of repression was “worthy of another epoch, the type of thing you would not think could reappear in the midst of civil Europe” (33). Along with this rhetoric of exceptionalism and singularity, it is also to be noted that Gualterio gestures a few times toward the longue durée of bad government in the south. At one point, in fact, he traces the origins of the “bad government of Naples” all the way back to the Angevins, though he more frequently mentions the corrupting influence of Spanish rule.21 The dominant emphasis, however, is on the variability in the history of the kingdom and the contingent, historical nature of conditions there since the reign of Charles III. While the Bourbons have tended to govern badly, there have 21. “The bad government of Naples,” Gualterio writes, “. . . is actually the descendant of the bad government of the Angevins” (118).

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been important moments of improvement and progress, significant achievements in the political and cultural life of the nation (27–28). Even amid the “tortures” of Bourbon censorship, many great intellects have flourished, garnering acclaim across the peninsula (69–70). There is no master narrative of corruption and degradation in Gualterio’s account. His portrayal of the current ills under the reign of Ferdinand II is, moreover, circumstantial, and he carefully distinguishes between the periods of Ferdinand’s rule before and after 1837. Whatever the grave misdeeds of his regime, the kingdom contains the capacity to change, to regenerate through the liberation of the vital elements within it. Thus, while Gualterio’s discussion of Naples in The Recent Italian Revolutions participates in the general tendency to denigrate the Bourbon regime and emphasize its role in causing harm to the south, it is nevertheless more moderate in its rhetoric than most other anti-Bourbon texts of the 1850s and more balanced in its depiction of how the situation in the kingdom differs from that in the rest of the peninsula. In Gualterio’s view, the south is, as certain revisionist historians have put it, just a “piece of the world” (Donzelli, “Pezzo di mondo”). But at the same time that Gualterio presents the history of the kingdom under the sign of normalcy, he significantly acknowledges the problem of public perceptions. As we have seen, Gualterio began by noting, first, that Italians outside the kingdom generally viewed it as “distinct and separate” from the rest of Italy and, second, that he himself was tempted to view this difference in almost racial terms. But Gualterio’s aim is, finally, to refute the idea that “Italy ends at the Garigliano,” highlighting instead the common links between Neapolitans and other Italians. Such a level-headed approach was absent from most other discussions of the Bourbons during the 1850s. Beginning with Gladstone and Massari, most critics portrayed the Neapolitan Question in more polarized terms. The Bourbons were absolutely corrupt, and this judgment could not but raise questions about the social, economic, and cultural reality over which they ruled. As we shall now see, these questions, and a blanket condemnation of the Bourbons, were voiced with increasing force by southerners themselves over the course of the 1850s.

the south as africa “Muratism” was one of the factions of the nationalist movement with considerable support among southern exiles in the 1850s. The Muratists aimed to replace the Bourbons with Lucien Murat, son of Joachim and nephew of Napoleon III (see Gavotti; Bartoccini). In the summer of 1855 the debate

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over Muratism intensified, involving a number of leading Italian liberals.22 One of the most heated exchanges involved two southern exiles in Turin, Francesco Trinchera and Francesco De Sanctis.At issue in the debate between Trinchera and De Sanctis were not only the merits of a specific nationalist program but also the character of southern Italian society and the south’s role in the nationalist movement. Trinchera’s pamphlet “The Neapolitan Question: Ferdinand Bourbon and Lucien Murat” marks the extreme limit of the tendency to confuse the malgoverno of the Bourbons with the social dimension of the kingdom.23 In his response to Trinchera, De Sanctis refutes this position but at the same time acknowledges that the potential for such a confusion exists. His is an important statement on the risks involved in accentuating southern difference within the context of the nationalist movement. Trinchera condemns the Bourbons in no uncertain terms. He cites Gladstone’s Letters, stressing the important role they played in publicizing the sins of this “brutal and savage government” before “all of Europe” (26). But unlike Gladstone, Gualterio, and most others, who take care to distinguish between the Bourbons and the social reality of the south, Trinchera stresses the connection between them, offering one of the most damning portraits in this entire literature. The main point of the pamphlet is that a liberal solution to the Neapolitan Question, which would involve the overthrow of the Bourbons with the assistance of the Piedmontese, is not feasible. Trinchera correctly argues that the Piedmontese would not be able to undertake the unification of the peninsula without the support of France and England. But Trinchera stresses that the liberal plan to overthrow the Bourbons is seriously flawed in another way as well. However heroic, the liberals are out of touch with the disastrous social, economic, and cultural conditions in the south. He criticizes the situation in the south at two intersecting levels: the people themselves (il popolo), and the economic, civic, and cultural conditions of the kingdom more generally. In both cases the outlook is dire. Initially Trinchera gestures at the kind of distinction between a good people and the bad political regime that has corrupted them which we found in Gladstone: “For a long time religious and political tyranny together have fouled 22. See Candeloro, Storia 4: 224–31; Grew 55–60; Berti 675–84; Romeo, Cavour 3: 269. 23. The pamphlet is anonymous but widely attributed to Trinchera. On Trinchera, with specific reference to his role in this debate, see Colapietra 567–70. Croce outlines De Sanctis’s role in the debate in De Sanctis, Scritti varii 179–81. See also Petrusewicz 144–50.

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the minds of that generous people” (8). But the entire thrust of his argument is aimed at eliminating the distinction between the regime and the people, showing them rather to be integrally related. He proceeds by offering a picture of the complete degradation of the people, by suggesting that the Neapolitans get what they deserve, and finally by emphasizing that it is the people themselves who make up the regime. His main description of the Neapolitan people is contained in the following paragraph: It does not take much intelligence or insight to understand that a people that is profoundly degraded and filled with misconceptions and gross prejudices, that believes in the evil-eye, in spiritual possession, magic and magicians, witches and witchcraft, dreams, the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood, hair miraculously growing on the crucifix, and a thousand other crazy and absurd things, cannot think seriously about freedom, cannot understand it, want it, die for it. (9)

The main fault of the Neapolitan liberals, according to Trinchera, is that in their eighty years of struggles against the Bourbons they have persistently ignored this reality, aiming to establish “a government based on virtue . . . amid a horde of savages” (9). But who is to blame for this state of utter degradation and benightedness? Certainly, Trinchera notes elsewhere, the Bourbons have excelled as few other regimes could in encouraging retrograde tendencies, particularly in the reactions of 1799, 1820, and 1848. Each of these moments he bitterly labels a “triumph of the Bourbons” (10–13). But the passage above refers to something deeper, an almost immobile anthropological substratum. Trinchera’s next paragraph thus begins with the remark that “I have always heard that a people gets more or less what it deserves.” He does not wholly endorse the idea, but it nevertheless remains one of his most pithy and provocative statements on the relation between the Bourbons and the southerners themselves. Indeed, he does not stop at this; such a formulation still articulates the people’s relationship to the political regime in terms of a certain passivity and exteriority. He goes on to stress that the forces of Bourbon oppression are themselves Neapolitan. “Please tell me,” he writes, if they are foreigners or Neapolitans—the hundred thousand men who form the army of the king of Naples, who burned and bloodied the palaces on via Toledo on May 15 [1848], who butchered the elderly, the infirm, women and children, the rebels of Messina and Catania. Tell me if that horde of spies, snitches, cops, assassins, thugs, brutes, commissars, and other similar trash that makes the police force so omnipotent rained down upon us from outside the kingdom or if they

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were not rather born right in our backyard, on the banks of the Sebeto, Ofanto, Volturno, and Garigliano. (15)

Trinchera is emphatic both about the iniquity of these characters and their southern origins. The minds of the people thus have been not only fouled by the Bourbons; they are of a piece. The oppression taking place is not wrought upon an innocent people but is the work of that very people. Such is Trinchera’s portrait of the Neapolitans, but he does not limit himself to this damning portrait of the Neapolitans and their relationship to the Bourbons. He also situates them in a correspondingly dire economic and cultural context: The traveler who happens in that kingdom finds no signs of a civilized people, no institution that is useful and productive, no public or private instruction, no roads, no links among provinces or between the capital and the provinces, no traffic, no commerce, no arts, no industry, no manufacturing. And if it were not for the thousands of monks, priests, crooks and vagabonds, beggars and do-nothings; if it were not for the serenity and clarity of the sky, the fertility of the soil luxuriant with spontaneous and flourishing vegetation, this traveler would think that he was in one of the countries of Africa made bestial by the most degrading despotism. (8–9)

At one level such negative hyperbole about the south is standard fare; Trinchera has outdone neither Gladstone nor Renan. But in the context of the anti-Bourbon campaign, his total, insistent negation has a special significance and force. The kingdom is represented in terms of a complete lack of civilization, defined here at once as bourgeois and European. His list of things that the kingdom lacks constitutes an ideal vision of bourgeois society and culture at midcentury: useful and productive institutions, public and private education, a dense network of well-trafficked roads, commerce, arts, industry, manufacturing. The conjunction and, which begins the second part of the paragraph, introduces the crucial geographical qualification, again by way of negation. All of the preceding is qualified as European; there is no other way of imagining this land of lack than as Africa, the alterity of Europe. This constitutes the imaginative nucleus for one of the dominant patterns of representing the south in postunification Italy, starting with Farini’s famous exclamation, “This is not Italy! This is Africa.” In this regard, it is worth noting that this passage is primarily dedicated to the topic of bourgeois civilization, on the one hand, and to the Europe-Africa antithesis, on the other. The traditional view of the south as a “paradise inhabited by dev-

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ils” appears to be imbedded in this paragraph, yet significantly transformed and, in a sense, superseded. The topos of southern fertility appears in a subordinate position, its role reduced to signaling the southernness of the described region and thus the peculiar and deplorable hybridity of African conditions within Europe. This aspect of Trinchera’s text is paradigmatic in that it reveals the residual status of this topos at midcentury vis-à-vis the increasingly diffuse articulation of southern difference as the antithesis of bourgeois civilization and Europe. Of equal interest is Trinchera’s formulation of the entire passage through the rhetorical device of the traveler’s perspective.This is noteworthy for several reasons. Firstly, it reveals the striking interplay of the insider’s and the outsider’s perspectives in the production of this passage. As De Sanctis will underscore in his polemical response, the southern authorship of the pamphlet gives the statement its special force. This is not the traditional denigration of a foreigner. At the same time, the traveler’s perspective is crucial in that it helps to establish the position from which the south can be judged as different and wanting. As I argued in Chapter 2, the outside perspective of foreign travelers and the strongly comparative perspective of Genovesi and other southern intellectuals enabled the representation of the south as different from other parts of Italy and Europe. It was precisely this outside perspective, together with his authority as a Conservative member of parliament, that contributed to the force of Gladstone’s text. Trinchera’s adoption of that perspective here both signals its historical importance and exploits its efficacy as a discursive strategy. It is no coincidence that this outside perspective will play a crucial role in the “discovery” of the south during the mid-1870s. As we shall see in the final chapters of this study, in both the political writings of Leopoldo Franchetti and the fiction of Giovanni Verga, the traveler’s perspective from outside will constitute both the enabling condition of possibility for the production of the text and a major theme that these authors address. Trinchera’s pamphlet thus cuts through the ambiguities and reservations expressed in most other anti-Bourbon texts, offering an integral vision of southern degradation that certainly worked to confirm the Italians’ worst fears about the situation in the Mezzogiorno. This is not to exaggerate the influence of a text written, as Trinchera puts it, by an “unknown man and nothing more” (4). But he was working with highly flammable material, as Francesco De Sanctis’s passionate response makes clear. De Sanctis’s article helps to highlight the significance of Trinchera’s strategy and the stakes involved. Read along with Trinchera’s pamphlet, De Sanctis’s text provides one of the major articulations of the problem of representing the south on

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the eve of unification. De Sanctis’s response to Trinchera is the second of three polemical articles on the proposal to replace the Bourbons with Lucien Murat that De Sanctis published in Il Diritto of Turin in October 1855. The primary concern of the article is actually not so much to challenge the legitimacy of the Muratist hypothesis as to counter the pamphlet’s denigratory representation of the south and southerners. De Sanctis’s first article had, after all, effectively dealt with the main political issues à propos Muratism, and at the beginning of the second he makes it clear that there is widespread hostility to the idea of replacing the Bourbons with Murat. Rather, what moves De Sanctis is the dramatically negative representation of the south that Trinchera has presented in a text that, De Sanctis stresses, was published in Paris and circulated in Piedmont. De Sanctis introduces his main discussion of the problem with the observation that the author of this pamphlet “knows no other way to defend the cause of Murat than to cover his own country with infamy” (Scritti varii 194). “He makes it seem,” De Sanctis continues, that other peoples of Italy are unable to liberate themselves from their oppressors for very special reasons. The Neapolitans instead are unable to do so because they are a degraded people. There is something more painful than the beatings of Ferdinand II, and it is when someone from our own land makes us the laughing stock of Italy; it is to hear him say, with regard to our many sufferings, that a people gets more or less what it deserves; it is to see him gather up all the dirt that is in our history and rub it in our face. One day Lamartine called Italy the “land of the dead,” and it was a knife in the heart of every Italian. We Neapolitans have the special privilege of hearing one of our own compare his fellow citizens to African savages, turned into beasts by the most degrading of despotisms. Yes, the despotism that oppresses us is beyond description; and nevertheless it has not succeeded in turning the Neapolitan people into beasts. Not only are we not a degraded people, but rather we form part of the movement of progress spreading across Europe. (Scritti varii 194–95)

In this opening paragraph De Sanctis touches upon the key points he will develop in the rest of the article. To begin with, he makes it clear that what is at issue is the representation of Neapolitans in the context of the broader effort to make and imagine the new nation. Representations of the south matter; they can bring ridicule upon a people at the very moment when that people’s appurtenance to the national movement is at issue. He also highlights the particular significance of and suffering caused by the southern authorship of this denigration. And he relates this denigration of the south to the denigration of Italy as a whole, highlighting the specificity

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of the mode in which the south was represented as African savages, bestialized by the most degrading despotism. Finally he counters that the Neapolitan people remain sound, participating in the progress of the rest of Europe. This final sentence in De Sanctis’s opening paragraph, in fact, goes to the heart of the problem of constructing southern difference from the midcentury forward. In Trinchera, as in so many other representations of the south thereafter, the central proposition is that the southerners are exceptional, peculiar, different from other peoples. This notion above all provokes the astonishment and ire of De Sanctis, and he formulates his main counterargument in response to it: And just what is so peculiar about the Neapolitan masses, such that you put a mark on their forehead and distinguish them from the masses elsewhere, who are all more or less ignorant and superstitious? Do you really believe that only Neapolitans are filled with errors and prejudices, that they alone believe in miracles, dreams, witches? (Scritti varii 195)

The masses elsewhere in Europe progress, he continues, “and only ours have remained in a bestial state?” (Scritti varii 195). “Why then must we bow our heads before other peoples? Why must we be the only ones among Italians castigated as incapable of redeeming ourselves on our own? . . . In Naples Neapolitans are the butchers of the Neapolitans!—Only in Naples?” (195– 97). His simple and succinct counterargument is that the Neapolitans are comparable to other peoples in Italy and in Europe: “We are in the same condition” (195). Another aspect of the pamphlet to which De Sanctis returns a number of times is that this portrait of the south was written by a Neapolitan. As we saw above, De Sanctis introduced his discussion of the pamphlet with the idea that its author had “covered his own country in infamy.” De Sanctis directly relates the significance of this characterization of the south to its southern authorship. Picking up on Trinchera’s own admission that long years of political struggle and repression had made him pessimistic, De Sanctis chastises him “for painting everything black, attributing your own state of prostration to your fellow citizens” (198). De Sanctis finally makes it clear that the specific significance and force of this characterization of the south lie not in its novelty but in the fact that it builds upon and accentuates preexisting stereotypes. Trinchera’s particular sin is to have contributed, as a southerner, to this tendency. “How could he have added his voice to that of countless foreigners,” De Sanctis asks, “who have disparaged us for so long?” (198). As De Sanctis suggests in his earlier reference to Lamartine and again

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in the last lines of the article, this Neapolitan has not only joined with foreigners in their disparagement of the Neapolitans but outdone them. De Sanctis surmises in conclusion that Trinchera’s own Muratist comrades must be ashamed “to see their homeland so vilified that the French and Lucien himself should spit in our faces, calling us, as Napoleon had done, filthy Neapolitans” (199). De Sanctis thus calls attention to the importance of a Neapolitan’s redeployment of a mode of representing the south characteristic of foreigners. In this pamphlet he identifies a crucial convergence between this secular European tradition and the specific discursive context of the anti-Bourbon struggle. With his rare acumen as both textual interpreter and political analyst, he offers a forceful articulation of the terms of the problem at hand and of the stakes involved. What he could not realize at the time is that while he, supporter of national unity under Piedmont, was on the winning side in this skirmish with the Muratists, he was nevertheless on the losing side in the symbolic agon that was being waged against the south during the last years of the movement for independence and within postunification Italy itself. In fulfillment of his most fervent hopes, Italy would be made, but in the process, it would be split in two.

All the texts examined thus far in this chapter point to the linkage between the anti-Bourbon discourse of the 1850s and the broader field of representations of the south produced in Italy and Europe during the previous century. In the eyes of many, the Bourbons were just one part of a broader horizon of southern backwardness; the south was different from the north. Gualterio had begun his discussion of Naples with both the rehearsal and rejection of the notion of radical southern difference. But by the middle of the decade this tendency certainly had not been attenuated but reinforced. A particularly clear expression of this is provided by Biagio Miraglia, a Calabrian exile in Turin who published a set of reflections on the differences between north and south just a few months after the polemical exchange between Trinchera and De Sanctis. In an essay on the current state of Italian literature that appears in the same volume as his Five Calabrian Novellas, Miraglia succinctly states that “Turin and Naples are, with respect to the nation, two opposing centers, one of expansion, the other of resistance.”24 24. “Su le condizioni attuali della letteratura italiana, specialmente nel reame di Napoli,” in Cinque novelle calabresi 13. Ferroni discusses Miraglia’s essay in his article “La letteratura calabrese al tempo di De Sanctis” 35–38.

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Without the animus of Trinchera, Miraglia insists that the “resistance” of Naples encompasses much more than the Bourbon monarchy”: In Naples there are no foreign armies that repress the people’s will; it is rather the masses themselves that live separate from the Italian nation. . . . the vivid contrast between Piedmont and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies does not so much depend on the capricious will of one man, as some people want to believe, but on extremely ancient causes that have their profound roots in the inveterate habits and real conditions of our homeland. (13)

Miraglia thus provides a deep and integral interpretation of southern Italian difference that is all the more striking in that it evinces little hostility for the Bourbons and is, more generally, expressed with equanimity. Italy, he writes, “is nearly split into two very different parts.” He traces this split back not only to the Middle Ages and the division between the communes in the north and the monarchical regime in the south, but to Etruscan and Greek times. Thus, he concludes, “who does not see today, that there is a form of ideal integration between Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, the Duchies, Romagna, and Tuscany that is lacking, or only latent, between these provinces of northern Italy and the Neapolitan Kingdom?” (10). The views both of southerners like Miraglia and of the central-northerners evoked by Gualterio are certainly indebted to traditions of representation whose origins are more remote than the propaganda campaign against the Bourbons. Yet the campaign against the Bourbons nevertheless had a galvanizing effect. After all, the Bourbons provided Miraglia with the context of exile and the occasion to bring these differences into focus. Not only did the anti-Bourbon campaign prompt patriots to represent southern difference more markedly than ever before. In the context of the ascendancy of Piedmont, anti-Bourbon discourse helped, as in the quotation by Miraglia, to establish a polarizing view of nation, both in the specific terms of Naples and Piedmont and of north and south more broadly. This polarizing view was reflected in the 1857 work by the influential Neapolitan exile residing in Turin, Antonio Scialoja, which contrasted The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples and of the Kingdom of Sardegna. As in other texts, the explicit political focus of the polemic intersected with more general issues of “civilization.”25 In his conclusion, Scialoja, too, stressed that the damage wrought by the Bourbons to the kingdom affected its image as well: “It is not only 25. For example, Scialoja observed that France and England, “two of the most powerful nations in Europe, broke off diplomatic relations with Naples out of a concern for civilization” (37).

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the arbitrary and corrupt governments that are held in contempt by the civilized nations, but also the people who suffer them too long.”26 The anger, frustration, and disaffection about the situation in the kingdom only increased with each passing year. Trinchera had acknowledged the fact that his perspective on the situation in the kingdom was colored by his pessimism, and De Sanctis took him to task for this. But it could not be helped. In a diary entry of September 1858, Giuseppe Massari described his conversation with a recently arrived exile from the south in the following terms: “He speaks to me at length about the dire conditions in the kingdom. He says: ‘the present is terrible, the future frightful.The demoralization proceeds from the top and filters into the country. If a change occurs, how will it be possible to control a people educated in this way? A dictator is necessary. The only hope for the kingdom is a foreign invasion’” (Diario 25). As Marta Petrusewicz has noted, the southerners’ views about the south were changing. After ten years of prison and exile, their visions of the south had darkened (105–58). But if the hardship of exile had affected their views, they themselves had affected the ideas of the Italians of the center-north whom they had addressed. As Carlo Poerio put it in 1859, “our words and deeds and writing have been so effective that all of civilized Europe . . . has condemned them” (quoted in Petrusewicz 134). The problem was that while the object of their polemic—the Bourbons—was eventually eliminated, the effects of their polemic and of their experience persisted. On the one hand, many of the exiles had lost touch with their homeland and become, at some level, permanently alienated. Some, like the founding father of the Southern Question, Pasquale Villari, or like Silvio Spaventa, never really returned from their exile, settling permanently in the center-north. After unification, Spaventa, according to Croce, kept his distance from Naples, “half terrified, half nauseated,” and spoke with irritation of “that nasty land” (Storia del Regno di Napoli 350). On the other hand, the southerners had helped to convince others, providing the nation’s future rulers with a dark picture of the south. One of the most eloquent anti-Bourbons, Luigi Settembrini, addressed the problem head-on after unification when he wrote: We Neapolitans pay the price of a lie we have told or, to be more exact, an exaggeration. We have cried all across the world that the Bourbons had turned us into barbarians and beasts; and everybody believed that 26. As with Gladstone’s Letters, the Neapolitans responded vociferously to Scialoja’s treatise, publishing numerous pamphlets in defense of the finances of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; see Zumbini 25–26; and Candeloro, Storia 4: 210.

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we were barbarians and beasts. Now we want to tell them otherwise, but everyone wants to stick to their first opinion; and those who come and see us are amazed to find out that we are men. (quoted in Talamo 111)

As we shall see in the next chapter, however, the problem was that this “first opinion” often stuck even with those who “came and saw.” A second related problem was that this belief in the barbarism of the Neapolitans, reinforced by the anti-Bourbon campaign, had important ramifications for the way the south’s political agency would be conceived within the new nation. As with Trinchera and the exile cited in Massari’s diary, anti-Bourbon discourse had finally helped to crystallize the idea that the south would have to be liberated, regenerated, and civilized from the outside. By the end of the decade, large numbers of patriots conceived of Piedmont in the role of liberator. Certainly there were Italians, southerners in particular, who saw nationhood in a different light and who would defend the south’s cultural dignity and its claims to political agency.27 But the dominant view among the Moderates, the party that dictated the modality of unification and the form of the new state in 1860–61, was that the south must succumb to the north. As Giovanni Lanza, president of the Piedmontese parliament, put it in December 1860, “The Neapolitans, accustomed for centuries to suffer a cynical, immobile, and corrupt government, lack all sense of public spirit . . . it is the arduous mission of the Italians of the north to civilly and politically regenerate the Italians of the south” (quoted in Tavallini 1: 253). It was not just a question of replacing one monarchy with another but of replacing one form of civilization with another.

a poetic and picturesque world Yet was southern Italy only a liability to the future nation? As we have seen, this idea gained ground among both southern and northern patriots over the course of the 1850s and would be reinforced further in the throes of national unification in 1860–61. It is important to note, however, especially considering what we shall see in later chapters, that a picturesque image of the south continued to be elaborated in a variety of fields—fiction, travel literature, illustrated magazines—during the 1850s. In conclusion, I consider one example of this other perspective, provided by the Calabrian exile Biagio Miraglia. Miraglia’s portrayal of Calabria in the set of novellas that accompanied the essay on Italian literature cited earlier calls attention to the 27. See, for example, Enrico Cenni, Napoli e l’Italia, published in 1861, who argues that Naples should be the capital of the new nation.

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persistence of the picturesque view of the south in the very midst of the anti-Bourbon campaign. More specifically, Miraglia shows how the condition of exile itself could both accentuate the picturesque image of the south and contribute to its dissemination in the center-north. In his essay on Italian literature, Miraglia drew a sharp contrast between north and south, describing Naples as the “center of resistance” to the “Italian idea” championed by the northern part of the country (12–13). In the fictional parts of the book, however, Miraglia adopts a quite different perspective. The volume begins with a Fantastic Preface that situates the author in the gloomy north, in Turin. “It was one of those sad, truly Nordic winter nights. This part of the Italian sky at the foot of the Alps, which is so beautiful when the weather is beautiful, had a lugubrious and desolate aspect” (vii). Gazing into the flames of his fireplace, he begins to hear strange sounds and voices: “Don’t you remember?” they say. “We are the voice of your fleeing youth. . . . We are the mysterious sounds you heard in the wind, amazed, when it rushed through the forests of your homeland and across the waves of the Ionian Sea” (ix–x). Thus Miraglia depicts the scene of his exile in the north and dramatizes his nostalgia for the world of his youth, Calabria. After the appearance of a figure incarnating the “spirit of the north,” who commands him to abandon his fantasies, and a maiden who calls up the memory of his Calabrian homeland, the narrator finally announces that he will dispense with his conceits and get to the point: For eight years, wherever I roam, my spirit . . . has flown without rest, far far away, to the beloved land of my fathers. . . . I wrote these stories to people the dark solitude of my exile. Through them I have tried to conjure forth those sweet places I have lost, to depict the character of my people, to repeat the fragments of old songs I learned as a child, and thus to forget my pain. This is a poetic and picturesque world, new perhaps and certainly unknown to the rest of Italy. This work may therefore prove to be of some value. For Italy will not be a nation until the dispersed parts of this great body begin to know one another and become integrated with one another, ideally if not politically. (xvi–xvii)

In what sense is this world “poetic and picturesque”? The novellas themselves contain the standard commonplaces about the south and Calabria in particular. The magnificence and picturesqueness of the landscape are emphasized throughout; mountains, forests, rocky shorelines, and volcanoes figure prominently.The leading characters are proud bandits and rebels, men and women full of passion, a sense of honor, and the spirit of vendetta, chanting poetry and song. Finally, at every turn we are reminded that this is the

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land of Magna Graecia. All this forms part of the Romantic imagination of Calabria, expressed in fiction, poetry, and drama during the 1840s and 1850s.28 The new element, which gives the particular charge to this poetic and picturesque image, is clearly the author’s geographical distance from Calabria and, at the same time, the fact that he is explicitly addressing a northern audience. The Fantastic Preface emphasizes the importance of his situation in the north, beginning with the contrast of environments: the cold, foggy north versus the sunny south, with its air fragrant with orange blossoms, the shimmering sea. But he outlines a set of other contrasts as well. The south assumes the connotations of the past to the north’s present, youth to its adulthood, poetry to its prose, fantasy to science and reason. The spirit of the north, moreover, chastises the narrator for cherishing love and hope “in this great century of progress” (xii). Miraglia’s position in the north thus helps to accentuate the south’s difference and to define the qualities specific to this part of the national body. It is to be stressed that he writes this, above all, for a northern audience, publishing the book in the center-north with the prestigious publisher Le Monnier of Florence. Considering the different parts of Miraglia’s book together, we can see a kind of double vision and ambivalence. From the explicitly political point of view of nation building expressed in the essay, the south’s distinctness and resistance to the “Italian idea” is an obstacle to be overcome.There must be unity. But there is an alternative, more sentimental perspective. All those historical sedimentations that have made the south different represent a set of values that go against a modernity that is, at some level, gloomy. Italy must become one and, in the process, become part of “the new and marvelous Europe that rises upon the ruins of feudal Europe” (33). Still, some of those feudal ruins capture the imagination; some of what resists unification may be worth holding onto. Although expressed in very different terms in the different parts of his book, Miraglia gives both positions a fairly equal weight. In the rush to make the nation, however, the negative view would certainly prevail among Italian liberals. It would not be until the 1870s, when the urgent task of unification was complete, that the picturesque view would have the ideological space to develop more fully in Italian culture.

28. On the literary representation of Calabria during this period, see Placanica, “Calabria in idea” 603–7; Ferroni; De Sanctis, “Letteratura a Napoli.”

5

“This Is Not Italy!” Ruling and Representing the South, 1860–1861

In May 1860, Garibaldi’s “Thousand” landed in Sicily, defeating the Bourbon troops on the island by late July and from there moving up through the mainland south to enter Naples triumphantly in early September. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was thus conquered and, with the plebiscite of 21 October, united to the northern provinces under the rule of King Victor Emmanuel to form the Kingdom of Italy. The dream of a unified nation, excepting Rome and Venice, was at last a political reality. Nevertheless, for the Piedmontese who orchestrated this union, governing the ex-Bourbon provinces of southern Italy in the months that followed would prove to be every bit as daunting as conquering them.1 The period between the spring of 1860 and the summer of 1861 constitutes one of the decisive moments in the history of the Italian Southern Question. During this period were forged certain relations of force between the north and south that would have a profound bearing upon the interactions between the two areas for decades to come. If the political, administrative, and military aspects of the Piedmontese takeover in the south in 1860–61 have been discussed at length, the question of how the Piedmontese confronted and represented the alien reality of southern Italy has received far less attention.2 Insofar as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was transformed 1. Cavour puts it this way in a letter to William de La Rive written just before the inaugural meeting of the first Italian parliament in February 1861: “But the task is more laborious and difficult now than in the past. To constitute Italy, to meld together the diverse elements of which it is composed, to create harmony between north and south, presents as much difficulty as a war with Austria and the struggle with Rome” (quoted in Artom 145). 2. For a general overview of the political, administrative, and military aspects of the takeover, see Candeloro, Storia 4: 415–538 and Storia 5: 9–178. More specifically, see Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi; Scirocco, Governo e paese;

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into southern Italy at this time, this was a crucial moment in the process of conceptualizing and imagining the south within the new geopolitical framework of the Italian nation. For the Piedmontese, the pressing problem of the day was not only how to govern the south but also how to make sense of it, and this “sense,” this ensemble of interpretations, descriptions, and representations, far from being secondary, actually served as the framework within which decisions of how to govern, administer, and control the south were made. In this chapter I shall examine this process of articulating and representing the south as it manifests itself in the correspondence between the Moderate political and military leaders involved in the “liberation” and annexation of southern Italy during the year between August 1860 and August 1861.3 I shall analyze the various concepts and figures employed to represent the south, focusing on some of the patterns that emerge within the discursive field constituted by these letters. In conclusion I shall consider the relationship between these representations and the form of rule based on military force that was employed in the south during this period. Let us begin with a few general observations about the epistolary discourse under examination. The letters, dispatches, memoranda, reports, and other texts collected in the Carteggi di Camillo Cavour and elsewhere conPasserin D’Entrèves, Ultima battaglia, especially 101–59; Pavone 73–120; Molfese 9–129; R. Villari, “Liberazione”; and Romeo, Piemonte 253–76. For a detailed account of Cavour’s role in these events, see Romeo, Cavour 679–941. 3. The majority of the letters I will be considering are collected in the Carteggi di Camillo Cavour, above all the five volumes of the series titled La liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del regno d’Italia, to be referred to henceforth in the text as CC Lib. del Mezz., followed by the volume number. For a concise discussion of this correspondence with respect to the emergence of the Southern Question, see Salvadori 23–33. It should be stressed at the outset that the main focus of this chapter is the correspondence among the men who belonged to the Cavourian entourage. It would no doubt be illuminating to compare these texts with the correspondence of democrats and republicans from the same period or, in a different vein, with the Garibaldine literature of 1860. Such an analysis, which lies beyond the scope of this chapter, might begin by taking into consideration the contrast Ernesto Ragionieri draws between the enthusiasm and curiosity for the foreign reality of the south variously manifest in the writings of Giuseppe Cesare Abba, Giuseppe Bandi, and Alberto Mario, and “the disdain for the Neapolitan people, institutions, and administration that explodes in all the letters of the Cavourian correspondents writing from the south.” Nevertheless, in Ragionieri’s view, “whoever compares the letters from the south written by Cavour’s emissaries and collaborators with the Garibaldine literature of 1860 will find in the latter a greater spirit of human solidarity with the populations of the south, but rarely a superior level of knowledge and understanding” (“Politica e amministrazione” 91). One striking example of Ragionieri’s point is Ippolito Nievo, who, as Romagnoli shows, reveals a profound sense of alienation from the south in his Lettere garibaldine of 1860–61 (see Romagnoli, “Spazio pittorico” 482–85).

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stitute the main network of communication connecting the political leaders engaged in the construction of the new Italian state. Count Camillo Cavour is the central figure in this correspondence, who, as Gaetano Arfé writes, “follows and directs from afar the action [in the south] in each of its phases.” But along with Cavour appear nearly every major exponent of the Moderate ruling group involved in applying Cavour’s directives in the south. Among the correspondents there appear, in fact, typical representatives of the old Piedmontese diplomatic and military personnel, but also—and they are perhaps the majority—the new “assimilated” men of the Cavourian party, former exiles from the various regions of Italy and, in particular, the south, who follow the policies of Cavour with no less zeal and fervor than the Piedmontese themselves.4

Through these letters and other texts the correspondents communicated a wide range of information and knowledge, from orders and instructions to descriptions, ideas, and observations. Along the most important route in this network, between the two politico-administrative centers of Turin and Naples, there was specifically an exchange of knowledge with regard to the south. In many of the examples to be considered, the correspondent writes from Naples with the understanding that the recipient in Turin (usually Cavour, who had never traveled south of Florence) lacks crucial knowledge about the situation in southern Italy, as is clear in a letter from the Neapolitan Antonio Scialoja to Cavour: “Naples is so different from Turin that no one unfamiliar with it, not even Count Cavour himself, has the most remote idea of what it is like” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 93–94). Or as Cavour himself indicates in a letter to his Piedmontese envoy in Naples, Marquis de Villamarina: “I thank you for your detailed letters. It isn’t easy to get an exact idea here of the real situation in Naples, for the reporting of newspaper correspondents reflects the opinion and party of the writer more than the real state of the land. Evidently, events of great importance are about to take place in southern Italy” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 1: 36). One of the main tasks of the various correspondents located in or visiting the south is thus to inform, to describe, to provide an accurate, truthful representation of the conditions in southern Italy: My dear Count, . . . I hasten to communicate my first impressions of this land to you. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 1: 11)

4. Arfé 322. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of this Moderate ruling group consisted of members of the liberal aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

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Please excuse this digression: I always seize the opportunity to provide you with an idea of this land. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 392) . . . I tell you all this not out of some mania for gossiping; but rather because I believe it is useful for you to know the true state of things, and because I fear that no one but I can or wants to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 395) Obeying His Majesty’s orders, I have the honor to submit to Him some considerations about the general situation and principally about those provinces that have been recently acquired. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 340; from Rattazzi to Victor Emmanuel II)

Few of these correspondents could be said to be impartial, however, insofar as most are actively involved in the political and military situation about which they are reporting. Most have a particular program or, at the very least, a “take” on the political process of which they are a part. These letters are therefore also acts of persuasion, attempts to represent the reality of southern Italy with a view to controlling it.5 As Cavour indicates in a dispatch to the commander of the Piedmontese fleet in Palermo, Admiral Carlo di Persano, the effect of their statements was considerable: “I impatiently await the requested report about the state of Sicily. I do not want to make any decisions before learning your opinion, which I know to be impartial and informed” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 1: 322).6 The effects of these letters are not limited to the influence they may have upon their decision-making, action-taking recipients. Many of these communications are not only persuasive but imperative. They contain numerous 5. As acts of persuasion such statements are also in competition with other representations of the same reality, as the following passage from a letter of Villamarina evinces regarding the level of Neapolitan discontent with the Bourbons (and thus regarding the crucial question of Neapolitan support for Piedmontese annexation): “The country’s attitude remains the same; they do not want the Bourbons any longer at any price. . . . take my word, dear Count, and don’t get led astray by the [Neapolitan] émigrés, who fool themselves about the country’s true inclinations at the moment, of which they have lost sight after long years of absence” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 1: 335). The second part of Villamarina’s comment calls attention to the problem of southern exiles’ perspectives discussed in the previous chapter and exemplified by the attitude of Giuseppe Massari, to be considered below. 6. With regard to Villamarina’s letters from Naples during the first half of 1860, Mack Smith argues that Villamarina seriously misrepresented the situation in Naples to Cavour and thus helped to bring about a series of misguided decisions that would have a significant bearing upon the course of events in 1860–61 (Cavour and Garibaldi 135).

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statements such as “don’t weaken your position in Naples,” “don’t waste time taking prisoners,” “declare a state of siege,” as well as declarations like the following in which Cavour (via a dispatch to the minister of war) advises foreigners in southern Italy that “those taking part in insurgent bands will be no longer considered prisoners of war but guilty of common crimes.” These are texts, in other words, that directly affect the reality to which they refer, managing, administering, and controlling it. At the same time, what is specific to this epistolary discourse is not simply the recurrence of instructions, commands, and declarations, but the extent to which it is highly effective as a whole. The powerful and authoritative correspondents who send these messages make things happen not just with their orders but with their descriptions and observations as well. It is in fact the interpenetration of these registers—on the one hand the register of description, on the other the imperative register of command and rule—that should be kept in mind in the following pages. In these letters, descriptions themselves tend to possess an imperative force, as this letter from General Nino Bixio to Cavour demonstrates: “Have the cannons removed from the Grand’Garde, and make sure that Nigra remembers that the Neapolitans are a bunch of Orientals—they understand nothing but force” (CC Carteggio Cavour-Nigra 4: 301). Here, while the command to withdraw the cannons (and thus make them available for use against the Neapolitans) syntactically precedes the characterization of the Neapolitans as “Orientals,” it is actually this characterization that in a sense prompts the proposition to use the cannons against them. I will further explore the relationship between such descriptions and the actual use of military force at the end of this chapter. For the moment it is enough to note that the epistolary discourse of these military leaders is one in which the dimensions of representation and rule are intimately connected. These letters, however, are not only the means for transmitting information about the south or the matrix of representations that contributes to its domination by the north. They also constitute a discursive space for the subjective negotiation and articulation of the south, confronted by the north for the first time within a national political framework. Each letter constitutes an occasion and site in which to imagine and conceptualize this new sociopolitical reality and, in so doing, to come to terms with it. We will see that these correspondents are well equipped with stereotypes and prejudices about the south, stereotypes no doubt indebted to the discourse on Naples and southern Italy that, as we have seen, took form in the European and Italian imaginations over the preceding century. It is their specific deployment within the horizon of the first massive encounter between north and

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south, and the unprecedented configurations of this relationship resulting from it, that I shall now explore.

the neapolitans disappoint the piedmontese During the last weeks of August 1860, as Garibaldi and his troops made their way up through Calabria toward Naples after having conquered Sicily and crossed the Straits of Messina, Cavour and his associates were dismayed by the fact that the Neapolitans would not rise up against the Bourbons before Garibaldi’s arrival. They were concerned that without a Neapolitan insurrection, Garibaldi’s solo conquest of the Bourbon capital would give him overwhelming control of southern Italy as well as undermine French support for the cause of Italian unity.The Neapolitans, however, despite the work of Piedmontese agents provocateurs, would not budge.7 Two remarks made about the Neapolitans on this occasion by Cavour and his envoy in Naples, Marquis de Villamarina, in some sense mark the beginning of the lengthy jeremiad against Naples and the south that fills these letters.8 Cavour writes: The Neapolitans’ conduct is disgusting: if they won’t do anything before Garibaldi’s arrival, they deserve to be governed as the Sicilians were by the likes of Crispi and Rafaeli. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 2: 169)

The next day, Villamarina writes back from Naples: Is it my fault, dear Count, if the Neapolitans are spineless . . . if they have become, so to speak, brutish? (CC Lib. del Mezz. 2: 176)

Already in these two brief remarks a number of significant elements of the Piedmontese attitude toward the south emerge, elements that would have considerable implications for the way the south actually would be governed by them. In Cavour’s statement, we find a discounting of the political capacities of the Neapolitans, such that they “deserve” to be ruled in an authoritarian, even violent manner—à la Rafaeli and Crispi, the latter of whom, a 7. For a discussion of these events, see Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 129–62, as well as Candeloro, Storia 4: 473–92. 8. Villamarina in fact arrived in Naples at the end of January 1860, and the frequent letters he sent to Cavour contain expressions similar to these. It is nevertheless this decisive moment of disappointment at the Neapolitans’ insurrection manqué that gives rise to an unprecedented spate of condemnations. The term jeremiad appears in a letter written in response to Massari’s “cry of pain from the pit into which he [had] fallen,” that is, Naples: “ . . . all the letters that come from Naples, all the reports that circulate on the affairs and people of Naples end with an interminable jeremiad” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 23–24).

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group of Sicilians claim, “attracted in twelve hours of rule all the hate that the most infamous of the Bourbon henchmen, Maniscalco, attracted in twelve long years” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 2: 55). Villamarina gives Cavour’s negative assessment of the Neapolitans’ political behavior a further twist, situating it at a level that more directly regards the Neapolitans’ character: they have “no blood in their veins,” a phrase followed by an even more explicit, and commonplace, declaration of the Neapolitans’ fall from the ranks of the civil and human—they have become “brutish.” The two parts of Villamarina’s remark, moreover, imply a significant equivocation that underscores many of the statements on the south in these letters: Are the Neapolitans somehow naturally spineless and brutish? Or, as one correspondent writes, is their objectionable behavior rather historically determined, “the consequence of centuries of despotism and of the confluence of the most tragic circumstances”?9 As we shall see below in greater detail, nearly all of those participating in the leadership of the new Italian state consider the people and society of southern Italy “corrupted” and “rendered brutish” by centuries of bad government, and thus different from those of the north, Piedmont specifically.10 Conversely, most, to different degrees, believe that the south, viewed “through the prism of the old literary view that attributed every sort of natural and climactic advantage to the south,” can be reformed (politically, economically, morally) through the good government of the Piedmontese.11 Nevertheless, in the various articulations of the south vis-à-vis the north in these letters, one often detects a crucial slippage from a historicizing perspective to one that posits southerners and the south as essentially different. As Cavour puts it on one occasion, the Neapolitans are corrupt “to the marrow.”12 Thus, if the phrase “they have become brutish,” with its impli9. CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 147. Ruggero Moscati sums up this equivocation thus: “with all the good will in the world, for the Piedmontese ruling classes . . . and for the Neapolitan exiles themselves who returned to Naples ‘Piedmontisized,’ it was difficult to distinguish between that which was an organic imperfection and infirmity of the country and that which was the transitory consequence of a transitory maladministration” (“Mezzogiorno” 286). 10. Lady Holland, a friend of Cavour’s, is the sole female contributor to this correspondence. Cavour, in response to her criticisms of his policies in the south, writes, “If you were a man and an Italian, I would entrust the destiny of those provinces to you; but since you cannot govern them, may it please you to enlighten me with regard to their miserable condition” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 411). 11. The quote is from Romeo, Piemonte 271–72. It is the history of just this “mythical” notion that Salvadori traces in his Mito del buongoverno. 12. Cavour’s words as referred by Hudson to Russell in a letter of 30 November 1860, quoted by Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 412. In a similar vein, Villa-

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cation of a historical process of barbarization, holds out hope for the reversibility of a process that is extrinsic to the subject, such interiorizing images as “no blood in their veins” and “to the marrow” ground that corruption in the subject’s very nature, casting more than a shadow of doubt over the hope for reform and redemption.13 I will return to this cluster of issues concerning the corruption and barbarization of the Neapolitans below, but let us first look at another response to the same situation in Naples, made by Cavour’s faithful associate Giuseppe Massari. As we saw in the previous chapter, Massari played a prominent role in the anti-Bourbon campaign of the 1850s. He was one of the key Neapolitan exiles to return to Naples in August–September 1860 to assist the Piedmontese in their takeover. His letters from Naples make it clear that he had grown accustomed to life in the center-north. Writing to Donna Ghita Collegno in late August, Massari vents his frustration at the Neapolitans thus: “Oh Naples! How baleful it is to Italy! Corrupt, vile land, lacking that stalwart virtue that distinguishes Piedmont, the invincible wisdom that distinguishes central Italy and Tuscany in particular. Believe me—Naples is worse than Milan” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 2: 137). Massari extrapolates a good deal more from the uprising manqué against the Bourbons than even Cavour and Villamarina. The specific political situation that prompts this outburst, marina suggests in another letter from Naples that history alone cannot account for the degradation of the Neapolitans: “There is nothing but cowardice here. As an excuse they say that they have been degraded . . . but why, I ask, have they let themselves be degraded in this fashion? . . . In the final analysis, history shows that all peoples have gone through something like this, yet they haven’t fallen into the state of brutishness and sloth that has overcome the Neapolitans” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 1: 141; emphasis in original). 13. An interesting contrast with this situation is a similar debate that was carried on in Greece during the same years. In both cases a fundamental ideological and political question was to what extent and in what ways an oppressive, corrupt political regime—the Bourbons in southern Italy, the Ottomans in Greece—had affected the nature of the society and individuals subjected to its rule. A key difference was that in Greece—as suggested by the title of the excellent study of this question by Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece—there was a widespread notion, at least among intellectuals, if not among the people, that there was a distinct, originary form of civilization that could be reclaimed. In southern Italy, instead, the layers of foreign domination represent a kind of mise en abîme, including even the Romans. In Platone in Italia, for example, Vincenzo Cuoco harks back to the pre-Roman, Sannite “farmer-philosopher” as the root of uncontaminated italianità (for a discussion of which in the context of the ideological construction of the “Italian” during the Risorgimento, cf. Bollati 973– 79). For a discussion of the importance of the notion of rediscovering and reclaiming an “aboriginal essence” to the European nationalist movements of the first half of the nineteenth century, see Benedict Anderson 194–96.

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in fact, gives way to a global statement about the moral qualities of the different regions of Italy.14 With a rhetorical flair that, while not infrequent in these letters, nevertheless marks his statements about the south in particular, Massari sets up Naples as Italy’s enemy, in opposition to Piedmont, central Italy, and Tuscany (which thus implicitly constitute the true Italy). Massari’s outburst highlights the negative ideological charge built up against Naples in the years before unification, fed in large part by the Neapolitan exiles in Turin, and lying ready to be ignited on occasions like this. This surplus charge characterizes many of the statements on the south in these letters. Furthermore, this letter is the first full-blown example of the logic of binary opposition that structures the encounter between north and south in this correspondence. Massari draws a kind of moral map of Italy, divided into regions of virtue (northern) and vice (southern). Naples’s very italianità, moreover, is cast into doubt by its description as “baleful” to Italy (a description that, with reference to the particular moment in August 1860 when Naples was in fact warring against “Italy,” is not inaccurate but, when linked to the universal characterization that follows [“corrupt, vile, lacking that virtue . . . “], loses its claim to historical specificity).

meeting the barbarians The Neapolitan rebellion manqué in August 1860 thus gave rise to a number of negative characterizations of the society and people of Naples. In the following pages these stereotypes will reappear in different combinations, with different inflections, accompanied by many others still to be considered. One in particular, a cognate of Villamarina’s (among others’) notion that the Neapolitans had become brutish, plays a particularly significant role in the imaginary field being examined: barbarism, and its more or less explicit complement, civilization. It is just this notion that rings out in one of the inaugural statements of this northern encounter with the south, the 27 October 1860 letter of Luigi Carlo Farini—chief ad14. For the highly “Piedmontisized” Massari, Milano is evidently fair game for criticism as well. This derogatory allusion to Milan (nevertheless favorably compared to Naples) serves to remind us that Naples and the Mezzogiorno were by no means the only region to be maligned by the Piedmontese, that indeed the negative representation of the south takes place within a field of multiple regional antagonisms. At the same time, the annexation of southern Italy in 1860–61 constitutes a crucial episode in the formation of a dualistic antagonism between north and south that, while by no means canceling out the force of other, more specific regionalisms and campanilismi, eventually becomes the overarching geopolitical division in the national imagination.

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ministrator of the south during the first months of Piedmontese control there—to Cavour. In this letter, written just after Farini’s arrival in the Neapolitan provinces, Farini describes the famous meeting between Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel at Teano. He then turns his attention to the state of these territories: But, my friend, what lands are these, Molise and the south! What barbarism! This is not Italy! This is Africa: compared to these peasants the Bedouins are the pinnacle of civilization. And what misdeeds!” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 208)

Barbarism and civilization, Africa and Italy, these are the oppositions that structure the articulation of the south in Farini’s statement. But it is not so much a statement as a series of exclamations, the dramatic sign of the first moment of northern impact with southern Italy. This land is “other than Italy,” other than that sociopolitical unity imagined by the Farinis, Cavours, Villamarinas, and other members of the Moderate Piedmontese leadership who at that very moment were consolidating their political hegemony over the democratic forces of opposition. Farini provides what is probably the most concise expression of the contrast between the barbaric south and civilized (northern) Italy, respectively connoted here in terms of Africa and its implicit Other, Europe.15 It recurs frequently, however, and, while the specific inflections of the opposition vary according to the context in which it appears, its basic character remains the same. In the following passage of a memorandum on the conditions in southern Italy written by Lady Holland to Cavour from Naples in late October, the emphasis on the “state of indecency” and lack of civilized infrastructures in the south goes hand in hand with the notion that the Piedmontese will have to build a civilization there starting from scratch: It is remarkable that in the entire Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the new government will discover that everything remains to be done. . . . All 15. In his report to Minister of the Interior Marco Minghetti on the conditions in southern Italy, Diomede Pantaleoni describes the difficulties of traveling in Calabria during the summer of 1861 in a similar fashion: “One must have forty, sixty bodyguards, go with extra carriages, all armed to the tooth, and travel like caravans in the desert defending oneself from the Arabs and Bedouins. . . . There isn’t a word of exaggeration in all this! It’s the story, the simple story of the way . . . I myself had to and did travel in those areas” (Alatri 771). A few years later, A. Bianco di St. Jorioz was even more explicit about the paradoxical nature of the coexistence of “Italy” and “Africa” in the same country: “Here we are among a people who, although they are Italian by birth, seem to belong to some primitive African tribe” (quoted in Croce, Storia del Regno 347).

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the cities of Naples and Sicily are in a state of indecency, almost inferior to that of the ancient tribes of Africa. The prisons and sites of detention are places where beasts can hardly be kept. There are no public fountains, no clocks, conditions not in the least fitting for civilized quarters.16

A similar vision of the uncivilized south as a place where society must be built ex novo appears in a letter to Cavour written by his minister of justice, G. B. Cassinis, while on a government visit to Naples in late November. Cassinis frames the problem in terms of the need to create the “public conscience” necessary for the “application” of a constitutional system of government in the south: In a certain sense it is necessary to remake the country, to remake or, better, create the public conscience; it is necessary to render these men capable of living under the constitutional system of government. And it would be something to despair over, to consider impossible, if this very land, so far from the ideas of progress and civilization, didn’t offer us special opportunities.17

The south is “so far from the ideas of progress and civilization” (which, again, implicitly characterize the Piedmontese) that it will require a Piedmontese intervention, or as Massari writes on another occasion, “a massive invasion of Piedmontese morality,” to reform it. By the same token, Cassinis’s statement manifests the proprietary or, more precisely, imperial attitude toward southern Italy that is a hallmark of this correspondence, an attitude that in turn relies upon a crucial assumption regarding the stability and autonomy of the Piedmontese.As we shall see more clearly below, the Piedmontese posit 16. CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 244. It is interesting to contrast this description of Naples and Sicily with the encomium of Naples offered by the Milanese federalist Giuseppe Ferrari a few weeks earlier on the floor of parliament during the 8 October debate on the annexation of the southern provinces. In his speech against annexation and in favor of confederation, Ferrari declaims: “I saw a colossal, rich, powerful city. . . . I saw better-paved streets than in Paris, more splendid monuments than in the premier capitals of Europe, fraternal and intelligent inhabitants, quick in thought, in conversation, in association, in action. Naples is the greatest Italian capital, and when it overlooks the fires of Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii, it seems the eternal queen of nature and of nations” (Discussioni della Camera, 1860, 2nd period: 936). In light of the Cavourians’ representations of Naples, there would appear to be a correlation between Ferrari’s federalist political orientation and his respect for the human and civic reality of Naples. This hypothesis must be considered, however, in relation to the case of Massimo d’Azeglio (cf. note 20 below). 17. CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 351. Consider also the following statement regarding the savage mind of the Neapolitans: “The people of Naples are profoundly ignorant, semibarbarian, and superstitious to a degree unequalled in history” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 332). Again the hyberbolic terms of the affirmation are prominent.

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themselves in these letters as active, stable, and sovereign against a south that is presumed to be passive, subject to change, and heteronomous. The representation of the south as a land of barbarism (variously qualified as indecent, lacking in “public conscience,” ignorant, superstitious, etc.) is evidently one of the most effective ways to assert its distance and difference from the civilized, Piedmontese north. At the same time it engenders a corollary proposition, the need for and justification of Piedmontese intervention in and reform of the south. The representation of the south in these terms works as a kind of figurative seesaw, such that the lower the south falls in the north’s representation, the higher the north rises in its self-representation. The distance and difference of the south from the north thus consolidate the north’s self-identity as morally, culturally, and technically superior to the south, giving it a sense of superiority resoundingly expressed by Diomede Pantaleoni in a letter to Cavour of 6 November 1860: Our annexation of Naples and those provinces devastated and ruined by the most absurd despotism is already a bold test to which we have put ourselves, but at least with our force, our greater courage, with our superior intelligence and superior morality, with our experience and character, we can hope to govern and master them. (CC Questione romana 1: 70)

Or, in this letter to Massimo d’Azeglio of 21 August 1861, with an emphasis on the north’s benevolence toward the south: Believe me, we are not the ones who benefit from this union, but rather those wretched peoples without morals, without courage, without knowledge, and endowed only with excellent instincts and a mixture of credulousness and cunning that always delivers them into the hands of the greatest crooks. (Massimo d’Azeglio 441)

These assertions of the south’s civic ruin (“ruined and devastated provinces”) juxtaposed to the north’s positive capacity to govern, master, and aid it represent one of the key stances taken by the north vis-à-vis the south in these letters. It is characterized by the north’s power over the south’s dysfunctionality, by the north’s ability to master the south. There is, however, another stance taken by the north, one that reveals another face to the south’s difference and that proves to be a good deal more unstable than the one just considered.This is the stance taken when the south manifests itself to the northern observer as excessively ugly, disgusting, abject. Such manifestations of the south’s difference threaten the glowing and gloating sense of northern superiority that fills these letters, calling into question the north’s ability to overcome this intense condition of negativity.

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The type of representation engendered by this relationship is one in which the negative qualities of the south are articulated minus the assertion of the north’s capacity to master and reform them. These representations are among the most emphatic and indiscriminate in this correspondence, recklessly confusing the register of moral judgment and objective description. Reading the following passage from the diary of General Paolo Solaroli after his brief visit to Naples in December 1860, one is left wondering, for example, exactly to which aspects of the Neapolitan people the words ugly, weakness, vice, and filth actually refer: I shall now say a few words about the often-praised Naples with its lovely climate. Its population is the ugliest I have seen in Europe after Oporto’s, but it surpasses them in weakness and vice, in filth. . . . We have acquired a terrible country, yet it seems impossible that nature could bestow so much upon its land without generating another people.18

As with other reactions of this sort, the insistence upon, indeed obsession with, these negative characteristics calls attention to the subjective state of the author, to the effect this purported reality has on him. In contrast to the group of statements considered above in which the capacity to reform, master, and govern held sway, in this group the emphasis on the abject nature of the south tends to be intimately associated with the author’s sense of being overwhelmed by that state of negativity. According to Massimo d’Azeglio, for example, the north was not up to the Herculean task of cleaning out the “Augean stables” of the south (see Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 134), an image that expresses the notion of the south’s superlative filth with a classical touch. On another occasion, and in a different figurative register, d’Azeglio writes, “in every way fusion with the Neapolitans frightens me; it’s like going to bed with someone who has smallpox.”19 One year later, he adds, “As for Naples, with each step we take things only get worse. It’s an ulcer that gnaws at us and costs us 18. CC Lib. del Mezz. 5: 231–32. It would be difficult to find a more explicit reprise of the description of Naples as “a paradise inhabited by devils.” 19. Massimo d’Azeglio 430. As in the previous citation from this collection of letters, the editor adds an exculpation of d’Azeglio in a footnote: “These are reminiscences of the dreaded Bourbon government. Absit iniuria from that genial people [the Neapolitans], who in fact possess excellent and serious qualities.” The editor is clearly at pains to dissipate the lingering confusion between the political system and the essential character of the Neapolitans discussed earlier.

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dearly.”20 In each of these statements the south is represented as that which enervates, contaminates, detracts from the north. The south that appears in this abject guise therefore tends to provoke disgust, to inspire fear or dismay, as in the statements “fusion with the Neapolitans frightens me” or “what frightens me above all is the distance between the moral and political life of these provinces and those of middle- and upper-Italy.” But fear and disgust are only one side of the coin. When seen in a different light, the very elements that represent a source of repulsion and uneasiness can constitute a source of attraction and pleasure. Let us look at this form of psychic ambivalence, this complicity of disgust and desire, in a letter by Giuseppe Massari. Shortly after returning to Naples after more than a decade of exile in Piedmont, Massari communicates these “impressions” to Cavour in a letter of 21 October: I find myself in an entirely new world, and I want to share my impressions of it with you. Naples offers the most bizarre and singular spectacle that one could imagine: that of an anarchy that is at once picturesque and grotesque: an otherworldly racket, a continuous shuffling about of people, an uproar that would deafen even Senator Plana, and a filth that would disgust the people of Constantinople. I have always loved and appreciated Piedmont, but after these three days in Naples I adore it. The contrast is indescribable. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 163)

Massari offers here some of the familiar stereotypes regarding Naples: its “anarchy,” mentioned by numerous correspondents who alternately describe it as Babel or Babylon (i.e., “the filthy spectacle of this filthy Babylon”); its confusion and clamoring crowds; its filth—described here with a nod to the Orient—which exceeds even that of Constantinople. It is not, however, so much these commonplaces as the framework for their articulation that merits our attention. First of all, Massari—who, let 20. Quoted in Flora 100. In the context of the prevalently Moderate Carteggi Cavour under examination, d’Azeglio’s statements prompt us to consider the extent to which the denigration of southern Italy is not limited to the Cavourian entourage or to the Moderate leadership but is rather something that invests other political orientations as well. Professing, in a federalist spirit in open polemic with the Cavourians, the Neapolitans’ right to political autonomy and self-determination, d’Azeglio nevertheless presents a vision of the south akin to theirs in its visceral sense of contempt and disgust. The geographical imagination, in other words, does not line up neatly with a single political position but is rather “overdetermined,” the product of diverse social, cultural, regional, and political formations. For a relevant discussion, see Bidussa, with specific reference to the uneven fit between the grammar of anti-Semitism and the politics of anti-Semitism.

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us remember, is a former resident of Naples—expresses the astonishment of the (assimilated) Piedmontese subject before the “entirely new” world of Naples.The Neapolitan “spectacle” is “bizarre” and “singular,” at the limits of the imagination. The distance separating Naples from Piedmont is in fact an abyss, the contrast between them “indescribable.” Out of this contrast and encounter, the author’s identification with Piedmont emerges consolidated and confirmed: “I have always loved and appreciated Piedmont, but after these three days in Naples I adore it.” The most striking feature of the passage, however, is its double vision of Naples’s anarchy, which it labels “at once picturesque and grotesque.” Naples is grotesque in a way similar to that indicated by General Solaroli and Massimo d’Azeglio—noisy, filthy, disorderly. But by the same token it is picturesque. Massari thus formulaically describes the dialectic of attraction and repulsion that the north engages with its southern Italian Other, both during this period and in the decades that follow. In the statements we have considered, the grotesque, repulsive dimension was prominent, but the very insistence upon and, often, obsession with the south’s negative qualities constitute a form of attraction to it (Charles Dickens’s phrase “the attraction of repulsion” is very much to the point). As Stallybrass and White observe with respect to the “low-Others” that bourgeois society defines as dirty, repulsive, noisy, and contaminating: “disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as ‘Other,’ return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination” (191). They return, in our case, as “picturesque,” that lens through which the south was so often viewed from late in the eighteenth century forward. To frame the problem in Foucauldean terms, Massari’s formulation attests to what could be described as the “incitement to discourse” that the south offers the north, an incitement that another correspondent expresses in a way that could serve as an epigraph not only to these letters but to the discourse on the south more generally in the modern era: “Your Excellence, please pardon these words dashed off in such fury. This land is too interesting not to discuss at length” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 481).

two moral maps The mapping of various moral, political, and cultural traits onto the geographical axis of north and south is a key aspect of the northern confrontation with the south inscribed in these letters. In the statements we have just considered, it was present in a more or less implicit fashion; in others it is articulated in a more open and elaborate manner. The Lombard

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Count Guido Borromeo (recently appointed to the post of secretary general of the Ministry of the Interior) formulates it this way in a letter to Ferdinando Riccardi di Netro of 14 December 1860: I know this city where I have sojourned for more than two consecutive years and know the perils and snares strewn upon its streets. Accustomed to the severe discipline and scornful honesty of our north, the cowardice, greed, corruption, and bad faith that grow exponentially as one descends toward the heel of the boot are appalling. It will take at least two generations before stealing, lying, and cheating are considered actions that are not merely prohibited by the legal code. Still, it is necessary for someone to assume the role of master and pedagogue. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 71)

Here we find some of the familiar hierarchical oppositions between north and south—between the discipline and honesty of the former and the “cowardice, greed, corruption, and bad faith” of the latter. But what is striking is the cartographic imagination at work in this passage, the way the author envisions an ethical scale of values descending with mathematical regularity as one moves down the “heel of the boot.” Here, too, the disastrous conditions in the south are a source of despair for the northern subject—“fanno un effetto disperante” (they are appalling)—and this sense of consternation in turn leads typically to the adoption of a morally superior stance, that of “master and pedagogue.”21 In another letter we find a somewhat different version of this moral map. While the preceding letter was written by a Piedmontese aristocrat and government official who, by dint of “more than two consecutive years” of residence in the south, professes the authority to describe it and contrast it with the north, the author of the following quotation is a Neapolitan lawyer and patriot, Tommaso Sorrentino. Sorrentino’s text consists of a “memorandum” to Costantino Nigra, who at the time was serving as secretary to the lieutenant general of the Neapolitan provinces, Prince Eugenio di Carignano. In it Sorrentino offers Nigra a bit of local advice, suggestions for the successful governance of the Neapolitan provinces. Consider that Italy from the Alps to the Roman Apennines has one way of life, one thought, one upbringing; from the Apennines to the sea it has another. In the north patriotism predominates, in the south selfinterest; there sacrifice is spontaneous, here one works out of egoism; 21. As the Neapolitan Giovanni Manna noted at this time, it was just this attitude that prompted a growing resentment among many southerners as they realized that the Piedmontese compatriot who claims to be “friend, associate, brother, instead aims to be master and superior” (Passerin D’Entrèves 64).

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in the north there is reflection, here in the south dancing; there harmony exists, at least in purpose, here discord in everything; in upper Italy one is familiar with political life, in lower Italy it is entirely unknown; up there civic education exits, down here public corruption. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 288)

Whereas Borromeo offers the image of an ethico-cultural scale of values descending from north to south, Sorrentino sets out a more dichotomizing geographical schema. Sorrentino’s Italy is divided by the Roman Apennines, on either side of which exists a distinct form of “life, thought, upbringing.” Sorrentino draws out this dichotomy, repeatedly passing back and forth between north and south, consistently valorizing the former and devaluing the latter. The variations he employs to indicate northern and southern Italy are also significant: after specifying north (Settentrione) and south (Mezzogiorno) at the beginning, he writes “there” and “here,” respectively, twice; then “upper” and “lower” Italy; and finally “up there” and “down here.” The modulation from the simple indication of “there” and “here” to these other terms, combined with the emphatic moral contrast between the two places, serves to tint the otherwise merely topographical adjectives with a distinctly moral color.

the wound, the doctor, the nation Both the Lombard Count Guido Borromeo and the Neapolitan Tommaso Sorrentino articulate the social, political, and moral reality of the newly formed Italian nation along the geographical axis of north and south. Borromeo, we saw, concluded his geographical representation with an appeal to reform, a call for someone to serve “as master and pedagogue” for these morally depraved provinces. Sorrentino concludes on a similar note. At the end of his memorandum he beseeches Nigra to heed his patriotic advice and closes with this appeal: “Don’t you see the general ill-health of this social body? May you cure it before its condition worsens” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 288). The south is a sick body in need of the Piedmontese cure. Images of disease and medical treatment constitute one of the most common modes of visualizing the south and its relationship to the north in these letters.22 The south is frequently figured as a piaga (wound) or cancrena (gan22. The medical vision of the south, however, is by no means limited to this period and this correspondence. To cite a few examples from the first decades following unification, in 1863 Alexandre Dumas writes (with reference to Naples) of “the necessity of a surgeon” for “a gravely ill society” (quoted in Ragionieri, Italia giudicata 11–12); just after the conquest of Rome in 1871 Rattazzi speaks of Naples

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grene) that requires the north’s healing treatment. As with other representations considered so far, these are unstable, tending to shift among the political, social, and moral domains. The 21 November 1860 letter of the former Sicilian exile in Turin and secretary of the National Society, Giuseppe La Farina, to Cavour from Naples provides a striking example of the use of this medical imagery.23 At the same time, it demonstrates how the imagination and denunciation of a particular political and administrative reality expand to embrace an increasingly general “moral” range of characteristics. Here theft in public offices continues just as under the Bourbons and under the dictatorship [of Garibaldi]; and it will take fire and iron to extirpate this gangrene. Another lethal wound is the greed for employment. The halls of the ministers and stairways are so crowded that it would be impossible for a gentleman to make his way without the help of our police. It’s a form of blackmail, no less irritating, impudent, and disgusting than that which takes place in the city streets, along which one sees the most horrible and obscene human infirmities put on display as advertising for alms. But what frightens me above all is the distance between the moral and political life of these provinces and those of middle and upper Italy. Except for the name of Piedmont itself, there is not one Piedmontese name that is known here: no one speaks of Piedmont, no one asks of it; its history is unknown, no one knows the slightest thing about its political conditions and laws. In short, the moral annexation [of the south] has not happened. I believe that the king’s government should make every effort and sacrifice to increase the communications between

as “the bleeding wound that we have opened on our side” (quoted in Capone, “Età liberale” 121); a few years later Franchetti describes the worldview of the Sicilians as an “illness to be cured” (Franchetti and Sonnino 1: 221); and finally Paolo Orano writes in 1896 that the “race” of Sardinians “grows, spreads like rotten, pussy gangrene. This is not normal generation; it is a breeding ground of assassins, of beasts; it is without doubt an invasion of barbarians” (quoted in Salvadori 187). For a general consideration of the analogy between disease and civil disorder in Western political thought, see Sontag, Illness as Metaphor 71–85. The locus classicus in the Italian tradition is to be found in Machiavelli’s Prince: “When trouble is sensed well in advance it can be easily remedied; if you wait for it to show itself any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable. As the doctors say of a wasting disease, to start with it is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; after a time, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. So it is in politics. Political disorders can be quickly healed if they are seen well in advance (and only a prudent ruler has such foresight); when, for lack of diagnosis, they are allowed to grow in such a way that everyone can recognize them, remedies are too late” (39–40). 23. For a discussion of La Farina’s activities as secretary of the National Society, see Grew.

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these and the older [northern] provinces. . . . The Bourbons surrounded Naples with a Great Wall of China, and the Neapolitans are so used to considering their great city as a world unto itself that it is necessary not only to invite them but to force them to enter into the common life of the nation. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 356)

La Farina’s observations begin with the particular phenomenon of theft in public offices, which, figured as gangrene, gives way to “another lethal wound,” the greed for employment. The concrete manifestation of this greed, however, entails another shift in perspective from the general notion of theft and greed to a specific, subjective, and anecdotal description of the difficulty a “gentleman” has in moving along the stairways. The description of this phenomenon, a “form of blackmail,” shifts in turn to the city streets, forming a comparison between the domain of administration and that of society at large. What links these two spheres is in fact the figure of infirmity itself and the sense of the abject that underscores the description of both. Of course what gets lost in this series of figurative associations and shifts in perspective is whatever analytical validity the original description of theft in public offices had; as we shall see in a moment, the description eventually concludes in the realm of utmost moral abstraction. But what is equally notable about this passage is the movement from objective observation to subjective involvement. The problem of greed for employment seems to be reduced—by way of the colon—to the problem one gentleman has in moving along the stairways. What follows leaves little doubt that the gentleman is La Farina himself, for as his description turns to the streets, the force of the adjectives—irritating, impudent, disgusting, horrible, filthy—and the final exclamation mark render the author’s own participation in this scene readily apparent. The opening of the following paragraph confirms this subjective stance of fear and trembling before the horrors of Naples (“But what frightens me above all . . . “) at the same time that it directs the problem back into the generalizing register of an objective moral dichotomy. The confrontation between this single, “Piedmontisized” subject and the sociopolitical reality of Naples thus becomes “the distance between the moral and political life of these provinces and those of middle and upper Italy.” Of the Piedmontese who are to rule these provinces and indeed the entire nation, no one in Naples seems to have the slightest idea. Their military and political conquest of the south has fallen short of the desired “moral annexation,” and

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thus, a concerted effort involving both solicitation and constraint is necessary “to force them to enter into the common life of the nation.” The visualization of the south as a wound also raises the question of just what kind of treatment must be administered to heal it. La Farina clearly indicates the need for a more violent intervention, both in the opening lines of the passage cited earlier (“it will take fire and iron to extirpate this gangrene”) and at the conclusion when he mentions the necessity of force. This certainly contrasts with the more tender treatment suggested by Pasquale Stanislao Mancini of Apulia, who writes to Cavour of “this homeland of mine lacerated by terrible wounds in need of loving care” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 362; my emphasis). Luigi Carlo Farini also assesses the situation in Naples as so grave that it would be impossible “to make a clean, deep cut, in the wound overnight”: Let me say it to you one more time, the state of this miserable land is appalling. . . . To be sure, we mustn’t encourage all the wicked inclinations and abject customs, but it isn’t possible to make a clean, deep cut in the wound overnight. The multitudes teem like worms in the rottedout body of the state: some Italy, some liberty! Sloth and maccheroni. No one in Turin or Rome will envy us the splendor and dignity of the capital of Italy as long as this one continues to be the capital of sloth and of the prostitution of every sex, of every class. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 328–29)

Equal in importance to the method of treating the wound is the question of who shall be the doctor—clearly the Piedmontese, who more or less explicitly arrogate this function for themselves. The Piedmontese representation of the south as wound and self-representation as doctor provide yet another way to project a moral and “operational” (political, administrative, military) superiority over the south that lies accordingly passive and supine as a patient. The dualism and detachment that this doctor–patient relationship implies are relatively unstable, however, undermined by the presence of another, contradictory figure belonging to the same medical register: that of the body of the nation, understood as “one and indivisible.”24 The body politic being treated is, in other words, that of the northern doctor himself, and the consternation, if not hysteria, that many correspondents express with regard to the infirm south no doubt derives from an awareness of this fact. The 24. “Italy one and indivisible” was the phrase that appeared in the text of the plebiscite of 21 October 1860.

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knowledge that Italy’s newly acquired unity depends upon the south’s own integrity (“if Italy is to be saved or lost, it will be saved or lost with Naples and in Naples”) thus underscores the fear that the south’s ills might spread to the north.25 Just this realization inspires Farini to appeal to the “great moral authority” of parliament in a letter to Cavour soon after his arrival in Naples in mid-November: If the national parliament with its great moral authority does not establish a bit of effective authority here, believe me, the annexation of Naples will become the gangrene of the rest of the state. I see that the view of these parts of Italy held by the rest of the country does not correspond to the truth. . . . Let us make sure that this phase of the annexation of Naples does not mark the beginning of the moral breakup of Italy! (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 328; my emphasis)

the south’s first day in parliament The representation of the south as the wound or gangrene of the nation (along with the concomitant figure of the doctor/surgeon) is also present in the first parliamentary debate on the south, which took place in Turin on 2–6 April 1861.26 As the first national, public discussion of the situation in southern Italy and, specifically, of the recent events connected to the “liberation” and annexation of the south, it marks an important episode in the story of the Piedmontese encounter with southern Italy.There is a significant overlap between the correspondents of the Carteggio Cavour and the participants in the parliamentary discussion (Massari, Cavour, La Farina, Pantaleoni, Crispi, Cassinis, Scialoja, Torrearsa, et al.). Equally importantly, the project of describing the south to the Piedmontese leadership, of representing it to and for them, is similar in both cases. A brief look at this discussion both allows us to see how the figures of disability and disease used in the letters are deployed in an affiliated discursive space and brings into focus the issue that will concern us for the remainder of this chapter—the relationship between representing the south and ruling it. In his opening statement Giuseppe Massari, the deputy responsible for initiating the discussion, presents the problem in these familiar terms: When a wound bleeds and is about to turn to gangrene, it is necessary to freshen it with the pungent air of publicity, it is necessary, if you

25. CC Lib. del Mezz. 5: 404. Or, similarly: “the entire Italian question is now in Naples. To succeed there is to create Italy” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 72). 26. For a discussion of which, see Passerin D’Entrèves 287–310.

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want to heal it, to treat it with the hot iron of open discussion. (Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 361)

In his response, Minister of the Interior Marco Minghetti elaborates upon Massari’s figure thus: The Honorable Massari has, in a sense, acted as a surgeon, revealing the principal wounds of the land [the south]; . . . I will try to be the doctor (laughter), indicating the remedies.27

At the same time, according to one member of parliament, the government has been remiss in its medical duties toward the south: In my opinion, the king’s government has been like a surgeon that finds himself before a tremendous operation to perform, and has not the courage to attempt it; he sees all the harm that can come to the patient, yet does not feel up to the task. (Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 413)

Another yet—Emerico Amari—takes issue with the very representation of the south as the nation’s wound and source of corruption: When one speaks of corruption . . . we must tell the truth: that is, that we have not all been corrupted simply because we were subject to the most corrupt of governments. I will say it once and for all, that these two peoples [the Neapolitans and Sicilians] must not be represented as nothing but some gangrene. No, we are Italians and we have preserved our Italian virtues. We made the revolution, and this suffices to demonstrate our morality.28

27. Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 371. Massari’s medical representation of the south must have seemed particularly fitting to Minghetti. Four months earlier he had communicated to Farini his conviction that “some soldierly methods would be beneficial medicine for this people” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 76)— a comment that points toward our discussion below of the correlation between such imagery and the use of military force in the south. 28. Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 416. One of the most eminent and authoritative members of the Sicilian autonomy movement, Amari was the man whose concerns about Piedmontese centralization inspired one of Cavour’s most celebrated (and, in retrospect, ill-fated) statements regarding regional self-government: “Professor Emerico Amari, most learned jurisconsult that he is, will recognize, I hope, that we are no less fond of decentralization than he, that our theories of the state do not lead to the tyranny of a capital over the provinces, nor the creation of a bureaucratic caste that would subject all the different parts of the kingdom to the control of an artificial center against which the traditions and customs of Italy would rebel no less than its geographic conformation. I expressed my views on this subject to Professor Amari’s brother on a number of occasions, and I have no doubt that as soon as the commotion that a few rabble-rousers are trying to stir up by fo-

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Challenging the prevalent view of the south as corrupt and politically incapable, this parliamentarian from Palermo asserts the active role of the southerners in the struggle for unification (“we made the revolution”), together with their moral integrity that, he claims, cannot be reduced to the corruption of the Bourbons.29 He shows that what is at issue in this debate (and elsewhere) is the representation of the south, the manner in which it will be imagined. And what seems implicit in his plea is that the manner of imagining the south will have a decisive effect upon the manner of governing it. This debate on the south is, in other words, at once a debate on how it will be represented and how it will be ruled. Those who contest the representation of the south as the corruption and gangrene of the nation are vastly outnumbered, however. Between Giuseppe Ferrari’s motion “to learn the state of the southern provinces, undertaking a solemn and impartial investigation, aimed at informing both the government and national parliament,” and the government motion that authorizes and encourages the government to maintain order there, it is the latter that is overwhelmingly approved.30 Notwithstanding Amari’s protest and Ferrari’s motion, the description of the south as corruption and wound clearly retained its currency,31 and the government thus received its first parliamentary authorization to act in accordance with that figure, to extirpate the

menting personal controversy is quelled, it will be very easy to reach an agreement on the scheme of organization that leaves the central authority the necessary force to complete its great work of national liberation and grants real self-government to the regions and provinces” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 220). 29. Similarly, in his opening statement on “the state of the Neapolitan provinces,” Massari begins by refuting the widespread opinion—which he numbers among the common errors about the south—”that the revolution in the southern provinces was what one would call, with an economic metaphor, the fruit of importation . . . that the national sentiment among the population of southern Italy is sluggish, is weak” (Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 361). 30. The quote is from Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 399. As Candeloro notes, “the national parliament’s first discussion of the Southern Question thus did not lead to a change in the government’s policy there, which proceeded along the road of administrative unification, without an exact idea of the actual needs of the south” (Costruzione 5: 143). It would be over a decade before parliament began to take the conditions in southern Italy seriously as a “social question.” 31. The “wound” of southern Italy figures prominently, in fact, in the opening discussion of the second period of parliament on 20 November 1861. After a long summer of fighting brigandage, however, Prime Minister Bettino Ricasoli’s statement suggests a somewhat diminished faith in the government’s medical abilities: “There is no doctor who can heal the wounds of the Neapolitan provinces with specific remedies. Time is needed to heal them, along with the actions of the government and the efficacy of the laws” (Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 2nd period: 6).

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gangrene with “fire and iron”—which is to say in practical terms, to rule southern Italy by means of military force.32

the supreme argument of force Returning to the Carteggio Cavour, a similar connection between the description of the south as corrupt and infirm and the prescription of military force to “cure” and control it emerges distinctly in a letter sent a few weeks after this parliamentary debate, from Prince Eugenio di Carignano—who at the time was serving in collaboration with Nigra as lieutenant general of the Neapolitan provinces—to Cavour: . . . because of the demoralized and degraded conditions in which the Bourbon government kept this land, the south is incapable of governing itself. It is necessary to destroy all of its administrations and assimilate it as quickly as possible to the other provinces. . . . Because this land does not understand the word nationality, annexation happened here under the pressure of revolution and with the fear of the revolvers of the Garibaldines and bandits. With this people’s ignorance, complete assimilation will not be felt here as it is in other parts of Italy. What’s needed here is troops everywhere and in great quantities; send governors and officials from the other provinces of the kingdom, scrupulous people, however, and I can assure you that things will go a hundred times better than at present. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 459)

In one seamless whole this passage articulates the negativity of the Neapolitans—their moral depravity, brutishness, political ignorance, and incapacity for self-government—and the necessity of ruling them by force. It constructs a kind of logical progression between these provinces’ past (their 32. In response to the militarization of government policy toward the south, and specifically to Minghetti’s suggestion that additional troops would be sent there to maintain order, two voices of protest rang out in this debate with particular force— that of Ferrari: “A single word shook and stung me like an arrow, and though I am to some extent in accord with the minister as long as he is fighting the pope and emperor, when I heard him assure, promise that he would send crack troops to the south, that at this very moment an imposing military force is already encamped at Foggia, at Sora, etc., then I felt myself to be almost personally threatened. What are you thinking, sirs, to send bayonets from Turin into the old kingdom [of Naples]? To what end? To police the area? Don’t you see the enormous contradiction of your position?” (Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 396); and that of Mellana: “. . . I’ll say it frankly, I listened with great distress to those who invoked the supreme argument of force.And with greater distress I heard the minister of the interior vaunt this grievous expedient with an air of satisfaction, speaking of it more in an absolutist sense than in that of a free government” (Discussioni della Camera, 1861, 1st period: 437).

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corruption under the Bourbons), their present (their ignorance and incapacity for self-government), and their near future (the need for “troops everywhere and in great quantities”). Read together with the parliamentary debate just considered, this letter offers a clear indication of the prevalence of the view of the south both as corrupt and infirm and requiring military force. In conclusion I wish to articulate the relationship between these two instances—of representation and rule—more carefully, situating this relationship in the context of the historical events of 1860–61. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the epistolary discourse of this political correspondence is a highly effective one in which the imperative mode of commands, orders, instructions, and declarations interpenetrates with the descriptive mode of impressions, observation, and representation. While my analysis here has been concerned primarily with statements of a descriptive-representative nature, let us remember that the overall context of these descriptions and representations was that of the government and administration of southern Italy. Each of these statements, in other words, possessed an imperative and performative force that affected the sociopolitical context in which it was deployed. Another important aspect of this discourse with respect to the practical rule of southern Italy is its role as part of the imaginary and conceptual horizon within which the Piedmontese apprehended the south and consequently acted upon it. At one level the articulations of the south in this discourse also articulated the types of actions that could be taken there. The Piedmontese discourse on the south was an important enabling condition for ruling it. Prince Eugenio’s statement above, in which we saw a “natural,” logical progression from the assessment of the southerners’ corruption and incapacity for self-government to the request for “troops everywhere and in great quantities,” must therefore be read as an integral part of the militarization of southern Italy during this period. At the same time, this effective, epistolary discourse was itself subject to the historical conditions in which it was enmeshed. The climate of violence that reigned in the south during this period and the increasingly systematic use of military force there formed the matrix out of which the statements we have been considering were produced. We have seen that the Piedmontese undertook the “liberation” of southern Italy with a well-stocked repertoire of preconceptions and prejudices. But the particularly antagonistic, extreme articulation of this repertoire was the result of the specific form that the initial encounter between north and south assumed. The nature of this encounter had been, from the outset, violent. From the landing of Garibaldi’s Thousand in Sicily in May 1860, the south was a field of battle, a territory

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to be won from an enemy power. From that moment, the government, management, and imagination of the south took place within the horizon of military conflict. When at the beginning of October 1860, Luigi Carlo Farini enters the Neapolitan provinces alongside King Victor Emmanuel to set up a Piedmontese administration there, he arrives with a conquering army engaged in an operation of military cleanup. His first encounter with and representation of this “other Italy” is thus underscored by violence, as the extended version of the citation considered earlier suggests: But, my friend, what lands are these, Molise and the south! What barbarism! This is not Italy! This is Africa: compared to these peasants the Bedouins are the very pinnacle of civilization. And what misdeeds! The king [of Naples] gives carte blanche and the rabble sacks the houses of the gentry and cuts off the heads, the ears of the gentleman, and they boast and write to Gaeta [the king]: we killed this many gentlemen, and I get the prize. Even the hick women do some killing; and worse, they tie up the gentlemen (that’s how they call the liberals) by their testicles, and they drag them that way through the streets, and then chop ‘em off. Horrors beyond belief if they hadn’t happened right around us in this area. But nothing else has happened for a few days: I’ve arrested a lot of people; some I’ve had shot in the back (I hope [Minister of Justice] Cassinis will forgive me); Fanti has published a severe decree. As soon as I arrive in Naples, I’ll send you a report with the documents regarding these exploits of the Court of Gaeta, which are wholly worthy of the tradition of Queen Caroline and Cardinal Ruffo. (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 208)

To be sure, this is a wartime document, and seen from the perspective of an imagination-at-war, there is perhaps nothing particularly remarkable about the “barbarization” of the enemy manifest in this description. But the key problem this passage represents with respect to the formation of a national consciousness is not only how to make Italian citizens out of barbarians but how to bring about a cessation of hostilities, both on the field of battle and in the field of the imagination. Instead of decreasing in the wake of the Bourbon defeat, the militarization of the south actually increased during the years immediately following unification, assuming the dimensions of a civil war. This continuation of hostilities in southern Italy weighed heavily upon both the political and imaginary relationships between north and south for years to come. Faced with the sociopolitical disorder and unrest ensuing from the collapse of the Bourbon kingdom and the revolutionary war in the south, the Piedmontese government adopted what Molfese describes as “a strictly repressive approach to the solution of the problems in southern Italy, with

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the near total exclusion of measures of social reform.” The repressive measures adopted were, moreover, of an “exceptional, exaggerated and indiscriminate severity” (39, 64). In the political correspondence of 1860–61, and specifically in the autumn of 1860, it is in fact possible to mark a crescendo of “appeals and incitations to the use of force and repression” (R.Villari, “Liberazione” 269) and to observe the transition from a war conducted against an external threat (the Bourbons) to one conducted against complex and multiple forms of internal political resistance. In the mind of Cavour and others, the military campaign had to be conducted on two fronts: one against the foreign threat of the Bourbons and the other against a multifaceted domestic threat, ranging from Garibaldine “democratic” political opposition to Bourbon-instigated insurgency to “brigandage.”33 Shortly after defeating the Bourbon troops in the areas south of Naples, General Villamarina urges Farini to declare a state of siege: “It is necessary, in all areas where acts of rebellion have occurred or will occur, that a state of siege be declared, so as to pass judgment quickly and effectively and to give an adequate idea of the force of the king’s government” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 3: 152). Two months later, as the Piedmontese laid siege to the last Bourbon stronghold of Gaeta in early December, Cavour’s secretary, Isaac Artom, writes to Massari from Turin: “Certainly when Gaeta falls it will suffice to distribute the twenty or thirty thousand soldiers who are now involved in the siege [of Gaeta] into the major centers of population so as to restore material order throughout the Neapolitan state” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 24). In late December, Antonio Scialoja writes to Cavour of “the impossibility of establishing a government [in the south] by other means than force, at least for a long time to come” (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 143). And the commander of the army in southern Italy, General Enrico Della Rocca, reflecting on his decision to administer summary executions in the countryside in January of the next year, writes of “certain regions where it [is] not possible to govern except through terror” (quoted in Molfese 66). By mid-July 1861, with the violence of brigandage and its repression raging throughout continental southern Italy, the south was virtually under military government.34 A few weeks later, Diomede Pantaleoni, on a governmental fact-finding mission in the south, would write back to Minister 33. For an illuminating discussion of the interrelations between the representation and repression of “brigandage,” see Dickie’s chapter “A Word at War,” in Darkest Italy 25–51. 34. General Enrico Cialdini assumed full civil and military powers in the provinces of southern Italy on 14 July 1861. Colonel Gustavo Mazé de la Roche, commander in the area around Campobasso in the summer of 1861, offers this picture

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of the Interior Marco Minghetti that the answer to the problems for the moment was “troops, troops, and more troops”: “This is a land that can be held only through force or through the terror of force. It has never been held by other means, and if you want them to be on our side, we must show them that we are by far the strongest” (Della Peruta, “Contributo” 78). Around the same time, finally, Massimo d’Azeglio summed up the political situation in the south thus: “ . . . I know nothing about suffrage. All I know is that there is no need of battalions of troops this side of the River Tronto, only beyond it.”35 To the north of the Tronto there was democracy and political freedom; to the south, military repression. One year after the “liberation” of southern Italy, the south was under a state of siege, and Cavour’s words on his deathbed earlier that summer ring out with desperate and delirious force: No state of siege, not the means of absolute governments. Anyone can govern with a state of siege. I would govern them [the Neapolitans] with freedom and show them what ten years of freedom can do for those lovely lands. In twenty years, they will be the richest provinces of Italy. No, I beg you, not a state of siege.36

Viewed through the flames that were devastating southern Italy in the summer of 1861, as well as through the different forms of representation considered here, the necessity of Cavour’s other approach to the south is readily apparent: “The aim is clear; it is not open to discussion. To impose unity upon the weakest, most corrupt part of Italy. There is no doubt about the means: moral force and, if that isn’t enough, physical” (CC Carteggio Cavour-Nigra 4: 292–93). of the extent of military rule in one southern Italian province: “In the district I am mayor, judge, commander of the police . . . and I exercise nearly absolute authority over some fifteen towns” (quoted in Buffa di Perrero 80). 35. Scritti 399–400. The Tronto River roughly marked the border between the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papal States in the northeast and, along with the Garigliano River, commonly served as shorthand for the divide between northern and southern Italy. 36. As reported by Cavour’s niece, Giuseppina Alfieri, in La Rive 439.

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III representing the south in postunification italy, c. 1870–1885

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6

Terra Vergine Picturing the South in Illustrazione italiana

The year 1860 constitutes a pivotal moment both in the history of the south and in the history of representations of the south. At the beginning of the year the southern part of the peninsula together with Sicily formed a sovereign state under the rule of the Neapolitan king Francis II; a year later this area had been absorbed into the newly formed Kingdom of Italy under the rule of the Piedmontese king Victor Emmanuel II.The “Neapolitan provinces” and Sicily were now a part of “Italy,” yet many viewed them as distinct from the more “Italian Italy” of the center-north whose political elites had engineered the process of unification and who were now hegemonic in the new state.1 Italians were united, but the political and military crucible of 1860 had served to accentuate, not diminish, those perceptions of southern difference that had already increased during the 1850s. As Giovanni Lanza stated in December 1860, “it is the arduous mission of the Italians of the north to civilly and politically regenerate the Italians of the south” (quoted in Tavallini 1: 253). Yet if 1860 marks a dramatic change both in the imaginative geography of the country’s ruling elites and in the political destiny of the south more generally, the crucial phase for the development of a new vision of the south in Italian bourgeois culture is not the early 1860s but the 1870s. What took place during this decade, in particular after 1874, can be best described as a proliferation of interest in the Mezzogiorno across a wide range of cultural domains. In the decade following unification, Italy’s ruling elites were primarily concerned with the most urgent aspects of nation building: diplo1. Luigi Carlo Farini uses the phrase “Italian Italy” with reference to the centernorth in a letter of 12 December 1860 to Marco Minghetti (CC Lib. del Mezz. 4: 56). On the hegemony of northern elites in the new state, see Meriggi, Breve storia 57–62.

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matic recognition within the international community; the kingdom’s finances; the suppression of brigandage in the mainland south; and the Roman Question. Obsessed with political unification and administrative centralization, they were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of “problems that were specific to one region or another, local ‘questions’ requiring particular attention.”2 With the acquisition of the Veneto in 1866 and the conquest of Rome in 1870, national unity was consolidated and certain domestic questions came into sharper relief. Conditions in the south in particular began to attract more widespread interest among Italy’s middle and upper classes. In the mid-1870s the existence of a Southern Question was publicized by three political and social thinkers, Pasquale Villari, Leopoldo Franchetti, and Sidney Sonnino. Their writings highlighted the poverty, criminality, and political corruption in the south and helped to propagate an image of southern difference to a broader audience. Yet in the same years, the south also attracted the attention of journalists, artists, folklorists, and writers. They, too, helped to accentuate a vision of southern difference but in more explicitly aesthetic and cultural terms. Images of a picturesque, and at times exotic or primitive, south appeared more frequently in bourgeois journals of pastime. In the studies of folklorists, the south was represented as a reserve of authentic popular customs and traditions. Finally, in the work of fiction writers, beginning with Giovanni Verga, the south became a charged mythic landscape, an environment of intensified human drama. For the first time, in short, the south was becoming an integral part of the imaginative geography of Italy’s middle and upper classes. The dual vision of a backward and picturesque south was consolidated in the minds of the nation’s elites. On the one hand the south was figured as the region that deviated from and resisted the construction of the unitary state, usually conceived as a nation aligned with modern European civilization. On the other hand the south was figured as a reservoir of customs and traditions that the modernizing nation was gradually eliminating and for which the middle classes often felt a certain nostalgia. In both cases a process of imaginative displacement takes place. The Mezzogiorno becomes a privileged site, whether of criminality, feudal residues, corruption, and superstition, or of quaint peasants, popular traditions, folklore, and exotica—a terra vergine. The final chapters of this study explore the articulation of this dual vi-

2. Romanelli, Italia liberale 118. On the obsession with political unification and administrative centralization, see Ragionieri, “Politica e amministrazione” 92. For a discussion of some of the texts dealing with the south during the 1860s, see chapter 3 of my “Representations of the South.”

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sion across a diverse yet interconnected set of cultural practices. Here I explore the picturesque perspective in the illustrated weekly magazine Illustrazione italiana. In Chapter 7 I examine the emergence of the Southern Question in the writings of Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti. In Chapter 8 I investigate the representation of Sicily in the fiction of Giovanni Verga. My primary aim throughout is to offer a close analysis of the representation of the south in each of these discursive domains. At the same time I highlight some of the interconnections among them and situate them within a common cultural framework. All of these discourses, to begin with, originate in the center-north and form part of an expanding bourgeois culture. A northern, bourgeois perspective structures the representation of the south in all of them. These texts reflect moreover the special emphasis on Sicily that emerges during the 1870s; in all of them we see how Sicily becomes the particular part of the south with the greatest symbolic charge, most exotic and alluring and yet also most capable of provoking consternation and fear.3 Finally, both Illustrazione italiana and the texts of the Meridionalists, and the picturesque and backward perspectives on the south more generally, take on a special significance in relation to Verga. For it is Verga who seizes upon the cultural significance of representing Sicily from the heart of the bourgeois north; who, working in the spheres of both Illustrazione italiana and the Southern Question, grasps the aesthetic potential of playing the picturesque and backward perspectives off one another; and who, in the process, establishes the south as one of the most powerful landscapes in modern Italian literature.

politics, positivism, and pessimism, c. 1874 Before turning to Illustrazione italiana it will be helpful to outline the main factors that contributed to the proliferation of interest in the south during the second half of the 1870s. As we shall see, in 1874 signs of a new emphasis on the south appeared in various domains of Italian society and culture: the journal Nuova illustrazione universale, the forerunner of Illustrazione italiana, began to turn its attention to the south; Leopoldo Franchetti completed his first journey through the “Neapolitan provinces”; and Giovanni Verga wrote “Nedda,” his first tale set in rural Sicily. At the end of the year something else took place that both served to reinforce an image of southern difference and helped to generate a new interest in the

3. See Giarrizzo’s introduction to La Sicilia for an incisive discussion of the cultural representation of Sicily after unification.

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south in the years to come. In the November 1874 general election, southern voters dealt a major blow to the Right, the party of Cavour and the Moderates, which had governed the nation since its inception. While voters in most regions of the center-north backed the Right, voters in the south, especially in Sicily, gave their overwhelming support to the opposition.4 The elections were the most blatant expression of a differentiation between south and center-north in the body politic to date. As Francesco Renda notes, what was at stake in the elections was nothing less than “the reversal of the political and territorial equilibriums that had been established in 1860” (“‘Questione sociale’” 168). Though a southern opposition had been growing since the end of the 1860s, members of the Right were shocked, if not scandalized, by these election results. In the wake of the election it became imperative for the Right “to block a process that, along with the inevitable overthrow of the Right in the government, led to a reevaluation of the role of the Mezzogiorno in the institutions and civil society of the country” (Renda, “‘Questione sociale’” 168). Faced with this joint political and territorial challenge, many commentators on the Right took off their kid gloves and interpreted the election results in specifically regional terms. As in 1860, the heat of political conflict served to animate expressions of southern difference; old stereotypes were redeployed. What was unprecedented, however, was that these articulations of southern difference were being aired in public. An article published by Diomede Pantaleoni in the Florentine journal Nuova antologia a few weeks after the elections constitutes an important example of this more public expression of claims to central-northern superiority.5 As we saw earlier, Pantaleoni had gone south in 1861 to report on the conditions there in a set of letters addressed to the minister of the interior, his fellow Lombard Marco Minghetti. As a prominent member of the Right publishing in one of the most authoritative journals associated with the Right, Pantaleoni’s basic position on the elections is clear from the start.6 He begins by contrasting the “vague, superficial, disconnected” and “absolutely erroneous” program of the opposition to that of the government, which, he writes, is “clear, precise, definite” (929). He continues, “in all the provinces of the north and of the center, which are incontestably the more 4. For a succinct account of the voting in Sicily, see Renda, “‘Questione sociale’” 159–61. 5. The article is titled “Le ultime elezioni politiche in Italia.” Page references will appear parenthetically in the text. 6. On Nuova antologia, see Musitelli Paladini, “Ipotesi di lettura”; Ceccuti 448–60.

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intelligent and enlightened, the electoral result, although hotly contested, went overwhelmingly in favor of the government” (929). Thus from the outset Pantaleoni explains the divergent electoral behavior of the center-north and the south in terms of different levels of civilization. The remainder of Pantaleoni’s essay explores the contrast between these levels—and types—of civilization and describes the implications of this contrast for the past elections and for the country’s future. His overarching point, already indicated in the passage cited above, is that the marked geographical differentiation between the Right and Left derives from the different histories and cultures of the two parts of the country. The opening paragraph of this discussion begins: It is well known that because of its specific natural conditions and history, Italy is divided into two great parts: one northern and western, the other more southern and oriental. . . . Thus it is true that two different civilizations dominated each part of Italy: the former assumed a western character, the latter had an oriental character and influences. (930)

Whoever reflects upon the history of Italy, he continues, will find that this difference between the two parts of Italy is and has been all too real, and that if Italy has always been divided thus, the true and profound reasons are written upon the land and inscribed in the history of its civilization. (930)

Pantaleoni proceeds to offer a historical survey of this division from ancient times to the present. Up to the Middle Ages, he suggests, the difference between north and south was marked but not qualitative. But then a significant hierarchical aspect is introduced. At this time, he states, western civilization grows in strength and eastern civilization declines. Though southern Italy is marginally a part of the former, the civilization of northern and southern Italy nevertheless diverged. Naples and Sicily had the Norman invasion, the true feudal regime, unknown to most of the rest of Italy. Nor did they participate in any way in that splendid, glorious movement of our communes, which characterizes the history of northern and central Italy. (930–31)

If, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the gap was wide, the Bourbons only increased it. Under them the south became a total wasteland. In every possible area the south was degraded. It was in these conditions that the peoples of the south became part of the nation, and thus, Pantaleoni writes,

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That conflict between the south and the north and center of Italy, which seems now to have suddenly seized the attention of many commentators in Italy, existed from the beginning in the intimate nature of things, was inscribed in the history, in the feelings, in the different civilizations of one and the other part of Italy. And if there is anything to be surprised about, it is that it has taken this long for this difference to manifest itself in such an open and explicit fashion. This peculiarity is crucial, and reveals to us better than anything else the true nature and real character of this opposition. . . . It is therefore the different level of education, the different level of moral feeling, the different physical, civil, social conditions, that which we call precisely civilization, that is the true cause of this different orientation taken by the Neapolitan-Sicilian provinces in the recent elections. (932–33)

Here and elsewhere in the essay, Pantaleoni’s insistence upon the profundity of the differences between north and south reevokes the problem encountered in the previous chapter, namely, that southern difference is represented as so deeply inscribed in history as to cast doubt upon the possibility of changing it. Pantaleoni does not speak of an essential biological or racial difference, yet the difference is radical. The profundity of these differences, he adds, “demonstrates that we must not deceive ourselves about the possibility of quickly attenuating the contrasts and changing the true state of things” (936).The “true state of things” requires the north to guide the south within the political framework established in 1860. Pantaleoni registers the dismay provoked by the eruption of this inferior southern civilization onto the national political scene and its challenge to the central-northern hegemony of the Moderates established at the time of unification. Operating within the framework outlined earlier in his article, which established a link between the center-north, the true Italy, and Europe, he concludes by noting that should the southern opposition eventually take power, both Italy and Europe would view the event “with the terror of a national calamity” (944).What is at stake, then, is the European (that is, northern, western) identity of Italy. The pressures of political struggle in 1874 served to galvanize and publicize traditional negative representations of the south and accentuate a vision of southern difference. As Marco Minghetti wrote to Ricasoli a few days after the election, “This accentuation of the difference between two Italies, southern and northern, is a grave phenomenon” (quoted in Berselli, Destra storica 2: 480). The election results also were interpreted as a sign of problems in the south, particularly in Sicily, that needed to be addressed. The problems in themselves were hardly new. “Public order” in Sicily had been a major concern since 1860: three states of siege had been imposed upon the

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island between 1862 and 1866 (Renda, “‘Questione sociale’” 162–63; Riall, Sicily). But after 1874 the “Sicilian Question” appeared in a new light and with greater urgency. Throughout the first half of 1875 heated discussions of Sicily took place in parliament, leading in July to the formation of the Parliamentary Commission for the Inquiry into the Social and Economic Conditions of Sicily. The execution of this official inquiry helped in turn to prompt Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino to undertake their private inquiry, La Sicilia nel 1876, published contemporarily with the official inquiry at the end of 1876. The publication of these two social and economic inquiries (inchieste) calls attention to another factor that informed the proliferation of interest in the south after 1874, the new climate of positivism that became dominant in Italy during these years. The link between positivism and the sociopolitical discourse on the south known as Meridionalism is clearly evinced by Pasquale Villari’s role as a trailbreaker in both areas. Villari had published the first manifesto of Italian positivism, “Positive Philosophy and the Historical Method,” in 1866. In this essay Villari outlined a method of intellectual inquiry that, renouncing the search for absolute truths (“Keine Metaphysik mehr” [“Filosofia” 443, 482]) and modeled on the experimental method of scientific research, was to concern itself with the observation and analysis of the “facts” of human existence. Villari’s proposal to extend the scientific method to areas of social and historical inquiry was an influential opening statement of positivist doctrine and heralded what Garin has termed the “impetuous take-off of positivist ideology in Italy” around 1870.7 From this point forward, there was an ever greater “proliferation of inquiries, investigations, researches, reports, relations, monographs and statistics aimed at describing, illustrating, investigating and measuring the variegated geographical and ethnic, social, and cultural tapestry of the nation” (Barbano and Sola 119). The parliamentary inquiry into Sicily, on the one hand, and the first writings on the south by Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino, on the other, were thus inspired by the political exigencies of 1875–76 and informed by the positivist turn to social and economic problems. But to appreciate the role positivism played in fostering an interest in the south in the mid-1870s, its

7. “Positivismo” 72. Roberto Ardigò, who also had a founding role in the history of Italian positivism with his La psicologia come scienza positiva (1870) and La morale dei positivisti (1879), later described Villari’s essay as “the first text to formulate the question of positivism as we understand it today in Italy” (quoted in Cicalese 100 n. 17).

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spread across different domains of Italian culture must be stressed. Verga’s representation of Sicily, and the literary trend of verismo more generally, was indebted to the climate of positivism as well.8 The Meridionalists and Verga both aimed to represent the concrete, social reality of the Mezzogiorno, and it was certainly one of the sources of their mutually felt intellectual attraction. In both cases the positivist tendency helped to define and foster the emergence of interest in southern Italian society and culture in the mid-1870s. But there was more to their descriptions of southern Italian society and culture than a passion for concreteness and the real. A critical attitude toward the modalities of unification also animated their writings. Dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the results of unification became increasingly widespread in Italy in the decade leading up to 1875 (see Asor Rosa, Cultura 821–39). As in the case of positivism, Pasquale Villari signals the specific convergence between this trend and the genesis of the Southern Question. With his noted 1866 essay, “Di chi è la colpa?” (Who is to blame?), Villari stepped forward as one of the first and most vocal critics of the unificatory process. In the 1870s his criticisms would become ever more forceful, culminating in the Southern Letters of 1875, which constitute “the first profound self-critique of Risorgimento liberalism” (R. Villari, Sud 1: 107). In the literary domain, on the other hand, the novelle and novels of Giovanni Verga constitute the first massive critique of the nation-building process. Albeit with different ends and means, both in the first Meridionalists and in Verga, the south serves as a powerful emblem of the failings of national unification.

the geography of textual production in postunification italy The political developments and intellectual trends described above significantly shaped the interest in the south that emerged during the second half of the 1870s. This interest assumed a variety of forms in different cultural domains.At the same time that the image of a dangerous and backward south was being accentuated in the work of the Meridionalists and, in a different way, in the parliamentary inquiry of 1876, a picturesque image of the south began to establish itself in the culture of Italy’s middle classes. In order to understand the formation of this view of the south in Illustrazione italiana,

8. On the links between positivism and verismo, see Asor Rosa, “Cultura” 970– 78; Musitelli Paladini, Nascita di una poetica 10–12; Bigazzi 248–67; Spinazzola 5–42.

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as well as Verga’s turn to Sicily in 1874, we must now turn our attention to the expansion of bourgeois culture and the differentiated geography of textual production in Italy during the 1870s. From the mid-1860s on, Italian bourgeois culture expanded significantly, its growth inseparable from the growth of the Italian cities.9 During these years, urban centers across the peninsula saw substantial population increases, major building projects, and urban development. While this trend also was evident in the south— especially in Bari and Catania—urban expansion took place in the centernorth at a considerably faster rate (Romanelli, “Centralismo” 144–47; see also Caracciolo, Stato 77–86). The urbanizing and modernizing trends of these years provide the general context in which a heightened appreciation for a folkloric and picturesque south needs to be situated. Growing numbers of middle-class city dwellers felt a heightened interested in a natural, primitive south, Italy’s terra vergine. In one sense the south, as a cultural construct, was ready and waiting for this new cultural climate. As we have seen in the early chapters of this book, for nearly a century European culture had expressed its attraction for the primitive, natural south; the topos was well established. The key new element in the 1870s was that the Italian publishing industry expanded dramatically and, in the process, concentrated itself in the center-north. A disparity between the center-north and south in the field of publishing had been growing since the 1830s (Palazzolo, “Geografia” 34–45). But in the first two decades after unification the imbalance increases significantly. While in the south, “the production and local circulation of books virtually seems to dry up for more than twenty years,” in the center-north, and above all in Milan, a process of massive expansion and modernization takes place (see Marchetti 117–19). Publishers in the center-north not only thrive on the growing market of middle-class readers in their home cities, but in the case of Sonzogno and above all Treves, become publishers with a truly national scope (Ragone, “Letteratura e il consumo” 732).10 Fast on the way to be9. In his commentary on urban expansion and modernization during the 1870s in Italy, Romanelli speaks of “cities on the rise” (“Centralismo” 143–50). 10. The history of the Associazione Libraria Italiana offers a clear indication of the north’s dominance in the publishing industry. As Paolo Macry notes, when this association of the leading Italian publishers, booksellers, and printers was founded in Florence in 1869, Naples and the south “played a wholly marginal role. The executive committee consisted entirely of Turinese (Pomba and Bocca), Florentines (Barbèra and Le Monnier) and Milanese (Brigola and Treves). Of the 86 founding members, only seven were from Naples, in comparison to the 34 from Milan. A quarter of a century later, the presence of Neapolitan publishers and printers will be even more secondary” (“Napoli” 147).

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coming the economic capital of Italy, Milan establishes itself as the center of the publishing industry, with undisputed leadership in the important new sector of illustrated magazines (Giordano 139–41). It is in Milan above all, through its publishing houses and periodicals, that a new urban, middleclass consciousness is forged.11 The growing interest in the folkloric and picturesque south during the 1870s needs to be understood within the context of this differentiated geography of cultural production and consumption. For the middle and upper classes of the center-north, increasingly concentrated in urban centers, the south became the emblem of the rural, traditional, and picturesque world that was gradually disappearing from their lives.As Milan became, in Verga’s words, “la città più città d’Italia” (the most citified city in Italy; Novelle 2: 498), the south became the countryside par excellence and the designated region of the picturesque.12 It is notable that one of the first writers in postunification Italy to explore the literary, aesthetic potential of the south was Igino Ugo Tarchetti. Originally from Piedmont, Tarchetti formed part of the bohemian group of writers known as the Scapigliatura based in Milan, who were a powerful, if critical, expression of the ascendancy of bourgeois society in the north. At the beginning of 1868, Tarchetti became the editor of the major Milanese illustrated magazine of the day, Emporio pittoresco, taking over from Eugenio Torelli-Viollier, future contributor to Illustrazione italiana and founder, in 1876, of Il Corriere della Sera. Emporio pittoresco was the journal of Edoardo Sonzogno who, along with Emilio Treves—the future publisher of Illustrazione italiana and of Verga’s works—would become the major force in Italian publishing during the 1870s and 1880s.13 In 1868 and 1869, the year of his death, Tarchetti published three stories set in Calabria: the first in Emporio pittoresco, the second in Sonzogno’s other illustrated magazine, La Settimana illustrata, and the third in a collection published by Treves in 1869.14 All three stories express Tarchetti’s fasci11. On Milan’s self-promotion as the cultural and moral capital of Italy in the 1870s–80s, see Rosa, Mito della capitale morale. On Milan’s status as the publishing capital of Italy, see also Portinari 232–37. 12. On the dramatic urban development of Milan after the mid-1860s, see Gambi and Gozzoli 281–93; Adami and Ago. 13. On Emporio pittoresco and Sonzogno’s other illustrated magazines, see Giordano 89–97; Barile, “Per una storia.” On the beginnings of Sonzogno and Treves in the 1860s, see Marchetti 125–32. 14. They are respectively “Il lago delle tre lamprede,” “L’innamorato della montagna (impressioni di viaggio),” and “Uno spirito in un lampone.”

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nation with the region and emphasize its enchanting, evocative character. They also foreground the importance of the south’s contrast with the north. In an introductory passage from “L’innamorato della montagna,” he compares the weather: In our northern provinces all atmospheric phenomena take place with more or less constant regularity; . . . but there it’s an entirely different matter; it rains, snows or hails all at once, the winds swirl about in every direction; the sun appears, disappears, comes back into view like a man who can’t make up his mind. (1: 116)

As in other passages from this and the other two stories, Calabria—which Tarchetti repeatedly qualifies as “southern”—is represented as a place of drama, wildness, excitement, enchantment, magic, irregularity. But it is, of course, not just the weather that is different down there. The human environment is different and offers an energizing contrast to the bourgeois north. There is great poverty in the south; the southern provinces are full of lazzari, but, Tarchetti writes, “I never saw a sad one”: To think how people view life in those villages, how they are happy beneath their rags, how wisely they endure their misery—it’s enough to make us blush, we who belong to the northern race, a sick race, a serious and melancholy people who live with perpetual disgust and rancor. (1: 119)

Tarchetti anticipates certain key aspects of the picturesque perspective on the south that will proliferate in Italian bourgeois culture during the second half of the 1870s, first and foremost the vision of the south as distraction and delectation for the northern bourgeois reader. But he was somewhat ahead of his time. The expansion of bourgeois culture in the center-north was just at its beginning; the taste for the picturesque and folkloric south had not yet matured. The founding of Illustrazione italiana in November 1875 marks the beginning of a different stage both in the Italian publishing industry and, as we shall see, a new phase in the representation of the south in Italian bourgeois culture.

the birth of a magazine: picturing the nation in illustrazione italiana On 1 November 1875, the first issue of Illustrazione italiana appeared in Milan. The magazine was the brainchild of Emilio Treves, a relative newcomer to the Italian publishing scene who was nevertheless well on his way

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to becoming one of the major publishers in Italy over the next fifty years.15 Illustrazione italiana was one of his most conspicuous and enduring successes.16 By the end of the decade it had become the best-selling illustrated weekly magazine in Italy, and it would continue to be popular well into the twentieth century. Treves’s magazine opens a unique, and largely unexplored, window onto the culture of the middle classes in liberal Italy.17 Most important for our purposes, it vividly documents how a picturesque image of the south became an integral part of Italian bourgeois culture during the mid-1870s. Illustrazione italiana was actually the rechristened version of a magazine that Treves had started two years earlier named Nuova illustrazione universale. The continuity between the two publications is evident at many levels, but the magazine had changed in a number of significant ways.18 Most importantly, there was an increase in the amount of coverage, as well as a change in the type of coverage, that the new magazine dedicated to the south. Before investigating the development of this new interest in the south and the specific forms in which it was expressed, I want to examine the three different illustrations used on the masthead in the transitional years between the founding of Nuova illustrazione universale and its reinauguration as Illustrazione italiana in 1875. A close look at the third and final version of the cover illustration, which regularly appeared on the cover from 1875 on, can tell us some important things about the magazine’s imaginative geography of the nation and about the south’s place within it. Treves had used one illustration on the cover of the magazine during its first semester of existence, changing to another in June 1874 (see figures 8 and 9). There are significant differences between them, but compared to the final version the specifically Italian dimension is understated in both. Con15. In 1875 Treves was elected president of the Association of Italian Publishers. On Treves’s publishing house, with specific reference to the beginnings of Illustrazione italiana, see Grillandi 286–314; Giordano 97–114. 16. Indeed, it outlived the existence of Treves editori itself, whose fortunes declined after 1929 and which was forced out of business after the institution of the racial laws in 1938. Garzanti acquired Treves in that year (see Turi 399) and continued publishing the magazine until 1962. Garzanti began a new series of the magazine in 1981. 17. The main exception is John Dickie’s chapter on Illustrazione italiana in Darkest Italy. Michele Giordano also devotes considerable space to Illustrazione italiana in his history of illustrated magazines in Italy. 18. Among the continuities, for example, the annual volumes of Illustrazione italiana were numbered from 1873, the year in which Nuova illustrazione universale was founded. The basic format of the magazine was similar, and many of the contributors were the same.

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sonant with the title of the magazine, the emphasis instead is on the “universal”: agriculture, industry, the arts and sciences, and exotic foreign lands figure prominently, while explicit verbal or pictorial references to Italy are partly obscured and/or put in the background. In the first version, a banner emblazoned with the word Italia is draped behind the back of the female figure at the center but is partly obscured by the head of one of the four cherubs that encircle her. As Ilaria Porciani has noted, Italy’s allegorical figuration as a woman was not clearly established in Italian culture either during the nineteenth century or after; unlike “Marianne” in France, the figure is unnamed and relatively ill-defined (“Stato e nazione”). In this scene, the banner she holds, together with the presence of the star over her head, Italy’s “lucky star” (the stellone), help to mark her as Italy. These two signifiers of the nation in turn conceptually inflect the otherwise geographically indeterminate scenes to the left and right as Italy. Neither the battle scene on the left nor the agricultural and industrial scenes on the right are strongly marked in national terms. But with the visual clues from the center of the picture, we can almost certainly interpret the former as a battle in the movement for national independence and the latter as scenes of a laboring, productive Italy, probably in the north (the boat on the river or canal is a characteristically Lombard scene; the mountains in the background are evidently Alpine). In the second version of the cover illustration, the Italian dimension is reduced while, strikingly, both the regional and universal (or global) dimensions are amplified. It is true that the verbal signifier Italia remains in the exact same area of the illustration, and in the same position with respect to the female figure, who, as in the former, dominates the center. Moreover, the entire word, Italia, is now unobscured and appears not on a banner but on the outline of the Italian peninsula, whose central portion is vaguely visible on a blackened globe containing the figuration of no other geographical area. Nonetheless the letters making Italia are less than one-quarter the size of those in the first illustration; due both to their size and to their dark color, which blends with the background of the globe, they have much less visual emphasis. What is more, with the subtraction of the banner of Italy and the stellone, the woman’s function as an allegorical representation of Italy is less definite. The illustration emphasizes instead the regional or, to be precise, municipal dimension and the foreign or global. In the background in the upper-left-hand area we find the Duomo of Milan and, alongside it, the chimney of a factory. The chimney’s placement next to the Duomo and Milan’s reputation as the main site of industrial activity in Italy clearly mark the chimney as part of a Milanese or Lombard landscape. In the opposite

8. Masthead, Nuova illustrazione universale, 1874.

9. Masthead, Nuova illustrazione universale, 1874.

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area to the right we find the outline of the Egyptian pyramids, partly obscured by a balloon, which suggests travel, adventure, discovery, and perhaps, technological advancement. Thus the local and global have expanded, but so has the range of artistic and intellectual activities represented. Whereas the first illustration contained only a lyre and the small image of a palette with paintbrushes, a large amount of the space in the second illustration is occupied by books, musical instruments, a palette and paintings, and a printing torque. In the new, definitive masthead of Illustrazione universale, and subsequently, Illustrazione italiana, a major change is evident (see figure 10). To be sure, the magazine’s range of interests will remain universal; it will cover “political and social life, the sciences, the fine arts, geography and travel, theater, music, fashion, etc.,” as we read in the description that occasionally appeared on the first page of the magazine. But both the title and the illustration on the masthead now proclaim the centrality of Italy. In front center there is the bust of a female goddess over whom Italy’s “lucky star” hovers. The statue is mounted on a base with a relief depicting Romulus and Remus feeding from the she-wolf. Behind this, and dominating the center of the picture is the Campidoglio, echoing and reinforcing the Roman motif of Romulus and Remus. Flanking either side of the Campidoglio is a row of famous monuments from various Italian cities. The potpourri of motifs in the two mastheads of Nuova illustrazione universale, where Italy is only one among the many topics evoked, has been replaced by the conspicuous Italian focus of Illustrazione italiana. Integral to this new emphasis on Italy is the prominence and centrality of Rome, which had been completely absent from the previous mastheads. At the same time, the one marked regional reference in the second illustration, the Duomo of Milan, has now taken its place alongside monuments from other Italian cities. In other words, the national dimension has superseded not just the universal but the local as well. Yet we need to take a closer look at the Italy illustrated here and at the manner in which it is being represented. With respect to the earlier versions, the new illustration evinces not just a new emphasis on Italy but a new mode of representing the nation. From the first to the third illustration, the mode of representation has become increasingly symbolic and, more precisely, synecdochal. In the earlier versions aspects of contemporary life in Italy were figured. The right-hand panel of the first illustration showed scenes of “productive” Italy, at once rural, artisanal, and industrial, together with signs of technological progress (the tunnel and steamboat). In the second illustration these representations of life in Italy have been virtually eliminated. The only trace that remains is

10. Masthead, Illustrazione italiana, 1877.

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the smokestack positioned alongside the Duomo of Milan. Of the two icons, only the more historical Duomo will be included in the final illustration, but it will take its place among monuments from other Italian cities, ceding Milan’s special status to Rome. In the new masthead all references to living, working Italy have been eliminated. Not only are the people gone (they had already been eliminated from the second illustration), but the objects associated with contemporary human activity—the smokestack and balloon—as well. The monuments have taken their place: from left to right, the basilica of Saint Mark in Venice, the twin towers in Bologna, the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, and, on the right side of the Campidoglio, the Duomo of Milan and the Duomo and leaning tower of Pisa. What is striking, however, is that this row of “Italian” monuments comprises cities from the center-north only; the most populous city on the peninsula, Naples, is absent. No other city south of Rome is represented. Only half of Italy in fact is “illustrated.” Yet it is not only the absence of Naples and all other southern cities from this panorama of urban Italy that is significant, but the manner in which Naples and the south are in fact represented. In the background on the right Vesuvius appears, with its distinctive plume of smoke, constituting a pendant to the mountains in the background on the left. Two of the traditional strategies for representing the south are evident here. Firstly, Naples and the south are elided, with Naples in some way figuring the south as a whole. Both, secondly, are represented under the sign of nature, in the specific form of Vesuvius. Italy may include the south, and southern nature, but the dominant identity proclaimed in this illustration is urban and central-northern. How are we to account for this differentiated imaginative geography of the nation? For a start, the illustration evidently reflects the concentration of the magazine’s readers in the center-north: the cities represented in the illustration undoubtedly account for a large share of the magazine’s readership.The illustration could be likened to Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cartoon that presents a view of the world taken up mostly by Manhattan, with a few diminutive references to other places in the world in the background. Yet this is clearly not the only logic at work. For this geographic constellation does not simply reflect the location of the magazine’s readership. In the first place, the symbols for both Milan and Rome certainly do not reflect the proportions of the magazine’s readers in those cities. In fact, neither the monuments nor the cities themselves have the same status. The size and centrality of the Campidoglio, and the historical significance of the building itself, all proclaim that Rome is not just another city, but rather the capi-

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tal.19 There is, then, a patriotic logic that alters the logic of reader distribution. Rome signifies the national, unitary program of the magazine, a program that required the diminished importance of Milan itself. Bruno Tobia’s observations on the symbolic function of Rome in the patriotic rituals of postunification Italy are apposite here as well: “Rome, in short, was represented as the indispensable link in the center of the country of the hundred cities, the meeting point through which it became possible for municipalism to be projected toward a national dimension.”20 Yet if the journal’s title and the panoramic spread of cities express the unitarian imperative, the illustration also marks the geographic limits of that unitarianism. Illustrazione italiana announces that it will be more than a Milanese magazine; the size and centrality of Rome signal that it will be a magazine of and for all of Italy. Yet contrary to that unitary logic, the south is excluded and marginalized from the civic panorama of the nation. The cover illustration thus neither directly reflects the geography of its predominantly central-northern readership nor expresses, instead, a fully unitary vision of the nation. There are other logics of representation at work. The most important of these is the tendency to construct the south as natural and picturesque. I shall seek to clarify the motivations for and modalities of this tendency in my analysis of the illustrations and articles themselves in the following sections.There is one additional point to consider here first.The cover illustration clearly contrasts an urban center-north to a natural south. More precisely, it presents us with a set of monumental edifices from the centernorth that constitute the visual commonplaces for particular cities.21 These monumental edifices represent these cities, moreover, as historical entities, signaling the moments of their political and cultural greatness—the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—while also evoking the glory of ancient Rome. What has happened to the south’s history, its cities, its cultural splendor, its monuments? Certainly the overriding interest in a natural, picturesque south accounts to a large degree for their omission. But what also shapes the vision of Italy here is that broader tendency in the culture of the Risorgimento to posit the medieval communes and republics of the center-north 19. The image of the capitol was in fact taken from Illustrazione—Rivista italiana, a magazine that Illustrazione italiana had absorbed in 1874 (see Dickie 85). 20. See “Urban Spaces” 180 and, on monument building more generally during these decades, Una patria per gli italiani. On the emergence of Rome as a patriotic ideal in postunification Italy, see above all Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana 179–323. 21. Fusco explores this topic in “Il ‘luogo comune’ paesaggistico.”

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as the ideal foundation for the new nation. Beginning with Alfieri, Foscolo, and the historian Jean-Charles Sismondi, the communal civilization of the center-north became a model for the construction of Italian national identity.22 This view was evident, for example, in Carlo Cattaneo’s 1858 essay on The City Considered as the Ideal Principle of Italian Histories where, as we saw in Chapter 3, he contrasted the “vast and infirm kingdom” in the south with the flourishing city-state of Venice (“Città” 431). This perspective informed Diomede Pantaleoni’s assertion that Naples and Sicily did not “participate in any way in that splendid, glorious movement of our communes, which characterizes the history of northern and central Italy” (930– 31). Nor was this celebration of the communal civilization of the centernorth simply a function of regional chauvinism. It informed the views of many southerners as well. When, in his 1872 lecture “Science and Life,” Francesco De Sanctis took aim at the individualism rampant in modern society, he found his positive model of social solidarity not in his native kingdom but in the medieval communes of the center-north.23 Finally, the tendency to valorize the civilization of the center-north over that of the south was significantly reinforced by the anti-Bourbonism that had taken a firm hold in the consciousness of Italian elites after 1860. The image on the cover of Illustrazione italiana thus reflects the active depreciation of the cultural traditions, history, and monuments of the south, tied to the valorization of those of the center-north.24 But it also reflects the active interest in the natural and rural south on the part of the Italian mid22. Sismondi’s History of the Medieval Italian Republics of 1807 made the key contribution to this tendency in the domain of historiography; see Lyttelton, “Creating a National Past”; Mascilli Migliorini, “Atene d’Italia”; Bollati, “Italiano” 993; Venturi, “Italia” 1173–78. 23. See Pick 116. See as well De Sanctis’s criticisms of medieval Sicilian poetry in the opening chapter of his Storia della letteratura italiana. 24. See Gribaudi 85. As a prime example of this depreciative tendency, Gribaudi cites the 1877 text Napoli a occhio nudo by the Tuscan writer Renato Fucini: “No other city in the world I believe equals Naples in conserving such paltry and insignificant architectural remains from the successive dynasties that have ruled over her. Of the Byzantines and Normans there is the occasional and shapeless relic. The Swabians and Angevins have left a few churches but their solid palaces resemble sturdy fortresses rather than princely residences. To the Spanish is owed an abundance of awkward-looking churches and the odd, obscenely baroque obelisk. The royal palaces of the Bourbons are only worthy of their dimension and on the outside as on the inside they are no more than ordinary houses on a colossal scale” (85). Broadly speaking, it was this perspective that prompted Benedetto Croce to ask at the beginning of his Storia del Regno di Napoli, “Why is it that this sublime Neapolitan history, this almost privileged part it has played in the political and civil

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dle classes. And it is to the development of this interest in the first years of the magazine’s publication that I now turn.

the squalid south in nuova illustrazione universale The changes on the masthead between the founding of Nuova illustrazione universale in December 1873 and the appearance of Illustrazione italiana two years later call attention to the evolving identity of the magazine as a whole.Treves was searching for the right formula—for the title, for the masthead, for the magazine itself, and he clearly found it in November 1875 with Illustrazione italiana. What he also found was the right perspective on the south. But, like the masthead, this too had taken some time to develop. In its first year of publication the south figures relatively little in the journal; most importantly, what coverage of the south there is tends to emphasize manifestations of southern backwardness, offering an explicitly ethnocentric evaluation of the south’s failings from a central-northern perspective. In order to appreciate the emergence of the picturesque perspective it will be helpful to consider this earlier view. In a letter to the reader on the front page of the inaugural issue of Nuova illustrazione universale, Treves acknowledged that the fledgling magazine faced a number of obstacles. “The greatest difficulty,” he wrote, lay in providing illustrated coverage of the entire national territory. “As long as we are talking about a town in Lombardy, the Veneto, or Piedmont, matters are simple. But if it is a town in the Neapolitan provinces, in Sicily, in Sardegna? ‘Italy is too long,’ Napoleon once said. We will frequently confront the truth of that statement.”25 Yet while Treves acknowledges problems related to the physical distance between north and south, he does not acknowledge those relating to cultural distance. It is these that become most clear in the very moment that Nuova illustrazione begins to expand its coverage of the south in the middle of its first year of publication. During the first six months, illustrations and articles relating to the south had appeared infrequently, about once every six weeks. A few had a positive accent and were not unlike those dealing with the center-north: the first life [of Italy] . . . has not been recognized but rather depreciated and negated?” (23). On Naples’s demotion in the national hierarchy of cities after unification, see as well Frandsen 103. 25. 14 December 1874: 2. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text. I shall use the abbreviation Nuova illustrazione for Nuova illustrazione universale.

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piece from south of Rome, appearing on 18 January 1874, describes, for example, the new aquarium in Naples (47). But the majority of the articles relating to the south deal with more problematic issues. On 1 March 1874, the first full-page illustration dealing with the south appears on the cover, depicting a group of Neapolitan children who have found refuge in a hospice in Rome. The accompanying article describes them as refugees from “the filthy traffic in children, which is primarily practiced in the southern provinces” (91). The author notes with dismay that this traffic, which condemns children “to a gypsy-like life, plucking musical instruments on the streets of the great cities of Europe,” is a national disgrace (91). An issue published three weeks later contains a full-page illustration of a drawing of the Neapolitan lottery; the accompanying article speaks of the “squalid” and “filthy” neighborhoods where many of the people attending the drawing reside (123–26). At the beginning of May a half-page illustration with accompanying article portrays the destruction of a band of brigands in Calabria (3 May 1874: 173). The picture one can construct of the south from this handful of illustrations contrasts strikingly with that of the center-north, which is portrayed as a world of fine buildings and monuments, of technological advancement, and as home to worthy men of politics and culture. It may be this last category, in fact, that reveals most clearly the centralnorthern bias of the magazine: of the forty-two portraits of noteworthy men and women that appear in the first year of publication, twenty-two depict individuals from the center-north, and nineteen depict individuals from abroad. Only one of the subjects is from Naples, and as his biographical sketch notes, he had lived and worked in the center-north for the past three decades.26 Treves evidently was not concerned with the different kinds of attention his magazine was dedicating to the center-north and to the south at this point. But, as he had suggested in his opening letter to readers, he was aware that the amount of attention given to different areas was a potential problem. As part of a general retooling of the magazine announced toward the end of its first semester, a more serious expansion into the south was launched. In the first issue of the second semester appears the first installment of “Along the Southern Railways,” a five-part series by a certain L. Trevellini that ran through the beginning of October. The first article, dedicated to the railway tunnel beneath the cemetery of Naples, begins on a positive note, praising both the cemetery and the tunnel (7 June 1874: 12). It suggests that this corner of Naples represents a happy meeting of progress and tradition. At the

26. See the biographical sketch of Antonio Cipolla (2 August 1874: 77).

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same time, the author puts little emphasis on the regional specificity of the place, except to say that the cemetery is the most magnificent he has seen in Italy. In the next article, published the following week, Trevellini begins to characterize both the natural and sociocultural landscapes in more regionally specific terms and to introduce a marked note of disapproval that will be most fully developed in the following three articles. He notes the squalor and uninteresting aspect of the town of San Severo, the striking lack of villages and houses in the countryside, of noteworthy monuments, and of good hotels (14 June 1874: 18). In particular he introduces his main concern: the question of progress, especially in relation to certain aspects of the urban fabric, comfort, and cleanliness. The current state of Foggia, which is the focus of this article, actually bears witness to the entry of the forces of progress into the south. Trevellini is impressed that the “streets are all lit with gas and clean,” for, he writes, the practice of street-cleaning “is something one rarely finds in the southern provinces” (19). In the third article, published seven weeks later, Trevellini introduces a more adamant tone of condemnation that will prevail from this point on. His encounter with the “barbarous custom” of peasants leaving the countryside for villages at night prompts an extended reflection on the poverty of the southern peasant and the contrast between it and that of the Tuscan: Casting a glance at these hordes of wretches, reduced to nothing, worn out by the climate and a full day’s work, malnourished, who must traverse many kilometers before reaching their squalid huts, followed by their women and even their babies, all poorly dressed, especially the women whose torn petticoats reveal the nudity of their legs as far as the knee—all this is profoundly disheartening. What an enormous difference between the poor wife of the Apulian peasant and the gentle Tuscan farmer’s wife, elegant and clean, well-groomed, with a smile on her lips and speaking the language of our poets, whose demeanor reveals such a different level of affluence and civilization! (2 August 1874: 83)

Trevellini does not employ the term miseria here, which will become one of the keywords used to describe the south from the mid-1870s forward, but his portrayal of poverty and destitution certainly evokes that concept.27 In this passage he also brings into the open the contrast between south and center-north that will reappear in different forms later in the series. With this passage, too, Trevellini appears to hit his stride, to pull out the ethnocentric stops as it were, becoming particularly insistent about the inade27. As in the 1877 book by Jessie White Mario, La Miseria in Napoli.

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quacies of this area. He concludes the article by winking to his fellow centralnorthern reader and also by calling attention to the asymmetrical relations of force between his civilization and the southern world: We’ll be able to talk about the hotels and restaurants in Ariano a few years from now, when circumstances are more favorable. The reader will understand that it is not the usual “lack of space” that prevents us from discussing them here. We can take heart, however: progress has opened a breach in these places too, making use of that formidable cannon which is the locomotive. (2 August 1874: 84)

As he will note a few other times in the following articles, it is the railway itself that accounts for the more civilized aspects of certain parts of the south, a civilization more or less explicitly defined as both central-northern and European. Here the violence of the civilizing process is underscored, the element of rupture.28 In the next article, published two weeks later, Trevellini develops his critique of conditions in the south in even more detail. He harps upon the lack of good hotels and above all upon deficient hygiene.About the village of Trani, Apulia, he writes: “I am convinced that we cannot have a population that is educated and civil as long as it has to walk among sewers and lives in the midst of filth of every kind” (16 August 1874: 106). “You find in the southern provinces entire cities without toilets!” he continues. “If you have visited Potenza, the capital of Basilicata, one of the filthiest cities in Italy, I’m sure you were nauseated by the sight of both men and women relieving themselves in the streets, which serve as sewers and turn the whole city into a swamp, whose stench even penetrates houses” (106).Trani, fortunately, is not that bad, “perhaps because of its contact with the railway, vehicle of civilization and progress.” Nevertheless, it is still “very far behind on the road of progress.” Also noteworthy in this article is the evident correlation between the heightened emphasis on filth and the Oriental qualities of the region.Trevellini in fact begins the article by noting that each of the villages along the rail line between Trani and Foggia has “all the appearances of an Oriental city”; the cupolas of the church call to mind the “bizarre forms of mosques” (106). The final article in the series, on Bari, elaborates on both this Oriental motif and most of the other southern failings mentioned thus far as well (11 28. It is worth noting that the railroad in Verga is also represented as an extraneous, violent, dislocating force, usually shown, however, from the perspective of the southern peasants. Trevellini, we could say, is one of those on board the train in the short story “Malaria” about whom one “poor fellow” grumbles, “Ah! Those folks don’t have to worry about malaria” (Tutte le novelle 1: 254).

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October 1874: 186). The new part of Bari could be called the “civilized” part, Trevellini writes, to distinguish it from the old. There you find “good restaurants, good hotels, and one has the satisfaction of walking along wide and long streets, with intersections at right angles as one finds in Turin” (186). His appreciation for this part of Bari is in proportion to its similarity to a modern urban center in the north. He also clarifies the equation between the center-north and Europe when he again highlights the exceptional nature of the new part of Bari, writing of “all those comforts of life that one has the right to desire traveling in Europe in the nineteenth century, but which become, I’m afraid, a vain hope after passing the Tronto.” By contrast, the old city of Bari has “uneven, poorly paved, and squalid streets that force one to walk continually in the mud, because here, too, the streets serve as sewers.” He concludes the article by calling attention to the ignorance and superstition of the people in the old city, which he represents in terms of the Orient. After witnessing a feast in honor of the city’s patron saint, he writes that “all the superstition that still reigns in the southern provinces unfortunately manifests itself on this occasion: one sees disgraceful scenes of human degradation, worthy of other times and of Oriental mosques” (186). Trevellini offers, in short, an ample catalog of the various manifestations of backwardness in the south. His reconnaissance “along the southern railway” is animated by a search for similarities to the center-north and a condemnation of virtually everything that is different. It is not only the tone and perspective of these articles that contrasts so dramatically with what we shall find in Illustrazione italiana but also the choice of subject. Trevellini is concerned almost exclusively with cities; landscape and rural life in the south are of little interest to him. The best thing he can say about the landscape is that “it is not unpleasant” (non è sgradevole) (2 August 1874: 83). His one set of observations relating to the natural environment, a brief paragraph on the “immense desert” of the Apulian plain, concludes: “A sense of sadness darkens our view of this squalid picture” (14 June 1874: 18). As we shall now see, the customs and costumes of the southerners, and the landscape in which they live, will appear in Illustrazione italiana in a new light, no longer barbarous and squalid but picturesque.

the picturesque south in illustrazione italiana Early in 1875, a few months after Treves had adopted the cover illustration with its portrayal of Italy from the Alps to Vesuvius, a shift of interest toward the people and places of the Mezzogiorno becomes evident in Illustrazione italiana. At the same time, the magazine exhibits an increasing em-

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phasis on the picturesque aspects of the south. This did not take place overnight. In September 1874 there was a half-page illustration of an erupting Mount Etna (13 September 1874: 145–46), followed two weeks later by the full-page illustration of a young girl’s funeral in Naples. The text accompanying the illustration states that “the inhabitants of the southern provinces like to meet death with poetry and pomp. . . . Here the funeral of a girl is a party . . . what’s there to cry about?” (27 September 1874: 162, 168). Earlier in the year, Treves also had signaled to his readers that he aimed “to make the magazine ever more original and picturesque” (10 May 1874: 178). Treves was almost certainly referring to the need to improve the quality of the illustrations (the contrast between the quality of the illustrations in the first year of Nuova illustrazione and those in Illustrazione italiana is striking indeed), but his comments also indicate the evolution of the magazine’s aesthetic more generally or, to be precise, a specialization of the magazine’s aesthetic, in which a picturesque view of peoples and places would be dominant. This dimension is especially evident in the magazine’s representation of the south. As the image of Vesuvius on the masthead suggests, in the magazine’s imaginative geography the south will be the picturesque land par excellence. Giovanni Verga’s special relation to this shift deserves to be mentioned briefly here. In 1874–75 there is a striking back-and-forth between Verga and Treves with respect to the representation of the south, a process of mutual encouragement. It is Verga, in the first place, who helps bring into focus the aesthetic interest of the south at a moment when the backward view was still dominant. In June 1874, the same month that Trevellini’s series began,Verga published the novella “Nedda:A Sicilian Sketch,” his first story set in rural Sicily. As we shall see in Chapter 8, “Nedda” was a big hit with Milanese readers. On 21 June, Eugenio Torelli-Viollier published a brief note in Illustrazione praising the local color of Verga’s novella, noting that the story makes “you feel as if you live in Sicily, in that magnificent and squalid land, among that half-savage people” (27). Torelli-Viollier’s basic point is that Italian writers have failed to represent the regional specificity of the “different lands and peoples” of Italy and that “Nedda” is one of the few texts to have done so. Torelli-Viollier, who two years later would found the Corriere della Sera, is advocating the realistic regionalism that will in fact become the major literary trend in Italy during the next decade. Equally significant in the present context is his description of Sicily as both “magnificent and squalid.” As we saw, “squalid” was the keyword in Trevellini’s series of articles, but by coupling it with “magnificent,” and by urging writers to turn to Sicily as a source of inspiration, Torelli-Viollier signals that

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it is also a potential source of aesthetic delectation for readers. Treves also noted that Verga had hit pay dirt, praising the story in a note in Illustrazione a few weeks later. At the same time, he begged Verga to write more stories about the south. What came of all this critical interest and encouragement was “Stories of the Castle of Trezza,” set on the coast of Sicily, which appeared as four weekly installments in January–February 1875. It is, significantly, the first story set in southern Italy to be published in Illustrazione. From that point on, a substantial increase in attention to the south is evident. Not only does a novella by Luigi Archinti titled “A Platoon in Calabria” run over the next two months, but a series called “From the Alps to Etna,” which also begins in March, runs over the course of the entire year. The title of this series succinctly expresses the new scope of the magazine, a new national program, and a new attention to the south. How, then, did the new Illustrazione italiana depict the south, particularly in the years in which Verga was both a contributor to and an avid reader of the magazine? Let us begin with the first main article to deal with the south, which appears in the 21 November issue. It is about the provincial city of Modica and the famous caves in its vicinity in southern Sicily. The author, a certain Mr. Breda identified as “an army officer who brandishes at once the sword, the pen, and the drawing pencil,” begins by emphasizing that Modica is a far cry from Venice and Milan, and a safe distance from the “more or less discrete glances of Europe”: “Modica is nothing but a modest provincial city, forgotten in a remote corner of Sicily, at a latitude inferior to the Algerian coast of Africa” (21 November 1875: 54). It is revealing that Breda acknowledges at the outset that his readers might be put off by the topic. “But what’s so interesting about that?” he writes, voicing his readers’ doubts. Evidently, an article about a remote corner of Sicily still requires a word of introduction. He thus goes on to explain why Modica might be of interest to his northern readers. The place has a striking “originality,” he writes, and satisfied the author’s taste for the bizarre. Breda asks how his readers can stand the boredom of living among all those long, straight streets in Milan, with the city’s “monotony of lines, monotony of light, monotony of shadows, monotony of air, monotony of everything. . . . Everything [is] coldly symmetrical and uniform” (54). The first two columns of his article are an attack on the rectilinear models of Italian urban planners and are, more specifically, a clear reference to the extraordinary urban development that took place in the decade before the article was written (see Gambi and Gozzoli 281–93; Adami and Ago). Breda thus begins by establishing a contrastive perspective. Modica is the farthest one can get from Milan, from “the eyes of Europe,” from modern

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11. Scene from Modica, Sicily.

urban civilization. It is, of course, not only spatially but temporally remote. Modica offers more than a refuge from cold symmetry and uniformity; it contains cave dwellings, still inhabited today. Trevellini had called the cave dwellings of Ariano the town’s “ugly speciality,” “lurid hiding places of sad misery” (2 August 1874: 84). For Breda these dwellings fascinate, and they are the dominant motif of the page of illustrations that accompanies the piece (see figures 11 and 12). Another contrast to Trevellini’s piece is Breda’s appreciation for the landscape.The valley of Modica is so picturesque that Breda declares it would be pointless to describe it. “You’ve already seen it,” he tells an obviously perplexed reader: “Excuse me?” He then explains: “I don’t know if Claude Lorraine studied the Cave of Ispica or if rather the Cave of Ispica was constructed according to the plans of Claude Lorraine. What is certain is that the landscape is his—all you have to do is take one of Lorraine’s paintings and you will see how picturesque this place is” (55). Breda appears to be working from that traditional conception according to which picturesque scenes “were simply those that reminded a person of pictures that he had seen” (Hussey 15). This remote corner of Sicily provides this city-weary northerner with the perfect match. As the image of Vesuvius on the masthead suggests, the landscape will be an aspect of the south to which the magazine dedicates considerable

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12. Scene from Modica, Sicily.

attention. What is most characteristic about the representation of the south in the magazine, however, is the focus on the southern people, in many cases, placed in a landscape. This is the final notable feature of this piece—the author’s appreciation for the “truly beautiful peasants” and their “pleasant popular costumes.” Here, too, we find something that was essentially invisible to Trevellini, or to be precise, something that Trevellini saw from a condemnatory point of view. The one group of peasants he encountered was described as “hordes of wretches.” It may well be that the objects themselves were different: Trevellini apparently encountered some poor migrant laborers, while Breda saw well-dressed peasants. But there was no lack of peasants in “pleasant popular costumes” to be seen in Campania and Apulia; clearly it is also a question of perspective. To understand Breda’s appreciation for these peasants, and the representation of the south in Illustrazione italiana more generally, we need to take into account what one anthropologist has called the “folklorization of the south” in postunification Italy (Lombardi Satriani 63–64). As mentioned above, there was a virtual explosion in folklore studies in Italy during the 1870s, in which the Mezzogiorno played a leading role. In the work of folklorists, the south, and Sicily in particular, was acquiring a special function. They were coming to be seen as the privileged reserve of those ways of life that were threatened by modern civilization. It is no accident that the magnum opus of Italian folklore studies, Giuseppe Pitré’s monumental Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane, sprang from this terrain at the beginning

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of the 1870s.29 As Franco Lo Piparo notes with regard to linguists’ and folklorists’ attention to Sicily as a whole after unification, “the Sicilian people was studied and praised because, insofar as its linguistic and cultural history was frozen in the past, it was transformed into the metaphysical preserve of the language and culture that elsewhere historical events had swept away” (782). This, of course, forms part of a broader trend in nineteenth-century Europe, described by Linda Nochlin in the following terms: The notion of the picturesque in its nineteenth-century manifestations, is premised on the fact of destruction. Only on the brink of destruction, in the course of incipient modification and cultural dilution, are customs, costumes and religious rituals of the dominated finally seen as picturesque. Reinterpreted as the precious remnants of disappearing ways of life, worth hunting down and preserving, they are finally transformed into subjects of aesthetic delectation. (50–51)

In the Italian context, this brink of destruction tended to be mapped along a north-south axis. Elites constructed an imaginative geography of an urban, modernizing north and a rural, archaic south. The Romance philologist Pio Rajna made this clear in an impassioned account of the “Rinaldi,” or southern “singers of tales” (cantastorie), published in Nuova antologia in December 1878: . . . the neighborhoods in which we now find the Rinaldi are like sanctuaries where a persecuted race has sought refuge. The radiant hours of the day have passed, and after this dusk will come the night, a night with no hope of dawn.The singers of tales will disappear from Naples, as they have already disappeared from all of central and northern Italy. . . . The ship of the Middle Ages sank long ago; nevertheless, here and there one sees floating among the wreckage some panel, some fragment of the mast. We need to hurry and gather these fragments together and save them, before the sea swallows them forever. (578–79)

Here, too, Sicily has a special role. In conclusion Rajna notes that “Palermo and Sicily will probably be the final lands where the voice of the singers of tales falls silent.”30 Rajna, Pitré, Salomone Marino, and other scholars of popular traditions studied the south in increasing numbers and with increasing intensity over the course of the 1870s. But by the middle of the decade, the folklorization 29. On Pitré, see above all Cocchiara, Pitrè and Popolo e letteratura 377–95; Cirese, “Giuseppe Pitré.” 30. On the exaltation of the primitive in Pio Rajna’s work, see Cocchiara, Popolo e letteratura 361–65.

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of the south was spreading beyond the field of specialists into other areas, including both the literary trend of verismo and illustrated magazines.31 Illustrazione italiana clearly reflects this expanded interest in popular customs and traditions. Its south is predominantly a special preserve of folk traditions and a region of picturesque landscapes. In many instances these two elements are combined—as in Breda’s account of Modica—while in others the natural surroundings are the focus. Given the image of Vesuvius on the masthead, it is not surprising that the magazine pays considerable attention to the volcano from the outset. A ten-part series of articles on Vesuvius begins on 19 December 1875 with a two-page spread illustrating “An Excursion to Vesuvius” (120–21). It gives both the traditional view of the twin-peaked mountain and the more unusual view from the edge of the smoking crater looking down across the bay. In the central panel a group of boys and men carry a well-dressed lady up the summit. They are evidently not only the mode of transport for this excursion but a part of the scenery: in the right-hand panel they themselves are figured in a form of visual association with the Vesuvian landscape. One month later two other illustrations from the environs of Naples also combine the natural and folkloric dimension but in different proportions. The first depicts a procession of penitents during an eruption of Vesuvius, but the volcano itself is not visible (16 January 1876: 184). The picture focuses instead on the religious fervor of the people. Two different forces beyond man’s control are evoked here: the natural force of the volcano and the divine force to which these people turn to save themselves. These two forces, which the positivist culture of the time was set on taming, provide an exotic and primitive spectacle for the central-northern reader. In the next issue, another side of Naples appears but in a more traditional, picturesque mode (see figure 13). The View of the Channel of Ischia at Piedigrotta harks back to the tradition of view-painting (vedutismo; 23 January 1876: 205). The fishermen and their boats in the center foreground are dwarfed by the wavy sea, the mountainous island of Ischia, and the cloudy sky. In the first months of Illustrazione, then, the south appears in its characteristic form, combining nature and the people, with varying emphases. But if the landscape is a recurrent motif, it is in fact the people themselves, their customs and costumes, who will be the most persistent concern in the following years. I would like to conclude with a few examples from 1876–77 that emphasize the particularity of these southern ways and whose accom31. Rossana Melis explores the intersection between folklore studies and verismo, with specific reference to Verga, in Bella stagione.

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13. View of the Channel of Ischia at Piedigrotta. Illustrazione italiana, 1876.

panying texts call the reader’s attention to the aesthetic interest of these scenes. The first is titled A Wedding: A Local Custom from Basilicata.32 Examples of local, popular culture figure prominently in the picture: the women and men in the wedding procession are in local costumes; a distinctive, flower-bedecked canopy is held over them. The anonymous text provides a gloss that highlights the folkloric elements in the illustration. Everything in the picture is done “according to the local custom,” “according to the ways of Basilicata.” The bride’s dress appears less identifiably local, yet the text describes it as “bizarre,” while also celebrating her “peasant-like ingenuousness, so different from the malicious and deceitful ways of urban brides.” What may reveal most about the attitudes toward the south in this feature, however, is the commentary on the one figure who is dressed in what could be termed national, bourgeois garb, the groom in black overcoat and top hat. The text treats him with pronounced condescension, describing him as “comically proud and self-assured.” He is the mayor, the biggest landowner of 32. 4 May 1877. The illustration appears on 116; all of the following citations are taken from the accompanying text on 115.

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the place, “who has been to the capital at least once in his life, and who looks down at everyone else as if one of his glances were enough to turn them into a prickly pear bush“ ( fico d’India). Even though the groom is hardly recognizable as a southerner, he is turned into a southern stereotype, that of the domineering southern landowner. He is notably the same social type that Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino depict, in the same years, as a virtual slave owner, a “scandalous” figure singled out for condemnation, as we shall see in the next chapter. But clearly the aim of this feature, and the magazine as a whole, is not to engage in a sociopolitical critique, as the writer’s playful addition of the prickly pear to this scene makes clear.33 Although the text registers both the cultural and geographic distance between reader and the represented scene, the author is not interested in offering a critical reading of this distance. The article is rather a cross between an ethnographic account of a provincial rite and a sketch of regionally situated realistic fiction—a “little local picture” (quadretto locale) to use a phrase employed during these years to describe both ethnographic and fictional texts. But both the illustration and article use folkloric elements not for documentation but diversion, as the conclusion of the article makes clear: “the life, the movement, the gaiety of the figures provide you with a thousand feelings and a thousand pleasant emotions.” To provide the reader with “pleasant emotions” is clearly the magazine’s primary aim in representing the south, and there is no doubt that the southern countryside and provincial villages offer some of the most pleasing fare. It is there, after all, that one can find that “peasant-like ingenuousness, so different from the malicious and deceitful ways of urban brides.” But Naples, the largest city in Italy, provides a good number of pleasant emotions as well. In Naples, for example, we find the Cantina napoletana, a “pleasing scene of local customs” from the 19 November 1875 issue of Illustrazione (see figure 14). Like the panoramic image of Constantinople during the festivities following Ramadan on the facing page, this, too, is a gay scene, but in a more folksy and Neapolitan mode. Roosters run loose on the unswept floor, 33. It is through such touches as these that the prickly pear became an emblem of the southern, and above all Sicilian, landscape in the decades following unification. The textual addition of the prickly pear here is not unlike the pictorial strategy employed by the magazine in 1884 to emphasize the Sicilianness of the character Turiddu in an illustration dedicated to Verga’s play Cavalleria rusticana. (We shall see this illustration at the end of Chapter 8.) In a photograph by Giorgio Sommer from the late 1880s titled “Palermo. Fichi d’India,” the plant is similarly used as a “typical local peculiarity,” an “emblem of the place”; see Sommer 195, 238. In a more recent version of this emblem, the prickly pear was, incredibly, chosen as the image for the cover of the 1991 edition of Antonio Gramsci’s La questione meridionale.

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14. Cantina napoletana. Illustrazione italiana, 1876.

a guitarist serenades a nursing mother, another man shovels a handful of macaroni into his mouth, his bare feet on prominent display below.The commentary describes the scene in terms of its difference from an unspecified yet obviously northern “us,” defining the orality and folksiness of Naples against the literacy and modernity of the north: “In Naples when a new trattoria is opened—what we call an osteria—they don’t put up signs on the streets. The publicity is done in another way: two or three beggars in their bare feet . . . go around playing the drum and guitar” (394). If the gaiety of the scene is an easily recognizable Neapolitan commonplace, a less obvious component of the folklorization of the south in this and other southern scenes in Illustrazione is the lack of shoes. In other words, one of the landmarks along the north-south axis in Illustrazione is quite simply bare feet. In the imaginative geography of Illustrazione, somewhere south of Rome people’s shoes come off, whereas no self-respecting northerner appears without them in the illustrations of the magazine.34 Of course, bare feet are only one landmark in this differential geography. In the pages of Illustrazione the south is consistently represented by scenes in which folk 34. It is worth noting that bare feet are one of the attributes of Nedda that Luigi Capuana highlights in his review of Verga’s Vita dei campi (Verga 73–74).

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customs and costumes are prominent, in which the people are either joined in festivity or practicing some homely trade or traditional craft (fishermen, shepherds, hawkers). In contrast, the north mainly appears as a place of cities, bustling ports, splendid monuments, and technological achievements. As Mr. Breda made clear when he introduced his piece about Modica, it is precisely the experience of urbanization and modernization in the centernorth that makes these scenes from the south particularly gracious, pleasant, and picturesque. As the Cantina napoletana shows, one need not go to the country to get a whiff of the farm. But if the examples from the wedding in Basilicata and the scene from Naples provide occasions for delight in southern customs and costumes, one finds a growing awareness in these years of the destructive force of modernization and, thus, of the imminent extinction of these southern pleasures. As we saw, Pio Rajna expressed this in his December 1878 Nuova antologia article on the singers of tales. This was also succinctly expressed by Giuseppe Pitré’s collaborator, Salvatore Salomone Marino, in his introduction to his Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants of 1879: In a time of transition such as ours, in which civilization, fashion, and commerce have greatly canceled and will soon entirely cancel all the differences among nations, classes, and individuals, it is an act of charity to one’s homeland, as well as the duty of the historian, to gather up and preserve the last images of a people who have until now possessed a striking individuality. (32)

Such an awareness is evident in the pages of Illustrazione in these years as well. We see this clearly in The Fishmonger of Mergellina, on the cover of the 2 December 1877 issue (see figure 15). In this article, as in others in the following years, we find a more explicit articulation of the fact that the picturesque south is endangered. The commentary begins with the standard description of festive Naples: Naples is the city of life, of light, and warmth: everything is done there merrily, noisily; the sun there, especially at sunset, gives off flashes of fire, the people sing, the little horses gallop on and on. (349)

It ends, however, on a more somber, valedictory note: Take a good look at this poor fishmonger: it could be your last! For years, indeed, they’ve been out to destroy the most picturesque site in the bay of Naples. . . . Next year there will be no more beach, no more fishmonger! (350)

Readers of Illustrazione thus delighted in Naples, and in the south more

15. The Fishmonger of Mergellina. Illustrazione italiana, 1877.

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generally, a traditional, picturesque world on the brink of destruction.35 They could take a last look at a world that, from the safe distance of the centernorth, appeared in all its picturesque charm. These and other articles implicitly acknowledged that the south, too, was changing; the culprits here, set on destroying this picturesque site, were evidently the city fathers themselves. But whereas the center-north provided the majority of images of the very instruments and agents of change, the south was primarily represented as a place that was either affected by change (as with the fishmonger above) or, more often, at one remove from it. The south of Illustrazione was, in sum, less significant for its participation in modernity than for its separateness from it. If one looked to the south not as a resource for aesthetic delectation, however, but as a part of the nation-building process, and considered its distance from the more advanced and European center-north from a more political point of view, then one’s perspective on southern difference could change dramatically. Instead of nostalgia for a traditional world that was passing away, one might feel frustration for a feudal world that resisted change. Outrage could take the place of delight, fear and consternation the place of pleasant emotions. Instead of issuing a call to save that world, one might aim to destroy it. It is this alternative perspective on southern difference that we shall consider next.

35. In this spirit, an article accompanying an illustration featuring Sardinian costumes on the cover of an issue from 10 September 1882 states, “Even in the artistic and beautiful island of Sardinia the tyranny of fashion is driving from the seaside villages and cities the ancient forms of dress and varied popular customs. . . . What a shame that there is no way of restraining the forces set on the destruction of our national customs!” (231).

7

The Emergence of the Southern Question in Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti

During the mid-1870s, a new vision of southern Italy appeared in the writings of two Italian political thinkers. Pasquale Villari and Leopoldo Franchetti articulated for the first time the regional specificity of the social, political, and economic conditions of the Mezzogiorno. Their work, together with that of Franchetti’s collaborator Sidney Sonnino, announced the existence of the Southern Question and, at the same time, inaugurated the rich tradition of inquiry and debate subsequently known as Meridionalism (meridionalismo).1 In this chapter I analyze the major texts Villari and Franchetti wrote and published between 1874 and 1878, exploring the figures and rhetorical strategies through which they construct a bleak vision of southern difference. Their “discovery” of the Southern Question is contemporary with the discovery of the south in Illustrazione italiana. They, too, participate in the geography of textual production outlined in the previous chapter, publishing their texts in the center-north for a primarily centralnorthern audience. But their representations of the south contrast dramatically with those in Emilio Treves’s magazine. Instead of offering the reader pleasing pictures of southern customs and costumes, these writers portray the south as a threat to the political and moral integrity of the nation. I shall argue, in fact, that one of their polemical targets, especially in Franchetti, is the picturesque representation of the south itself.

1. Salvatore Lupo offers an important set of observations on the history and implications of the term meridionalismo in “Storia del Mezzogiorno.” While taking his reservations about the term seriously (20, 24), I still consider Meridionalism a useful label for describing that field of inquiry and debate that “situates the south at the center of its analysis and, even more importantly, at the center of national political life” (Barbagallo 7).

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the southern question in villari’s southern letters Pasquale Villari was among the Neapolitan liberals who, after being forced into exile by the Bourbons in the 1850s, never returned to live in the south. From his prominent position in the intellectual world of Florence, where he resided until his death in 1917, Villari exerted a major influence on liberal Italian culture.2 With the Southern Letters (Le lettere meridionali), Villari helped to establish a new conceptual framework within which to think about the south in the context of postunification Italy. Before turning to these letters, it is worth noting that Villari fostered an interest in the south in other ways both before and after the publication of the Southern Letters in 1875. Already in his 1872 essay “La scuola e la questione sociale in Italia,” he had called upon writers to visit the popular quarters of Naples and “describe them minutely, depict the life and moral conditions of those people, and denounce them to the civilized world as an Italian crime.”3 It was just such urgings, along with the impact of the letters themselves, that had some part in prompting the likes of Franchetti, Sonnino, Jessie White Mario, Renato Fucini, Matilde Serao, Giustino Fortunato, Pasquale Turiello, and, later, Gaetano Salvemini to produce, between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s, an extraordinarily rich and varied body of literature regarding the social conditions of the Mezzogiorno.4 Villari was, then, an “agitator” who stirred a wide range of thinkers into investigating the south (Salvadori 38). But it was certainly the letters themselves that had the greatest impact on elites of the day. As Pasquale Turiello commented in 1877: If, a few years from now, our professors of sociology and economy also refer to the conditions of the Neapolitan and Sicilian peasant . . . that will probably be due to a set of letters published in L’Opinione in 1875, written by Pasquale Villari, on the social conditions of the Neapolitan and Sicilian peasants. For it was then . . . that a small group of Italians interested in our social problems came into existence, and the question, which even impartial observers had previously ignored, suddenly seemed to take on a capital importance.5 2. On the figure and influence of Pasquale Villari in Italian culture, see Moretti; Cicalese; and, more recently, Urbinati. 3. Le lettere meridionali 173. Henceforth in this section I will include references to this edition parenthetically in the text. 4. See Salvadori 37–38; Galasso, Passato e presente 1: 16; and—with regard to Villari’s influence on Salvemini—Garin, Cultura italiana 106–9. 5. Turiello 23 n. 1. Five years later, Turiello wrote at the beginning of Governo e governati: “For me, as for others, it was Villari’s Lettere napoletane [sic]—the most

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Villari first published his letters in L’Opinione, the influential journal of the Right that, in Chabod’s words, “in part expressed the frame of mind of the governing Moderates and in part contributed to its formation” (Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana 398). However obvious it may seem, the first point to make about Villari’s text is that it is written in the form of letters addressed to the journal’s editor, Giacomo Dina. A contemporary of Villari’s from Turin, Dina played an important role in almost three decades of Italian political history and in a sense personified that restricted group of liberal elites who were the effective addressee of Villari’s letters.6 In a moment we shall examine the particular set of concepts, figures, and rhetorical strategies through which Villari represents the south to the readers of L’Opinione. What is crucial to bear in mind at the outset is the critical thrust of these texts; they in fact constitute a polemic against his very readership, the liberal elites who had directed and shaped the process of Italian unification over the previous decade and a half. Villari had already voiced his disillusionment with the contemporary Italian state and society in his groundbreaking essay, “Di chi è la colpa,” of 1866. There, after the humiliating defeats in the battles of Custoza and Lissa at the hands of the Austrians, he argued that it was time for Italy to wake up to the fact that in the very bosom of the nation there is an enemy more powerful than Austria, and it is our colossal ignorance, it is the illiterate multitudes, the unthinking bureaucrats, the ignorant teachers, the childish politicians, the impossible diplomats, the incompetent generals, the unskilled worker, the patriarchal farmer, and the rhetoric that eats away at our soul. It is not the quadrilateral of Mantova and Verona that stopped our progress: it is the quadrilateral of seventeen million illiterates and five million rhetoricians. (303–4)

Villari takes aim here at a wide range of domestic problems. But over the course of the next ten years, and particularly after the Paris Commune helped to sensitize elites to what was coming to be referred to as the Social Question, Villari’s focus became sharper on two fronts. On the one hand, he formulated an increasingly pointed critique of the manner in which Italy’s elites had governed the country since unification; on the other hand, he focused widely read book of all [on the south] and the most effective for the authority of its author—that inspired me to pursue these studies” (23). Forty years later, Giustino Fortunato spoke in turn of “the happy year in which Villari’s Lettere meridionali suddenly called the public’s attention to what was and still is our greatest domestic problem” (Pagine 164). 6. On Dina’s career in Italian politics and journalism, see Chiala, as well as the entry for Dina in the Dizionario biografico.

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on the problem that at some level summed up the most urgent issues facing the nation: the social conditions in southern Italy. In the first case, the fundamental problem consisted of the liberal elites’ isolation from the people, in itself not an original theme in Risorgimento thought.7 Villari’s approach, however, is unique. On the floor of parliament in 1876, he spoke of it in these terms: We, my dear colleagues, brought about a revolution that was largely the work of an intelligent, educated, and disinterested bourgeoisie. . . . The people were in such conditions as not to be able to participate in the revolution and were in a sense therefore dragged along by us. But precisely because we stood alone in this effort, because we alone were intent on completing the creation of a free Italy, even though we wished to do what was best for the nation as a whole, we found ourselves, without knowing it or wanting it, isolated in a closed circle, and we almost came to think that our little world was the whole world, forgetting that outside our narrow circle there is a vastly numerous class, to which Italy has never given a thought, and which it must finally take into consideration. (397)

A year later, in the noted essay “Ciò che gli stranieri non osservano in Italia,” Villari described the problem similarly. Again he granted that none of the country’s politicians had lost any of their patriotic spirit or “deliberately lost sight of the common good”: “but all of society found itself in the hands of an extremely limited group of people that, closed up in an all too narrow sphere, naturally came to believe that its world was the whole world, and that there were no interests that differed from those that it saw and felt” (243–44). Both of these statements vividly express the elites’ isolation from the people in terms of an inability to see beyond their “closed circle” and “narrow sphere.” What is particularly noteworthy about the first quotation is the tension it expresses between “Italy,” understood as “our narrow circle,” and “the nation as a whole.” Villari’s statement that “Italy has never given a thought” to the people highlights the latter’s effective exclusion from the former, just as he charges “Italy” with the task of broaden-

7. Ippolito Nievo, for example, had incisively addressed this problem in his “Frammento sulla rivoluzione nazionale,” written in 1859 but not published until 1929 (Opere). Closer to the historical moment and cultural milieu in which Villari was writing, fellow Neapolitan Angelo Camillo De Meis also took up the question in his Sovrano of 1868. On the problematic of elites and people more generally in the Risorgimento, see Asor Rosa, “Cultura” 13–48 and, with specific reference to Il Sovrano, 873–78; Colummi Camerino 5–80; and Gramsci, Selections 44–120, where the issue is central to his interpretation of the Risorgimento.

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ing its perspective to include that “vastly numerous class” that up till now it has ignored. In Villari’s Southern Letters, it is precisely the south that comes to represent those people, problems, and interests that have been forgotten or ignored by the country’s elites, sequestered in their narrow sphere of command and privilege. But if, on the one hand, the south desperately needs the political attention and material assistance of Italy’s ruling class, the ruling class, in Villari’s profoundly moral view of the problem, also has need of the south (see Salvadori 34). For Villari insists that the restrictive vision of the country’s elites, which was a political necessity during the struggle to unite Italy, has, in the context of postunification Italy, resulted in a form of moral bankruptcy. As in the passage from “Di chi è la colpa” of 1866 cited above, the problem is formulated here in terms of the waning of those “external,” heroic struggles of the Risorgimento and the consequent need “to turn all our attention inward” (67).8 But here the emphasis on the void in the “heart of each citizen” is much more pronounced.9 In this new “prosaic” age in which the statesman’s highest aim is to balance the budget and the scholar’s to obtain steady employment, it is the liberation of the suffering masses, and the masses of the south in particular, that could “give us back our lost ideal” (68–69).10 But just how is it that the south comes to perform this function in Villari’s moral geography of the nation? In the following discussion I want to examine the way Villari elaborates what will prove to be a defining feature of Meridionalist discourse from this point forward: the exceptional nature of the south, its peculiarity and radical difference with respect to the rest of Italy and, indeed, modern European civilization as a whole. As we shall see, Villari’s discourse vacillates between the desire to affirm the south’s common bonds with the rest of Italy, which springs from the unitary imperative that Villari shares with all the early Meridionalists, and an insistence on a peculiarity that ends up transforming the south into a regio dissimilitudinis, a place unlike any other, irreconcilable to the modalities of modern society.

8. This need for Italy to “to look inside its own breast” was also the note on which De Sanctis had concluded his Storia della letteratura italiana five years earlier (846). 9. Echoing the imagery of the “too narrow sphere,” Villari also describes the experience in terms of asphyxiation: “It’s as if we lack the air to breathe” (69). 10. For a discussion of the more general disillusionment—or deprecatio temporum—expressed by many of the country’s elites at this time, see Asor Rosa’s important observations in “Cultura” 821–39. Croce employs the phrase “age of prose” in his History of Italy (2).

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Given the title and content of the Southern Letters, it is striking that the south does not initially appear to be their main theme. In Villari’s prefatory remarks for the various editions of the letters (the opening of the first letter, and the prefaces to the 1878 and 1885 editions), he describes their main concerns in the following manner: in 1875 he introduces them as an investigation into “the state of the poorest classes, especially in the southern provinces” (1); in the preface to the 1878 edition he comments that “the writings that I have collected in this volume regard more or less the same question,” which is to say the miserable plight of the multitudes, “and above all those who live from agriculture” (xxvi; this preface, it is worth noting, makes no mention whatsoever of the south). In the preface to the second edition of 1885, Villari writes of “two questions” of principal concern—“the miserable state of our masses in certain cities, above all in Naples; the no less miserable conditions of our peasants in many parts of Italy” (vii). Finally, we must recall the book’s title itself, Lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia. In Villari’s presentation, the Southern Letters are then about the miserable conditions of both the rural and urban masses and more generally— as the book’s title indicates—about the “social question,” where the south is singled out as a regional case of special importance. The south’s problems are thus situated in a general, national context and, as we will see more clearly below, this is one of the central premises of Villari’s enterprise. Yet if Villari’s presentation of the letters’ themes serves to orient our reading toward problems of a national scope, the titles of the individual letters suggest the importance of the local context: “Camorra,” “Mafia,” “Brigandage” are all phenomena that are typically and (with the exception of brigandage) exclusively southern. This tension between the general and specific, the national and local, runs throughout the letters. While Villari presents his concerns in a national framework, his actual descriptions, observations, and analyses underscore the southern specificity of these problems. This interplay between the national and the regional is immediately evident in the first letter dedicated to the camorra and the conditions of the masses in Naples. At the beginning of his discussion, Villari introduces Naples as that city “among many, in which the low plebs find themselves, I won’t say in the greatest misery, because that is not what is worst, but in the greatest abandon, in the most grievous degradation and dejection” (3–4). Naples is therefore introduced as a special case of the “miserable state of the masses” in various Italian cities. The highly charged rhetoric Villari employs and the vividness of his descriptions tend, however, to undermine the

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proposition that these conditions can also be found elsewhere, albeit to a lesser degree; each detail, name, anecdote, story, communicates the peculiarity of this place and its problems. The camorra, as he writes, may well be “the logical, natural, necessary consequence of a certain social condition” that exists in other parts of the country (1). But his noted descriptions of the Neapolitan slums and of the string makers leave us with the impression that these conditions are somehow uniquely Neapolitan. Quoting a letter from an architect in Naples, he writes: These slums . . . generally have an entryway, without any opening onto the street, and a little courtyard, both utterly filthy, which open onto an immense quantity of terrible dwellings, much worse than kennels in fact. All of them, but especially those on the ground floor, lack air and light and are extremely humid. In these slums several thousand people live piled on top of one another, so degraded by misery that they seem more brutes than men. In those dens, into which you can’t enter because of the stench of the garbage that’s been piled up there for ages, one often sees no more than a pile of straw, destined to be the bed of an entire family, male and female all together. Latrines of course are nonexistent, for the streets and courtyards suffice for those needs. (5)11

This is only the first of a number of scenes of la miseria in the letters— “ever varied, brutal, and horrible”—that serve the explicit purpose of shocking his readers out of their state of indifference to the plight of the masses, an attitude that Villari elsewhere calls “incredible” (65).12 What is clear at this point is that before the descriptive power of these “lurid kennels, these terrible grottoes, and degraded inhabitants,” these “unhappy, degraded people” that crawl out into the sunlight “like ants,” the general category of the “social question in Italy” recedes into the background (7). With each passing description Naples appears more exceptional, if not a case unto itself: “in no other country on the earth do the terrible consequences of Malthus’s theory appear more clearly” (12). It is therefore the scene of the 11. Villari’s letters are in fact largely composed of various letters and reports that he received from correspondents in Naples and Sicily (among them his sister, Virginia [see Jeuland-Meynaud 185]); with respect to the positivist rhetoric of eyewitness observation that informs the letters—Villari speaks of the necessity of “seeing it with your own eyes”—it is striking that the most compelling accounts, on the whole, are those provided by others. 12. Shortly after composing this letter on the camorra, Villari wrote to his sister: “If you only knew how indifferent the Chamber is to all social questions— the Left as much or more than the Right—you would understand how terribly difficult it is to speak about such things. No one wants to hear a word of it” (quoted in Cicalese 133).

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string makers’ caves that remains imprinted in the reader’s imagination, or that of the poor widow who, in her cold, darkened den, bangs a rock against the wall in a desperate attempt to frighten the rats away from her sleeping children (6, 8–9).13 Villari, in fact, seems to recognize this problem to some degree, for at the end of the letter, he attempts to reframe his discussion of Naples and the camorra at a more general level. He writes that he will cite an example from the north “in order to show that the ill is general and in order to dispel the impression that I wish to take all my examples from the south of Italy” (14). But this very move serves to underscore the force of the former examples with respect to the latter. The series of statistics he cites regarding poverty in Venice lacks even a brief description of the specific conditions of the Venetian poor, and thus while the reader may take him at his word—“the ill is general”—the ill that one remembers is that of Naples. In his first letter on the camorra,Villari thus raises not so much the “question of the cities” as the “question of Naples,” unique and incomparable.14 Something similar occurs in the following letter dedicated to the “ills that afflict Sicily,” above all the mafia. Here, too, Villari suggests that the ills of the region constitute examples of a more general social—and, in this case, agrarian—question. Yet, to an even greater extent than in the previous letter, what is salient in Villari’s account is the singularity of these ills and, more generally, the peculiarity of the Sicilian Question. In the first place, Villari addresses the problem of working conditions in the Sicilian sulfur mines. He suggests that these working conditions are representative of those in other areas and industries, but the overall effect of his discussion is quite the opposite. To begin with, sulfur is Sicily’s major industry and closely tied up with the island’s economic identity; it is, in some way, typically Sicilian. At the same time, he underscores the particularity of the Sicilian sulfur mines, noting that while other countries with mining industries have sought to protect miners and especially children workers, 13. An 1878 review of Jessie White Mario’s La miseria in Napoli published in Nuova antologia begins, “The impression produced throughout Italy in 1875 by Villari’s description of the caves of the so-called string makers in his Lettere meridionali has not yet faded” (Baer 330). Bulferetti also notes the descriptive power of the Southern Letters, observing that it is not their conceptual content but rather their powerful “veristic descriptions” that grab the reader (91–92). 14. Contarino notes with respect to the new literature on the Neapolitan Question initiated by Villari, and then Jessie White Mario and Renato Fucini, that despite the ideological differences existing among them, “it is striking that what is prevalent in all of them is the idea of Naples’s uniqueness as a case of urban underdevelopment” (“Napoli” 669).

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no such thing has happened in Sicily. Finally, as with his account of the Neapolitan slums, he depicts the working conditions in the mines in a most sensational fashion, confronting the reader with scenes of unforgettable human degradation and suffering: These human beings are subjected to a form of labor that, described day in, day out, seems ever more cruel, if not impossible. Hundreds of boys and girls descend along steep embankments and rickety ladders, stuck into soil that is crumbling or saturated with water. Having reached the bottom of the mine, they are loaded with rocks, which they must then carry upwards on their backs, slipping on that steep and treacherous earth at the risk of falling and dying an instant death. The older approach the top sending out horrendous screams; the children arrive in tears. (18–19)

In the case of the mafia, the particularity of Sicily—and of the mafia as its synechdocal representative—emerges with even greater clarity. Here Villari offers comparatively little in the way of graphic descriptions of human misery, entering instead into an extensive and at times confusing analysis of the social and economic conditions of western Sicily that seemed to have produced the mafia. He expresses his surprise at discovering that the highest levels of criminality are to be found not among the poor but among the well-to-do farmers, and notes how this fact seems to “overthrow every rule of political economy and social science” (24). The mafia, in short, seems to confound his analytical intent, and this difficulty results in what is probably the least persuasive and engaging part of the Southern Letters. His conclusion that the two great “calamities” of western Sicily—the sulfur mines and the mafia—are generated by “the special conditions of its agriculture” (32) constitutes a kind of admission that these are not problems that can be easily related to the agricultural conditions in the rest of Italy. For while he claims they are “aspects” of the Agrarian Question, they are nevertheless problems that can be understood and remedied only in terms of their specific, local conditions. In the penultimate letter of the series dedicated to brigandage, Villari continues to emphasize the peculiarity of the south in the manner described above. Brigandage, he writes, “is the gravest ill that we can observe in our countryside. As is well known, it is certainly the consequence of an agrarian and social question that afflicts almost all the provinces of southern Italy” ( 38). Here Villari writes with even more extensive commentary, anecdotal description, and heightened rhetorical power. The ensuing series of descriptions of the plight of the southern Italian peasants produces the distinct impression that the south is profoundly different from the rest

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of the nation. In the first letter, Villari adheres more closely to his initial proposition, that the framework in which to view these problems is a general, national one, but after the passing reference to poverty in Venice, the north falls by the wayside. Or, rather, it now appears in an antithetical position with respect to the south. Villari introduces into his discussion Franchetti—whose study of the Neapolitan provinces he cites liberally in this letter—as one who was “grievously scandalized to see things that must have seemed impossible to him, a native of Tuscany where the peasant is not only a free and independent man, but a true associate of his master” (44). To the scandalized Tuscan Franchetti, the degradation of the southern peasants “calls to mind the age of slavery,” insofar as the master “has the unlimited right to demand services from his peasants and exercises it widely” (46). Here, in fact, the figure of slavery is repeated numerous times, along with other terms and tropes that emphasize the singularly abject condition of the southern Italian peasants. For the most part, these are scandalous analogies, references (like slavery, Ireland, the Middle Ages) that are blatantly out of place (and time) with respect to contemporary Italy. Thus, Villari reflects on the conditions in the south under the Bourbons and on how, since unification, the state of the peasants has remained unchanged, if not worsened (45). He writes: America has shown by its example that in many cases the enslavement of the Negroes harmed the slave’s master most of all, because he was thereby corrupted by the unjust dominion that he exercised. Shouldn’t an unlimited dominion not over blacks, but over men of the same race, corrupt as well? (43)

In the final letter, dedicated to “The Remedies,” Villari describes the relations between landlord and peasant in a similar vein: The landlord finds himself isolated in the middle of an army of peasants. The submission of the latter is immense. . . . But all this is not the result of affection or esteem. He could kneel down before his master with the same feeling with which the Indian worships the tempest or lightning. The day that this charm were broken, the peasant would rise up to avenge himself ferociously with long-repressed hatred, with his brutal passions. Sometimes, in fact, one has seen hordes of slaves transformed into hordes of cannibals. ( 57)

The overall effect of these repeated analogies is, of course, to emphasize the south’s deviation from the norm of social justice and good government that,

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while occasionally associated with Prussia, England, and Tuscany, generally functions as an unstated term of comparison in the text. Villari writes of the “marvel” that “the foreigner” feels upon finding no middle class in southern Italian cities as an intermediary between landowners and peasants, and this sense of marvel, accompanied by outrage, characterizes Villari’s rhetoric throughout (42). The south is thus, above all, remarkable, extraordinary, exceptional. Toward the end of the final letter Villari stresses—as he had at the end of the first—that southern Italy is not the only part of the country “in which the peasants suffer unjustly” (63). On this occasion he in fact provides a page and a half of descriptions and details from the Veneto and Lombardy that create an effective link between conditions in the south and other parts of Italy. This nevertheless represents only a brief parenthesis in the letter, and at its conclusion Villari reasserts the difference between north and south in quantitative terms: “The ill exists in many provinces, but in the provinces of southern Italy its dimensions are much greater” (65). As I noted at the beginning of this discussion, Villari represents the south in the letters not only as a problem for the impoverished classes of the Mezzogiorno but as a matter of capital importance to the elites themselves. Isolated in their “narrow sphere,” the elites need the south, or—more precisely— need to concern themselves with the south, in order to “reawaken in us that moral life without which a nation has no purpose, no true existence” (67). Yet, as we have seen, Villari’s attempt to make the Southern Question seem a national problem was undermined at some level by the power of his own representations, which tended to situate the ills of the south in a remote region unlike the rest of the nation. In the concluding statement of the letters, Villari addresses this problem head-on, formulating it as an imagined objection that, he writes, “some, out of patriotism, don’t make, but that they nevertheless harbor in their hearts”: Fortunately, they say to themselves, not all of Italy is in the same condition as the southern provinces. If the peasants and poor are in such a terrible condition down there, if the educated do not fulfill their obligations, ignoring and failing to improve this state of affairs, tough luck for them; they’ll just have to remain in their semibarbarous state a while longer. In central and northern Italy we will be, as we are now, civilized. (69)

This imaginary objection touches on precisely that problem of regional peculiarity examined earlier. For Villari’s imagined dissenter, the south’s problems are specifically and exclusively southern; perhaps most importantly, they are “down there” (laggiù), far from the civilized regions of central-northern Italy. The Southern Question is not our national problem but theirs.

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Not surprisingly, Villari responds to this objection by reiterating the unitary, national perspective he had announced at the beginning. But he does so in a striking fashion that merits quoting in its entirety: Let’s forget the fact that many problems, as I stated earlier, plague central and northern Italy as well. And let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Italy is in fact divided in the way my uncharitable opponents insist. But if they wished to draw such a conclusion from this state of affairs they should have thought about it before, leaving intact the Great Wall of China that the Bourbons had constructed [between northern and southern Italy]. After the unification and liberation of Italy, everything has gotten mixed together in the army, the navy, the judicial system, the administration, etc. The guilt of the more civilized provinces is equal to the guilt of the more educated and well-to-do classes that abandon the more ignorant and derelict classes of the one and same society to their own destiny. And the consequences are the same. Today the peasant who goes to die in the countryside around Rome, or who suffers from hunger in his own village, and the poor man who wastes away in the hovels of Naples can say to us and to you: After the unification of Italy, you’ve got no way out—either turn us into civilized people, or we’ll turn you into barbarians. And we men of the Mezzogiorno have the right to say to those of central and northern Italy: Your indifference and our indifference would be equally immoral and guilty. (70)

How then does Villari counter the impression that the south’s problems are somehow separate from the north, an impression that he himself helped to create? The preunification division between northern and southern Italy has been replaced, he argues, by a commingling of people from the two regions in the nation’s various public institutions. This point, it would seem, could be readily acknowledged by all sides. But it evidently does not go far enough, for while it has northerners and southerners working together in the same institutions, it still leaves the two parts of the country—and their problems— where they were: in different places, with a fault line running between them. Villari thus offers a more thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the relationship through an analogy that replaces the horizontal and geographical concept of north/south with the vertical concept of a single hierarchical society: the north is to the south as the “more educated and well-to-do classes” are to the “more ignorant and derelict.” North and south are, then, highly differentiated, but in such a way that one recognizes the relationship between the two in terms of the supposed obligations the upper classes feel toward the lower classes of their own society. The substitution of a geographical conceptualization of social difference with a political one enables him to argue for a northern obligation toward the southerners that otherwise would not be felt.

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Having done this, all that remains for Villari is to provide a more dramatic expression of this newly conceived relationship. What more effective way to do this than by letting this underclass, through a form of rhetorical ventriloquism, appeal to the nation’s elites? Yet this formulation contains something more than just an appeal for social justice; it is in fact a threat: “either turn us into civilized people, or we’ll turn you into barbarians.” There are two things about this formulation, and about this final passage more generally, to highlight in conclusion. In the first place, it recapitulates the gist of the letters as a whole, which is to say it articulates the differentiation between the two regions in the spirit of national unity. The educated, affluent, civilized north must help the ignorant, derelict, barbaric south. In the second place, it is interesting to note where Villari situates himself in this new geopolitical schema of a “more educated and affluent” north and a “more ignorant and derelict” south. On the one hand he places himself among the southern elites (“we men of the Mezzogiorno”). On the other hand, the text’s pronouns graphically represent the fact that he and the southern elites like him occupy an intermediary, and somewhat shifty, position vis-à-vis these two worlds. The underclasses of the south can apostrophize “us” (the elites of the south) and “you” (the elites of the north) as the common object of their threat. But if the southern elites are joined with those of the north as the addressee in the first clause, in the clause that follows they are separated. Here, instead, “we men of the south” charge “those of central and northern Italy”—and themselves as well—with the moral responsibility of helping the southern people. In this interplay of pronouns, the role of Villari, the Neapolitan-Florentine, as intermediary between the southern and northern elites and as representative of the southern masses to both is evident. What this means is that the novelty of Villari’s Southern Letters may lie not only in their launching of a new analytical field but in their inauguration of a new intellectual function: that, precisely, of the Meridionalist, the writer, from northern or southern Italy, who endeavors to provide a representation of the south to the nation’s elites.As we shall now see, Leopoldo Franchetti assumes this intellectual function as well, with the difference, however, that in his work the normative force of the north becomes even more absolute, the condemnation of the south all the more vehement, and southerners themselves are deprived of virtually all political agency.

franchetti’s sicilian nightmare If, as Leopoldo Franchetti once said, Pasquale Villari was the “revered master of the Southern Question” (Jannazzo 23), Franchetti and his close col-

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laborator Sidney Sonnino were no mere epigones. Both of these Tuscan intellectuals were profoundly indebted to Villari’s “lesson”: the Southern Letters were one of the sources of inspiration for their groundbreaking investigation of Sicily in 1876, and Villari had given his crucial backing to the journal Rassegna settimanale, a major forum for discussion of the south that Franchetti and Sonnino founded in 1878.15 They themselves were strikingly original thinkers, however, and with respect to Villari’s Southern Letters the investigations of Franchetti and Sonnino in fact “represent a more advanced and in-depth phase of study of the socioeconomic reality of the south” (R. Villari, “Origini” 72). In this section I focus on Franchetti’s 1876 study, Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia. I should stress, however, that because they worked together so closely during these years, in some instances I refer to Franchetti and Sonnino as a team: their first studies were published in a single volume in 1875 (Franchetti’s Condizioni economiche e amministrative delle provincie napoletane and Sonnino’s La mezzeria in Toscana); their second, more famous pair of studies, comprising Franchetti’s Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia and Sonnino’s I contadini in Sicilia, was conceived, researched, and published together as La Sicilia nel 1876; and, finally, between 1878 and 1882 they coedited Rassegna settimanale. My focus on Franchetti’s 1876 study is partly motivated by the fact that his investigation is of a more sociological nature than the technical, agrarianeconomic analysis of Sonnino. At the same time, Franchetti’s study was a more influential text than Sonnino’s, a “foundational work” through which the Southern Question “began to enter into the consciousness of scholars and politicians, if not of the more general public” (Gatto 229). Most importantly, the geopolitical vision that Franchetti formulates in this text constitutes one of the most powerful conceptualizations of the difference and division between north and south ever written. Let us begin with a brief consideration of Franchetti’s earlier study of the continental south, which announces many of the themes and problems that will be articulated with greater rigor and rhetorical force in his 1876 study of Sicily. Started in the autumn of 1873 and published a few months after Villari’s Southern Letters in the summer of 1875, Franchetti’s study of the “economic and administrative condition of the Neapolitan provinces” manifests a number of affinities with Villari’s text (at one level, of course, there is a direct link between them, insofar as Villari cites passages from 15. I shall address the importance of Rassegna settimanale in relation to Verga’s fiction in the next chapter.

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Franchetti’s 1875 study, as we saw in our discussion of the Southern Letters). In the opening lines, Franchetti announces that he has “called things by their real names and used harsh expressions where they seemed justified” (Condizioni economiche 3). Like Villari, Franchetti thus adopts a critical attitude to the southern provinces under investigation, seeking to bring to light unseemly realities previously ignored or hidden from the ken of the country’s elites. Franchetti then makes a move that, as we saw, was central to the conclusion of Villari’s letters: he issues a patriotic appeal to the common destiny of all Italians, claiming that the problems of the south are not those of southerners alone: “We are all Italians, their disgraces are our disgraces, we are weak with their weakness” (Condizioni economiche 3). Like Villari, Franchetti attempts to nationalize the problems of the south, dissolving the force of regional difference in an equation of theirs is ours, they are us. Certain differences between the two texts, however, are also readily apparent. In the first place, the subtitle of Franchetti’s work, “Travel Notes,” reminds us that the writer is an outsider. Franchetti in fact raises this point in the passage cited above, where he writes that he would be “profoundly saddened” if his southern readers, acting out of local pride, rejected his harsh assessment of the conditions in the south simply because he was a “foreigner.” It is in anticipation of just such local resentment that Franchetti makes the unitarian statement “We are all Italians,” in the hopes of dissolving the potential antagonism between local and foreigner, southerner and northerner, that threatens to hinder the reception of his message. Yet, as in Villari, this disclaimer of regional difference functions as a rhetorical frame that is at odds with the emphasis on regional particularity within the text. Here, too, what quickly emerges is the singular negativity of the conditions in these provinces. But whereas Villari, the Neapolitan, tried to render the south through a kind of impassioned identification with it, most clearly reflected in his attempt to give voice to the southern masses at the conclusion of the letters, Franchetti articulates a south that is clearly foreign to him, the representative of a different and superior civilization. With greater analytical rigor, Franchetti articulates a more systematic contrast between his world and that of the southern provinces, whereas the morally outraged Villari managed to acknowledge a certain human truth to the south. Franchetti instead represents the south as a perverse realm of social disorder and moral degradation in which human existence cannot be conceived of according to the standard measure of European civilization.16 We see this, 16. Jannazzo, in his introduction to Condizioni economiche, highlights Franchetti’s profoundly European cultural vision (vii–xv).

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for example, in Franchetti’s observations on the nature of the relations between peasants and landlords in Abruzzi and Molise: Truly, if one thinks about these facts, which appear contradictory to the man accustomed to civilization, they all seem equally typical of the state of primitives; a state of barbarism, ignorant of all the relations and laws that keep society together as a whole, from the laws of the family to that of public safety. (Condizioni economiche 18)

In another passage, the use of the foreigner’s perspective, and the corresponding sense of incredulity, is even more explicit. At the sight of this desolation, the foreigner is tempted to think that in that country some great disaster occurs every year after the harvest, some invasion, some conquest that robs them of the fruits of the whole year’s labor and prevents them from putting anything aside so as to improve the fields, so as to eliminate the fever; or that for centuries and centuries bad harvests have followed upon one another without respite and have left just enough for the landlords and workers to eat and plant again; or that the country is inhabited by a special category of men that, in the midst of cultivated lands, has preserved the improvidence of the savages of the American plains and that, having eaten well or poorly, does not feel that desire that is common to all men to improve their condition. (Condizioni economiche 50)

Thus, while Franchetti’s image of the south resembles Villari’s in its negativity, the contrast between the south and the “more advanced provinces” of Italy is more marked in Franchetti’s text (Condizioni economiche 33). Before concluding this brief consideration of Franchetti’s first study, it is also worth noting that the contrastive effect we have been discussing was further accentuated by its publication together with Sonnino’s study of sharecropping in Tuscany. Sonnino’s Mezzeria in Toscana amounted to an encomium of the Tuscan sharecropping system, which, in his view, was one of the most humane, successful forms of agriculture that could be imagined. The contrast between the disastrous conditions in the south and the “privileged position” of Tuscany was striking, and Sonnino himself seized upon this point in a sort of preview of their findings published shortly before the appearance of their joint volume in the spring of 1875.17 Nor was this effect apparently lost on one young southern reader, Giustino Fortunato. Many years later, Fortunato recalled the profound impact these texts had 17. The article, titled “Delle condizioni dei contadini in Italia,” was published in the Florentine journal La Nazione on 12 April 1875 and can now be found in Scritti 1: 155–61.

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upon him precisely in terms of this contrast, noting that they were “two texts published in a single volume, with the manifest intention of bringing together descriptions of two states of affairs as different from one another as the effects of the same contract in the particular conditions of the two regions are varied” (Pagine 163–64).

Let us now turn to Franchetti and Sonnino’s Sicilia nel 1876, focusing on the contribution of the former, Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia. Franchetti’s earlier study and his study of Sicily are akin to one another in a number of ways, but the study of Sicily is composed with considerably more clarity of focus and rhetorical force. Most importantly, it takes the contrastive vision of the earlier study to much greater extremes, virtually splitting the nation into two distinct parts. Like the preface to Franchetti’s earlier study, the joint preface to La Sicilia nel 1876 announces the authors’ commitment to telling the whole, unvarnished truth about Sicily. Franchetti reaffirms this point at the beginning of his own contribution with an epigraph from Machiavelli’s Prince that states, “There is no other way to ward off adulation than to let people know that they won’t offend you if they tell you the truth.” 18 The reference to the Prince is not a matter of indifference: Franchetti’s study is itself a treatise on statecraft, an analysis of the social and political conditions in Sicily and a diagnosis of how to remedy its ills aimed, as he writes later, at the “educated class of central and northern Italy and those few people from southern Italy who are aware of the conditions of their country” (238). The polemical edge of their investigation is apparent here as well, for they suggest that the country’s elites have ignored, if not suppressed, the harsh truth about Sicily in the past, subscribing to “that stupid sense of shame that often makes us Italians hide our ills so as to seem greater or different from what we are” (vi).19 18. Inchiesta in Sicilia 1: vi. Unless otherwise indicated, page references in this section refer to the first volume of this text. As noted above, the original title of the work was La Sicilia nel 1876. 19. It is also important to remember that Franchetti and Sonnino conceived of their study, at least in its final stages, as a critical response to the parliamentary Inquiry into the Social and Economic Conditions in Sicily that was being conducted at the same time as theirs (see Inchiesta sulle condizioni sociali). As they note at the end of the preface, the commission’s final report was released shortly before their study went to press, and while they express agreement with certain “partial” assessments made by the commission, they dissent from its “general judgments.” In a letter to Enea Cavalieri written some time after the book’s publication, Franchetti recalls how the authors rushed to publish their studies in time for the parliamentary

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The polemical spirit of the exposé therefore animates La Sicilia nel 1876, and as we shall see in a moment, surprise and shock are key elements of the text’s rhetorical construction. At the same time, Franchetti articulates his study in another narrative mode that occupies a central place in the history of representations of the south: that of the travel journal. La Sicilia nel 1876 is, after all, based on the journey Franchetti, Sonnino, and their friend Enea Cavalieri took to Sicily, and for Franchetti the travel narrative is evidently one of the most rhetorically effective ways to represent the experience of discovery that plays such an important role in his study.20 This experience is generally framed in terms of sociological analysis, but as the following passages show, this is not the purely dispassionate account of the positivist social investigator.A more imaginative and in some sense romantic perspective also comes into play, a certain enchantment with the new and foreign: The train sets off again, and the traveler is subtly overcome by the feeling experienced by one who finds himself in the middle of mysterious and unknown things; it seems that the valleys that open on the road, winding and then hiding themselves behind a rise, must hide strange things, never seen before. (20) Then the newly arrived traveler feels overcome by a sense of profound isolation. It seems to him that the nightmare of some mysterious and malicious power weighs on the bare and monotonous countryside, a power against which there is no help or defense beyond himself and the companions that have come with him from across the sea, and he suddenly feels overcome by a profound sense of affection for the carbine that he’s carrying across his saddle. (21–22)

Later in the text, the narrative device of the journey will be replaced by the more disembodied, scientific perspective of the social investigator.21 But the general sense of being an outside observer from the mainland permeates the study and shapes Franchetti’s representation of the Sicilian social reality. This is particularly evident in the opening pages of the study. discussion of the commission’s report. For a comparative discussion of the two inquiries, see Renda, Storia della Sicilia 2: 68–88. 20. Mazzamuto recalls the extensive tradition of travel writing on Sicily of which Franchetti was at least partially aware and makes an argument for a number of links between Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia and Paolo Balsamo’s Il Giornale del viaggio fatto in Sicilia e particolarmente nella contea di Modica published in 1808 (Parvenu 129–35). 21. See Dickie’s analysis of the relationship between these two perspectives in his chapter on Villari and Franchetti in Darkest Italy 53–82.

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Franchetti begins by recounting the traveler’s “first impression” upon arrival in Palermo. This, he writes, “is one of the most pleasant that can be imagined” (3). He lists the delightful climate and surroundings “celebrated in every language,” the splendor of the city and the hospitality of its citizens, the neighboring countryside that manifests signs of an “advanced civilization,” all producing in the traveler a state of “enchantment.” But—so begins the second paragraph—if the traveler stays a while, “the colors change, the aspect of everything is transformed” (4). After hearing a few stories about violent crimes, “all that scent of orange and lemon flowers starts to smell like a corpse” (4). With this incipit, Franchetti rehearses the picturesque perspective on Sicily of the northern traveler. He presents this view in patently hyperbolic terms, as an obvious cliche, all the better to subvert it, vividly transforming the sunny southern commonplace of “orange and lemon flowers” into the grim, antipicturesque image of a rotting corpse.22 This is the last we will see of picturesque Sicily in Franchetti’s volume. For the next two hundred pages the reader is presented with an unremittingly dire portrait of the social and political conditions on the island. The island’s ruling class is composed of that people in Europe which is “most passionately ambitious for domination, the quickest to take offense, the most ruthless in its struggles for power, influence and profit, the most implacable in its hates, most ferocious in vendettas” (8); the oppressed peasants live in destitute conditions that call to mind “the times in which the Sicilian countryside was tilled by hordes of slaves” (21); bands of brigands, bandits, and mafiosi maraud across the island, virtually unchecked by the forces of law and order, who, in turn, are like “an army encamped in a hostile country” (13). A “nightmare of mysterious and malign power” seems indeed to weigh upon everything, bathing not just the Sicilian landscape in a sinister light but its human reality as well. As Francesco Renda notes, a spirit of desolation pervades all of Franchetti’s observations and analyses in Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia (Storia della Sicilia 2: 73). Consider, for example, Franchetti’s statement that “the sight of the conditions on the entire island, irrespective of the particular province, is profoundly disturbing” (56). While Franchetti by

22. Franchetti’s demystification of the commonplaces of sunny Sicily can be usefully considered alongside that contemporary counterdiscourse produced by Mastriani, Serao, Di Giacomo, et al., aimed at undoing what Serao termed the rettorichetta (two-bit rhetoric) of picturesque Naples (see Giammattei, “Letteratura” 388–90).

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no means renounces claims to objectivity, neither does he attempt to suppress the subjective dimension of his encounter with Sicily. On the contrary, the representation of his experience of alienation from it constitutes one of the main ways of articulating the difference between the civilization of Sicily and the mainland more generally. This is an important point to which we shall return below. For the moment, let us briefly consider what Franchetti considers to be the two characteristics that typify life on the island: the omnipresence of violence and the predominance of private interests over the public good. As we have seen, violence was what first caught the attention of Franchetti’s traveler at the beginning of the study, and it accompanies him throughout. As much as the sheer frequency of murders, kidnapping, cattle rustling, and other crimes, what strikes Franchetti most is the Sicilians’ attitudes toward it. Acts of violence, for them, are not exceptional, but rather part of “the normal state of things” (5). They are “necessary and normal although harmful, like the heavy rains that make the year’s harvest rot in their fields” (221). Such violence reveals, in turn, the governing principle of life on the island: the predominance of private authority over social, or public, authority. It is this single phenomenon, Franchetti writes in the penultimate section, that “sums up” all the others described and analyzed in the book (220). From it follows the fact that in Sicily “violence can be freely employed by whomever has the means to do so, the res publica is exploited by the few, the rights recognized by Italian civil law are ineffectual against private force” (220). It is a world, in short, in which might makes right, where “there is no place for whomever doesn’t have fangs and claws” (12). These are the quintessential characteristics of the Sicilian social order according to Franchetti. What we now need to consider is how Franchetti represents these aspects of life in Sicily, and Sicilian society more generally, as different from what one finds on the mainland. This is a crucial point, for it is precisely the representation of Sicily’s difference that constitutes one of the text’s most powerful and lasting rhetorical effects. Through a variety of rhetorical devices Franchetti makes it clear that the way of life in Sicily differs from that of the mainland author and his implied readership. I should mention at this point that Franchetti establishes a form of identity between himself and his reader as “co-continentals” from the beginning by creating two basic perspectives in the text: that of the traveler-observer and that of the Sicilians. The first perspective is generally articulated as an indefinite third person (“one”) that embraces both author and reader as the subject that observes, analyzes, and experiences the Sicilian world; the Sicilians are

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quite simply the Other, the objects of observation and analysis.23 We will see more clearly below the way in which Franchetti actually deprives the Sicilians of their political agency, but for the moment let us consider how they are rendered socially and culturally “other” in the text. Franchetti’s study is strewn with various indications of curiosity, surprise, perplexity, confusion, and fear, all of which serve to underscore the cultural distance between the traveler and the Sicilians under observation. Such indications range from the use of qualifiers like “strange,” “disturbing,” even “monstrous,” to more extended representations of the experience of cultural difference. In the first pages of the study, for example, Franchetti stages the discrepancy between the traveler’s expectations about violence and the way things work in Sicily. One would expect people to be arrested for these crimes, but they are not (4–5); one would expect people to feel angry about these incidents, but they are not (7); one would infer from their frequency that Sicily was undergoing some revolution or other terrible cataclysm, but it is not (11). In each case the difference between the foreign culture of Sicily and that of the mainland is underscored through the discrepancy between continental expectation and Sicilian reality. The frequent use of questions and other indications of perplexity has a similar effect. Certain pages in fact amount to little more than catalogs of questions that express the traveler’s inability to orient himself in this strange world, asking, in effect, how could this be possible? “How could these criminals acquire such a sway over men’s minds? The mind searches at length in vain to solve this problem. . . . What is the reason for the landowners’ lack of organization? . . . the mind seeks in vain a criterion that can guide it in the judgment of the facts” (31). Sicily thus constitutes a cognitive challenge, a sociopolitical reality that, in fact, “throws into disarray all the concepts of government and the public good that one has formed in regularly constituted countries” (35). All these qualifiers, questions, and observations are so many ways of driving home what, at some level, is the fundamental point of Franchetti’s study: that Sicily is different, radically different, from the mainland. While the traveler’s conceptual framework may be momentarily “thrown into disarray” by certain aspects of Sicily, it comes out of this cultural encounter quite intact of course, every bit the unwavering standard against which Sicily and the rest of the world can be judged. Sicily is therefore not just different but, as the last comment cited above makes perfectly clear, irregular. 23. Franchetti and Sonnino’s various Sicilian hosts are one exception, to whom Franchetti expresses his gratitude in a section titled “Hospitality” (22).

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What is striking about this insistent, normative assertion of cultural difference is that Franchetti and Sonnino had claimed in the preface that the phenomena under investigation “have their first origin in the laws of nature” and that consequently they had no intention of “judging or condemning anyone” (v). By the same token, Franchetti stresses in the conclusion that the phenomena he describes “have nothing abnormal about them, but are rather the necessary manifestations of the social state of the island” (237). He even grants, with an air of tolerance, that this is “one state of affairs like another” that existed in Europe for many centuries and that continues to exist in many countries still today. Sicily is, in a word, medieval, behind on the time line of historical progress with respect to the “more advanced parts” of the country, and if left to its own devices, would probably follow in the footsteps of the rest of modern Europe (220).24 The key problem, however, is that Sicily does not exist in isolation but rather forms part of the modern Italian nation. Its “abnormality” derives from its position in this context. What is abnormal in Sicily is thus “the intrusion of a different civilization that seeks to impose itself and throws the play of natural forces into disarray, which otherwise would have resulted in the regular development of Sicilian society” (237). Franchetti thus makes clear a point that had been implicit throughout the study: Sicily and the mainland, north and south, are homogeneous entities, such that Sicily’s union with the mainland perforce constitutes an “intrusion,” the rupturing of the hermetic seal that had previously protected “medieval” Sicily from modern civilization. Set against one another in this fashion, however, there can be no compromise or fusion between them. The coexistence of Sicilian civilization and that of central and northern Italy in the same nation is incompatible with the prosperity of the nation and, in the long run, with its very existence, for it produces a weakness that renders it vulnerable to disintegration at the slightest push from outside. One of these two civilizations must therefore disappear in those parts of it that are incompatible with the other. And we believe that for any Sicilian of good faith and moderate intelligence there can be no doubt as to which of the two must make room for the other. (237)

As one would expect, such a unilaterally negative conceptualization of Sicily has certain ramifications with regard to the mode of governing it; not 24. The medievalism of the south was a familiar trope in postunification Italian culture. Speaking of Basilicata in a parliamentary discussion of brigandage in 1863, Deputy Stefano Castagnola exclaimed, “It’s the Middle Ages right under our eyes!” (quoted in Villari, Lettere meridionali 40).

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surprisingly, in order to formulate the specific political relationship between Sicily and the mainland, Franchetti draws upon the kind of medical imagery used to represent the south during the moment of unification in 1860–61. In their joint preface, Franchetti and Sonnino had in fact referred to the “diseased phenomena” that Sicily manifests, and the conceptualization of the relationship between northern observer and Sicily as that of doctor and sick patient was implicit throughout the course of Franchetti’s study. In the last two sections of the study, Franchetti elaborates extensively upon this medical imagery. As we saw above, Sicily constitutes an abnormal part of the Italian nation. In the penultimate section, titled—like Villari’s last letter— “The Remedies,” Franchetti makes it clear that Sicily “must be considered a morbid phenomenon, a form of disorder such that Italy has the duty to suppress it as quickly as possible” (221). Who shall spearhead this radical transformation of Sicilian society? Obviously not the Sicilians, for whom such a state of affairs is normal. They cannot participate in this effort, “for it is precisely their way of feeling and seeing that constitutes the illness to be cured” (221). Franchetti acknowledges that it is important to ask the Sicilians their opinions on the matter, but these views, these opinions, should be taken as phenomena, as symptoms of capital importance for the person who aims to discover the nature and process of the illness, not as directive norms for its cure. For a doctor, the patient’s complaints of thirst are often a reason not to give him something to drink. Often the sensations about which the patient complains most bitterly are for the doctor a sign that his remedies are working and, vice versa, an apparent improvement a sign that the disease is worsening and death approaching. (221)

Consequently, if the Italian state “wishes to cure the ills of Sicily, it must avail itself of the elements that the nation provides, to the exclusion of the Sicilians themselves” (222–23).25 The north, then, is invested with all the authority commonly associated 25. It is important to note that Sonnino, at the conclusion of his study, adopts a much more inclusive view of the role Sicilians should play in the transformation of conditions on the island, nor is the influence of the north viewed in such a univocally positive light: “Left to its own devices, Sicily would find a solution: numerous facts demonstrate this, and it is rendered certain by the intelligence and energy of its population, as well as by the immense richness of its resources. A social transformation would necessarily occur, either through the prudent collaboration of its affluent class or through the effects of some violent revolution. But we Italians of

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with a doctor, while Sicily is reduced to the figure of sick patient, wholly ignorant of its own conditions and consequently unable to make decisions on its own behalf.26 Sicily is quarantined from the community of Italians, denied all political agency. The problem, however, as Franchetti notes in the concluding section of his study, is that the ruling elites of central-northern Italy have been remiss in their medical duties. This part of the nation has lacked the sense of its duties and its mission toward Sicily and the southern provinces in general. We have received those little sisters of ours who, without a thought for the future, trustingly threw themselves into our arms. They were emaciated, starving, covered with sores, and we should have cared for them lovingly, nourished them, sought by every means, even with fire where necessary, to give them back their health. Instead, without even taking a look at their wounds, we put them to work, the hard, tiring labor of making Italy. We asked for men and money from them, and we gave them a two-bit freedom in return, imported from abroad, and we said to them: increase and multiply. And then after fifteen years we’re surprised to see that the wounds have become gangrenous and threaten to infect Italy. (238)

This passage introduces a number of important new elements. In the first place, Franchetti clarifies an issue that had previously remained in the shadows: the relationship between Sicily and continental southern Italy. Franchetti had restricted his focus to Sicily over the course of his analysis or, to be more precise, had restricted his comparisons to those between Sicily and central-northern Italy, effectively blotting out the continental south. If one were to draw up a map of Italy based on Franchetti’s observations, it would consist of an Italian peninsula truncated somewhere below Tuscany, across from which would lie the island of Sicily. Franchetti’s study is therefore written as if southern Italy did not exist, and this clearly serves to reinforce the image of Sicily’s insularity and isolation from mainland civiother provinces prevent this from happening. We have legalized the existing oppression, and we guarantee the impunity of the oppressors” (2: 263). Speaking of the corruption of the affluent classes, Sonnino similarly stresses, “I am talking about three-quarters of Italy, not just Sicily” (265). 26. It was above all this analogy that outraged the first Sicilian readers of La Sicilia nel 1876 and that Luigi Capuana later termed the “original sin” of their study—that of traveling to Sicily “like doctors to the bed of a sick patient, with the preconception that the sickness of that poor devil was something unusual, complicated, rebellious to the analyses and cures of science” (Sicilia 18–19); see as well De Mattei, “Inchiesta siciliana” 118–19; Brancato 10–11.

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lization. Here, without any further explanation, continental southern Italy comes to form part of that same downtrodden world. A second important feature of this passage is Franchetti’s addition of a gendered, human element to his representation of Sicily and the south, which infuses the medical imagery of doctor-patient with a sense of familial pathos and big-brotherly protectiveness. At the same time, in the last sentence the north loses its doctorly detachment and immunity, becoming instead a part of the same diseased organism. It is with precisely this view of the problem that Franchetti makes his final appeal in the closing lines of the text: Certainly, Italy will be able to survive a long time in the same conditions in which it has lived for the past fifteen years. There are many organic diseases that do not lead to an immediate death. But in a weakened organism, full of germs of decomposition, those same causes that in a healthy body would produce barely noticeable effects, generate a total breakdown. And if this should happen, the first to suffer cruelly would be the members of that class that is unable to understand the responsibility and duties toward the rest of the nation that are imposed upon it by the fact that it alone profits from the liberty of Italy. (237–39)

Sicily, then, is an anomaly, a holdover from the Middle Ages that threatens the modernity of the mainland with its violence, clientelism, and disregard for the law. It is in short a negation of the bourgeois civilization of the mainland (cf. Mazzamuto, Parvenu 132). Sicily and the mainland are therefore not only different from one another but utterly distinct and, in a sense, antagonistically opposed. This means that Franchetti not only represents “Sicily in 1876” but “the north in 1876” as well; these two geopolitical blocks are defined in antithetical relation to one another. Through this contrastive process, the north in fact becomes more modern, more European, more governed by law and order, than ever before. This is not to say that Franchetti ignores the fact that conditions in many areas of the north can be improved upon. He himself notes that “the social conditions of northern and central Italy leave much to be desired in every respect” (237). But under the pressure of unification, Italy paradoxically splits in two. In Franchetti’s text, the imaginative geography of Italy is subjected to a process of polarization of unprecedented force. Only Giustino Fortunato’s stark vision of two Italies, distinguished from one another by fundamentally different natural, geographical conditions, would rival and in some sense surpass Franchetti’s in argumentative and rhetorical persuasiveness.27 But Fortunato would not 27. See above all his noted 1904 essay, “La questione meridionale e la riforma tributaria” (Mezzogiorno 1: 539–41).

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elaborate this dualistic vision in writing until the end of the century. During the 1870s, which is to say at the beginnings of the Meridionalist problematic, it was Franchetti’s study that constituted the most rigorous and rhetorically charged elaboration of two distinct Italies, that shaped the conceptual framework within which the country’s elites viewed Sicily and the south more generally from that point forward.

8

The Geographical Poetics of Giovanni Verga

The fiction of Giovanni Verga is a prime manifestation of the keen interest in the south that emerged in Italian bourgeois culture during the second half of the 1870s. Verga’s Sicilian stories and novel, I Malavoglia, helped to create one of the great imaginative geographies in modern Italian literature. A striking feature of Verga’s literary representations of Sicily is their engagement with the areas of cultural practice and modes of representing the south considered in the previous two chapters: Illustrazione italiana and Franchetti’s and Sonnino’s writings, in particular, as well as folklore studies. Reading Verga in relation to these other domains helps us to see that his fiction is animated by a sustained interest in the problematic of picturesque Sicily. Verga discovered the powerful symbolic charge that rural Sicily had for the Italian bourgeoisie while working in the Milanese orbit of the publisher Emilio Treves and his magazine, Illustrazione italiana. The realistic revolution in his art known as verismo is partly enabled, however, by the bleak, antipicturesque vision that he found in Franchetti and Sonnino’s La Sicilia nel 1876. From that point on, Verga’s work offers a nuanced exploration of the many faces of southern difference, from the dismal, underground world of the 1878 novella “Rosso Malpelo” to the folkloric and picturesque spectacle of the 1884 play Cavalleria rusticana. This chapter focuses on the representations of Sicily that Verga produced in the crucial decade between 1873 and 1883, combining both culturalhistorical and formal textual analysis. On the one hand I read Verga’s work in relation to certain publishing and reading trends in the north at this time and, more specifically, in relation to the modes of representing the south discussed earlier. I trace Verga’s movement from the orbit of the picturesque south of Illustrazione italiana to that of the backward, menacing south of 250

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the Southern Question and back again. On the other hand I explore the specific ways that the problematic of picturesque Sicily is articulated in Verga’s fiction. Close textual analysis is essential here. Verga’s interest in Sicily is intimately related to his interest in the problem of representation itself, and he articulates this problem, in turn, in terms of spatial, geographical, and cultural distance. Again and again, from his 1873 novel Eva through his second and last collection of Sicilian stories, Novelle rusticane of 1883, Verga foregrounds the act of vision, imagination, and representation and calls attention to the distance that makes these acts, and thus the representation of Sicily, possible. Verga’s work articulates what I call a geographical poetics and brings into sharp relief something we have seen repeatedly over the course of this study: namely, that texts “make” the south, elaborate a vision of a particular physical and human territory. At the same time Verga shows that geography affects representation, and that the Mezzogiorno makes special claims on the Italian and European imagination. In a noted 19 March 1879 letter to his close Sicilian friend and collaborator, Luigi Capuana, Verga highlights an important aspect of this problem. Speaking of the difficulties that have kept him from finishing I Malavoglia, Verga writes that if he had only been able to complete the novel, the “fresh and serene” world of a Sicilian fishing village would have offered an immense contrast with the turbulent, incessant passions of the great cities, with those artificial needs, and that other perspective of ideas or—one could say—of sentiments. For this reason I would have liked to go hide myself in the countryside, on the seashore among those fishermen and to catch them live as God created them. But, on the other hand, perhaps it isn’t so bad to consider them from a certain distance in the middle of the activity of a city like Milan or Florence. Don’t you think that the aspect of certain things has no relief for us except if seen from a given visual angle?1

1. “ . . . un immenso contrasto con le passioni turbinose e incessanti delle grandi città, con quei bisogni fittizii, e quell’altra prospettiva delle idee o direi anche dei sentimenti. Perciò avrei desiderato andarmi a rintanare in campagna, sulla riva del mare, fra quei pescatori e coglierli vivi come Dio li ha fatti. Ma forse non sarà male dall’altro canto che io li consideri da una certa distanza in mezzo all’attività di una città come Milano o Firenze. Non ti pare che per noi l’aspetto di certe cose non ha risalto che visto sotto un dato angolo visuale?” (Carteggio Verga-Capuana 80). In this chapter, which places special emphasis on literary representation, I will include the original Italian version of all fictional texts and selected letters by Verga parenthetically or in footnotes. Whenever possible I have cited published translations of Verga’s works, revising them slightly when necessary; otherwise the translations are mine.

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It is Verga’s exploration of this “immense contrast,” and his elaboration of a geographical poetics more generally, that shall concern us in the following pages.

a sicilian writer in milan Giovanni Verga was a writer of provincial origins with an acute sense of the cultural center. Emigrating from his native Catania, Sicily, at the age of twenty-nine, he spent almost the entirety of his productive literary career in the two central-northern cities of Florence and Milan. He first traveled to Florence in 1865, less than a year after it became the provisional capital of the nation, residing there from 1869 to 1872. Shortly after his arrival in May 1869 he wrote to his brother in Sicily: Florence is truly the center of the political and intellectual life of Italy; here one lives in another atmosphere . . . and in order to become something you have to be in contact with those scenes, live in the middle of this incessant movement, make yourself known and get to know others, in short, breathe the air. I’ll say it again: it is essential to start one’s career here.2

Verga did in fact become “something” in Florence, and his experience in the Tuscan capital had a significant impact on his work.3 It was Milan, however, the economic and publishing center of Italy, where he moved in November 1872, that would be the main site of his literary activity over the next two decades; it was in Milan, “the most citified city in Italy,” that Verga discovered the symbolic power of rural Sicily.4 In his March 1879 letter to Capuana, he clearly articulated the geographical dimension of the act of representing Sicily. Verga’s awareness of the force of the contrast between Milan and Sicily had begun to take shape much earlier, however. In a 14 March 1874 letter from Milan to Luigi Capuana back in Sicily, Verga warned his friend that he was “wasting away” on the island and issued an impassioned appeal to come join him in the Lombard capital. 2. “Firenze è davvero il centro della vita politica e intellettuale d’Italia: qui si vive in un’altra atmosfera . . . e per diventare qualche cosa bisogna vivere al contatto di quelle illustrazioni, vivere in mezzo a questo movimento incessante, farsi riconoscere, e conoscere, respirarne l’aria, insomma. Ti ripeto è indispensabile incominciare da qui la propria strada” (Lettere sparse 10–11). 3. For a discussion of the significance of Verga’s Florentine experience, see Cattaneo, Giovanni Verga 47–111; Musumarra 7–43; Petrillo 77–151; and, finally, Petronio’s incisive observations in “Bilancio” 223–28. 4. Verga resided in Milan until 1893, returning to Sicily for one- to two-month visits about once a year. The quote is from Tutte le novelle 2: 498.

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That Milan that you have imagined will always be inferior to the reality of it. . . . I picture you, immediately upon arrival here from the peace and quiet of our Sicily, you the artist, poet, mad, impressionable, and nervous like me, feeling yourself penetrated by all this violent fever of life in all its most ardent manifestations—love, art, the satisfactions of the heart, the mysterious drunkenness of work, bombarding you from every direction.5

Verga thus articulates that elementary contrast between the “peace and quiet” of Sicily and the hustle and bustle of Milan that would constitute the basis of his geographical poetics in the following years. In this same letter he tells Capuana: “I have written a novella, a sketch of Sicilian customs” (Ho scritto una novella, uno schizzo di costumi siciliani; Carteggio Verga-Capuana 30). He is referring to “Nedda:A Sicilian Sketch” (Nedda: Bozzetto Siciliano). “Nedda” is Verga’s first short story set in rural Sicily, his first important statement of a geographical poetics, and his first major success with Milanese readers. Before turning to “Nedda,” however, let us take a brief look at a passage from Eva, the novel Verga had published the previous year.

picturing sicily in eva Eva marks a turning point in Verga’s career: it is the first work he completed in Milan; it is the first of many works he published with Emilio Treves; and, finally, it constitutes his first exploration of the nature of bourgeois society and specifically of art’s function within what he calls an “atmosphere of banks and industries.”6 This is the context in which Verga briefly, yet significantly, introduces the problematic of picturesque Sicily. Eva tells the story of the doomed love affair between Enrico Lanti, a young artist who has come to Florence from his native Sicily in search of success, and Eva, a famous Florentine ballerina. For the purposes of our discussion, which is centered on Eva’s perception of Sicily, it is worth noting that in the first encounter between the two characters, the issue of Eva’s mode of imagining Sicily, and more specifically her stereotypical view of it, is raised. 5. “Quel Milano che tu ti sei immaginato sarà sempre inferiore alla realtà. . . . Io immagino te, venuto improvvisamente dalla quiete tranquilla della nostra Sicilia, te artista, poeta, matto, impressionabile, nervoso come me, a sentirti penetrare da tutta questa febbre violenta di vita in tutte le sue più ardenti manifestazioni, l’amore, l’arte, la soddisfazione del cuore, le misteriose ebbrezze del lavoro, pioverti da tutte le parti” (Carteggio Verga-Capuana 30). 6. Tutti i romanzi 2: 89. For an incisive discussion of the significance of art as commodity in the novel, and of the importance of Eva more generally in Verga’s oeuvre, see Luperini, “Eva verghiana.”

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“Where are you from?” she asked. “I’m Sicilian.” “Is Sicily far away?” “Yes.” “Farther than Naples?” “Yes. [ . . . ]” “Is it true that Sicilians are jealous?” she asked me after a moment. “Neither more nor less than anyone else.”7

The next evening, Eva arrives unexpectedly in Enrico’s apartment, which also serves as his studio. Thrilled by the sight of his artworks, she begins to rummage through his designs and canvases, “blurting out a thousand ingenuous exclamations, asking a thousand questions devoid of sense and full of grace” (scappando in mille ingenue esclamazioni, facendomi mille domande prive di senso e piene di grazie). “Give me one of them” (Regalatemi qualche cosa), she says. “Go ahead and choose one.” “Give me that landscape. Is it an ocean beach?” “They are the ‘Cyclops.’” “What are the ‘Cyclops?’” “That’s what they call a group of gigantic rocks on the beach of AciTrezza.” “In Sicily?” “Yes.” “Oh, they’re so beautiful!”8

7. The original dialogue reads: —Di dove siete? mi domandò. —Son siciliano. —È assai lontana la Sicilia? —Sì. —Più lontana di Napoli? —Sì. [ . . . ] —È vero che i siciliani sieno gelosi? mi domandò dopo qualche istante. —Né più né meno degli altri. (Tutti i romanzi 2: 110)

8. The original dialogue reads: —Scegliete voi stessa. —Datemi quel paesaggio. È una spiaggia di mare? —Sono I Ciclopi. —Che cosa sono I Ciclopi? —Si chiamano così certi scogli giganteschi sulla spiaggia di Aci-Trezza. —In Sicilia? —Sì. —Oh, come son belli! (Tutti i romanzi 2: 117–18)

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This is in fact the first explicit reference in Verga’s work to Aci-Trezza, the corner of Sicily that will become the center of his poetic universe between 1878 and 1881.9 The first point to underscore is that Aci-Trezza is introduced here as a picturesque site in the most traditional sense. It is a landscape that has been “pictured,” whether in visual or textual form, so as to evoke a strong appreciative response in the observer or reader. The evocative power of this landscape is further underscored by the fact that Eva selects it from a set of other designs and paintings. But that is not all. This place is in fact a locus classicus in the traditional repertoire of picturesque representations of southern Italy. As I noted in Chapter 2, this is one of the vedute made famous by Richard de Saint-Non in his Voyage pittoresque of 1781–86 (see figure 2) and then reproduced numerous times over the next century in other “viaggi pittorici.” As Eva was going to press, in fact, an illustration of this seashore appeared in a travel book on Sicily published by Treves and edited by Verga’s friend and fellow Sicilian writer, Emanuale Navarro della Miraglia.10 The text states that “the landscape formed by the islands of the Cyclops together with the promontory and the old tower of Aci-Castello is one of the corners of Sicily that artists have rendered most famous” (135).11 Aci-Trezza is then a picturesque site within a century-old cultural tradition, which Verga introduces into his work in terms of picturesque representation. There are a few other aspects of this scene to consider, beginning with the discursive component of the picturesque. Enrico refers to the group of rocks in the picture as the “Cyclops,” evoking their Homeric, mythical

9. The marina of Aci-Castello, two miles down the coast from Aci-Trezza, appears toward the end of Verga’s 1866 novel Una peccatrice. I will discuss Verga’s description of Aci-Castello in this novel in relation to the novella “Le storie del castello di Trezza” below. 10. At the time, Navarro della Miraglia was a regular contributor to Nuova illustrazione universale. Later in the decade he would gain considerable notoriety for his 1879 novel set in Sicily, La Nana. Actively involved in a number of literary journals (La Cronaca, Fanfulla, Capitan Fracassa), Navarro della Miraglia would publish the first half of Verga’s novella “Jeli il pastore” in La Fronda in February 1880, which he had founded in Florence the month before. 11. The book, titled La Sicilia, with texts by Felix Bourquelot and Elisée Reclus, was among the first in Treves’s series of travel books, Biblioteca di Viaggi, which was one of the publisher’s most successful lists during the 1870s (see Ragone, “Letteratura e consumo” 727–32). The 21 June 1874 article in Nuova illustrazione universale in which Eugenio Torelli-Viollier praises Verga’s “Nedda” also contains a promotional note for the Biblioteca di Viaggi. The common theme in both apparently disparate notes is Torelli-Viollier’s invitation to Italians to expand their geographical horizons.

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association.12 Most importantly, in response to Eva’s question, he identifies their location in Sicily. This last discursive qualification in particular appears to prime Eva’s interest, culminating in the exclamation, “Oh, they’re so beautiful!” From this point forward in Verga’s fiction the simple identification of a setting or story as “Sicilian” often serves to announce a more picturesque perspective, whereas the lack of such an identification, beginning with “Rosso Malpelo,” tends to accompany the darker vision of his more realistic works. As we shall see in our discussion of readers’ responses to “Nedda,” Sicily itself, or Sicilianness, was acquiring a special evocative force for the Italian middle classes of the center-north. Two other aspects of Verga’s use of this picturesque landscape painting to consider are the self-referential character of the painting and of this scene and its geographical dimension. Eva is Verga’s most autobiographical work (see Luperini, “Eva verghiana” 299). It is about a young Sicilian artist in Florence seeking to gain recognition for and through his art among the bourgeoisie of the center-north.13 Within the novel, Eva serves as an emblem for that world or, to be precise, for the commodification of art within it. Her choice of Enrico’s painting of the seashore of Aci-Trezza is charged: it reveals the form in which she, as central-northern bourgeois observer, recognizes Sicily. At the same time, as the only painting of Enrico’s to be described in the novel, it constitutes a synecdoche for his work as a whole. The scene therefore reflects not just Eva’s—and the Florentine bourgeoisie’s—taste for picturesque Sicily but also the mode in which Enrico has chosen to represent his island for that audience. One last aspect of the representation of Sicily in this painting to bear in mind is the sea itself. Over the course of this chapter I shall argue that the sea in Verga’s fiction is the prime marker of the picturesque. By the same token, the significance of Trezza in Verga’s oeuvre is intimately connected to the presence of the sea. We shall measure the important link between the sea and the picturesque not only by the sea’s presence but by its absence in Verga’s texts as well. Verga’s most decisive assaults on the picturesque, in “Rosso Malpelo” and in Novelle rusticane, will involve a rejection of the sea.14

12. This aspect is highlighted by Reclus as well: “These are the celebrated islands of the Cyclops, which legend tells were thrown by Polyphemus at Ulysses and his fellow travelers” (Sicilia 135). 13. Debenedetti calls Enrico’s character “a portrait of the disorientation Verga experienced upon first confronting the environment in which he sought to produce his work and toward which he directed it” (Verga e il naturalismo 197). 14. This aspect of the sea in Verga’s work can be introduced at the outset in relation to an analogous antipicturesque aesthetic strategy employed by Italo

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Eva thus introduces the marine landscape of Aci-Trezza under the sign of picturesque representation; it suggests that Sicily in that form has value as an object for exchange; and it gestures toward the geographical coordinates that determine its aesthetic interest. As Giacomo Debenedetti notes, this passage can be considered a “presage,” the first glimpse of a geographical poetics that Verga announces more explicitly in “Nedda,” written six months after the publication of Eva.15

preamble to a geographical poetics: “nedda” Shortly after returning from his Christmas visit to Sicily in January 1874, in three days of feverish activity during carnival week Verga wrote the tale of Nedda, the Sicilian olive picker, set among the farms and villages on the slopes of Mount Etna.16 “Nedda: A Sicilian Sketch” has long been seen as a pivotal work in Verga’s literary career, prompting considerable debate over the precise extent to which the novella belongs more to the “new” or “old” Verga. Discussions of the novella have, however, generally neglected the opening pages of the novella or dismissed them as an example of the overwrought, late-Romantic style of his early novels. In these pages, however, which are in the form of a narrator’s preamble, Verga provides what I consider to be his first articulation of a geographical poetics. They stage the act of imagining Sicily in terms of the geographical and cultural distance between north and south, and they explore that distant world’s power to fascinate yet also disturb the northern subject. In this section I analyze the opening pages of the novella; in the next I consider the novella’s extraordinary success among Milanese readers and the effect of this success on Verga himself. The first pages of “Nedda” articulate a contrast between two distinct worlds: on the one hand, the fireside drawing room of the narrator, a bourgeois space of leisure, reverie, and recollection; on the other, that of the tale’s

Calvino in his 1947 novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders. In his preface to the 1964 edition, Calvino made it clear that his realistic and polemical aims in the book required the “erasure” of the sea: “from the landscape of my city, San Remo, I polemically erased all the tourist shore . . . as if I were ashamed of it” (viii). 15. Debenedetti cites this passage from Eva as one of the moments in Verga’s early novels that anticipates key issues in his later work (“Presagi del Verga” 231). His psychobiographical reading of the passage is quite different from mine, however. 16. The story was first published in the 15 June 1874 issue of the Milanese Rivista italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, and shortly thereafter as an extract by the Milanese publisher Brigola.

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heroine, Nedda, the Sicilian countryside where hardship and misery reign. What forms a link between the two or, more precisely, what enables the passage from the first world to the second, is a flight of fancy: gazing into the flames in his fireplace, the narrator recalls “another gigantic flame” he once saw in the “immense hearth” of a farmhouse on the slopes of Mount Etna. In the opening lines of the preamble, the narrator describes the hearth into which he is gazing: To my eyes, the domestic hearth was always a rhetorical figure, good for framing the most gentle, serene affections. But I had to smile when I heard people say that the hearth’s flames were almost like a friend. Fire seemed to me in truth an all-too-necessary friend, sometimes cross and despotic, that would like to take you slowly by the hands, or legs, and draw you into his smoky den and kiss you in the manner of Judas.17

The narrator goes on to state three times that at first he was not an adept of the hearth: “I wasn’t familiar with the pastime of poking the wood. . . . I didn’t understand the language of the little sputtering stump. . . . My eye wasn’t accustomed to the peculiar designs of the sparks” (Non conoscevo il passatempo di stuzzicare la legna . . . non comprendevo il linguaggio del cepperello che scoppietta . . . non avevo l’occhio assuefatto ai bizzarri disegni delle scintelle; Tutte le novelle 1: 5). But, he writes, once he was “initiated into the mysteries of the tongs and bellows [he] fell madly in love with the voluptuous languor of the little fireplace” (iniziato ai misteri delle molle e del soffietto, mi innamorai con trasporto della voluttuosa pigrizia del caminetto). He then describes how he leaves his body “on the little armchair, next to the fire, as I would leave a set of clothes, leaving it to the flames to keep my blood circulating and warm, and make my heart beat more rapidly. And I let the escaping sparks, which crowd around like enamoured butterflies, keep my eyes open, and make my thoughts wander capriciously” (su quella poltroncina, accanto al fuoco, come vi lascerei un abito, abbandonando alla fiamma la cura di far circolare più caldo il mio sangue e di far battere più rapido il mio cuore; e incaricando le faville fuggenti, che folleggiano come farfalle innamorate, di farmi tenere gli occhi aperti). Finally, he writes:

17. “Il focolare domestico era per me una figura rettorica, buona per incorniciarvi gli affetti più miti e sereni, come il raggio di luna per baciare le chiome bionde; ma sorridevo allorquando sentivo dirmi che il fuoco del camino è quasi un amico. Sembravami in verità un amico troppo necessario, a volte uggioso e dispotico, che a poco a poco avrebbe voluto prendervi per le mani, o per i piedi, e tirarvi dentro il suo antro affumicato per baciarvi alla maniera di Giuda” (Tutte le novelle 1: 5).

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This spectacle of your thoughts as they flutter around you, which leave you to run far away, and instill in your heart breaths of sweetness and bitterness almost without your knowing it, has indescribable attractions. With your half-extinguished cigar, with your eyes halfopen, the tongs slipping from your relaxed fingers, you see the other part of you travel far away, traverse vertiginous distances. You seem to feel the currents of unknown spheres. You experience, smiling, the effect of a thousand sensations that would turn your hair white and furrow your brow, without moving a finger or taking a step. And in one of these vagabond peregrinations of the spirit, the flame that was crackling—too close perhaps—prompted me to see again another huge flame that I had seen burning in the immense hearth of Pine Farm, on the slopes of Mount Etna. It was raining, and the wind howled angrily.18

This opening scene describes the imaginative process through which the rural Sicilian world is “seen again” (rivedere). Verga does not begin by describing Sicily itself but rather by describing how the narrator’s vision of that world takes form. Significantly, what enables this act of imagination and representation is a kind of frame, the fireplace that he introduces as “good for framing the most gentle, serene affections.” By referring to the domestic hearth as a “rhetorical figure,” moreover, he calls attention to the way that frame can be used to produce different kinds of representations, ranging from the soothing to the threatening. Indeed, the reference to Judas clearly announces a form of unsettling duplicity: it seems that the fire in the hearth might “kiss you in the manner of Judas.” Before addressing the question of duplicity, let me first emphasize that it is the frame of the fireplace that enables one part of the narrator, at the end of the preamble, to “traverse vertiginous distances,” to “travel far away,” to Sicily. It is, in other words, through an act of framing and imagination, that Sicily comes into view. However different the frames, this gesture of 18. “Cotesto spettacolo del proprio pensiero che svolazza vagabondo intorno a voi, che vi lascia per correre lontano, e per gettarvi a vostra insaputa quasi dei soffi di dolce e d’amaro in cuore, ha attrattive indefinibili. Col sigaro semispento, cogli occhi socchiusi, le molle fuggendovi dalle dita allentate, vedete l’altra parte di voi andar lontano, percorrere vertiginose distanze: vi par di sentirvi passar per i nervi correnti di atmosfere sconosciute; provate, sorridendo, l’effetto di mille sensazioni che farebbero incanutire i vostri capelli e solcherebbero di rughe la vostra fronte, senza muovere un dito, o fare un passo. “E in una di queste peregrinazioni vagabonde dello spirito, la fiamma che scoppiettava, troppo vicina forse, mi fece rivedere un’altra fiamma gigantesca che avevo visto ardere nell’immenso focolare della fattoria del Pino, alle falde dell’Etna. Pioveva, e il vento urlava incollerito” (6).

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framing and representation links the preamble in “Nedda” to the moment in Eva discussed above. Both texts describe the act of imagining Sicily in terms of framing and distance. One of the crucial differences between the Sicily in Enrico’s painting and the Sicily in the narrator’s fireplace relates to the question of duplicity mentioned above. Enrico’s painting of that Sicilian landscape and Eva’s reception of it are both unequivocally picturesque. What is striking about the preamble to “Nedda,” and in certain respects the novella as a whole, is the way it emphasizes the theme of duplicity and ambivalence. The hearth is putatively a “friend,” but, the narrator suggests, he might, like Judas, destroy you. The narrator claims three times that he did not previously appreciate the attractions of the hearth, only to go on to say that he has become wildly enamoured of its pleasures. At the same time, toward the end of the preamble, this “spectacle” fills the narrator’s heart with “breaths of sweetness and bitterness.” The text finally describes a splitting of the narrating subject: one part sits in the chair observing the other “travel far away, traverse vertiginous distances.” The observing part, moreover, “smiles,” while “you experience . . . the effect of a thousand sensations that would turn your hair white and furrow your brow.” The preamble thus articulates various forms of duplicity and ambivalence. Yet there is also a progression, however tentative, from an apparently safe, pleasant situation in the man’s drawing room in the north to one that is potentially life-threatening on the slopes of Mount Etna. The first lines of the story itself—“It was raining, and the wind howled angrily”—complete this movement, setting the tone for the tragic tale to follow. Nedda’s tale is, geographically and aesthetically, a world apart from the picturesque scene of Aci-Trezza in Enrico’s painting. The duplicity and ambivalence announced by the preamble are nevertheless an essential aspect of Verga’s novella. On the one hand, “Nedda” is tough, gritty, and tragic. The story concludes with the starvation of Nedda’s baby, who dies in her mother’s arms, unable to feed from her malnourished breasts. It is a harrowing tale, capable indeed of “furrowing your brow.” In terms of the hardship and suffering it shows, “Nedda” represents the south under the sign of la miseria. Yet the tale is set in one of the most alluring parts of Sicily, described by Sidney Sonnino in La Sicilia nel 1876 as “the picturesque slopes of Etna” (Inchiesta 2: 60), in marked contrast to the barren expanses of the interior.19 The mention of

19. Symptomatically, the picture of an erupting Mount Etna, which appeared in Nuova illustrazione three months after the publication of “Nedda,” was one of the few images from Sicily to appear in the magazine during 1874. And it is with an image of Etna that Antonio Stoppani concludes his popular geographical survey

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Etna at the outset immediately conveys a special interest to the story. Giving the story the subtitle “A Sicilian Sketch” has a similar effect. As we shall see in the next section, this local Sicilian color provoked a powerful response in Verga’s Milanese readers. “Nedda” may depict the hardship and suffering of Sicilian peasants, but in many instances, and in the opening scene most importantly, it does so with a light, folkloric touch that would fit in as a southern sketch in Illustrazione italiana; the opening scene indeed evokes the kind of atmosphere in the illustration of the Cantina napoletana discussed in Chapter 6 (see figure 14). The wind is howling outside as the olive pickers wait for their dinner to be prepared, but the scene has a festive air: In the time that it took to cook the soup, the goatherd started to play a mountain air that made their legs tingle, and the girls began to dance on the broken up pavement of the huge smoky kitchen, while the dog growled out of fear that they would step on his tail. Their rags were streaming gaily in the air, and the beans, too, were dancing in the pot.20

It is this passage that sets the stage for the first appearance of Nedda, whom Verga introduces as “la varannisa” (the girl from Varannisa), reinforcing the local color of the scene with an italicized phrase in dialect, as he does at various points in the novella. “Nedda” thus contains two perspectives on Sicily, one folkloric and picturesque, the other full of hardship and misery. The preamble itself announced the theme of dual perspectives and duplicity and voiced the narrator’s hesitation and ambivalence about the spectacle unfolding before his eyes. As we shall now see, this hesitation and ambivalence are not only part of the preamble but are reflected in Verga’s own attitude to the story after it was published.

“one helluva fuss”: milanese responses to “nedda” Within weeks of its publication on 15 June 1874, “Nedda” had caused “one helluva fuss” (un caos del diavolo) in the Milanese literary world. That, at least, is how Verga put it in a letter to his family back in Sicily two weeks of the peninsula, Il Bel Paese, published in 1878 (467). It is worth noting that an illustration of “Aci-Castello and the Island of the Cyclops” appears on the opposite page. 20. “Poi, nel tempo che cuocevasi la minestra, il pecorajo si mise a suonare certa arietta montanina che pizzicava le gambe, e le ragazze si misero a ballare sull’ammattonato sconnesso della vasta cucina affumicata, mentre il cane brontolava per timore che gli pestassero la coda. I cenci svolazzavano allegramente, mentre le fave ballavano anch’esse nella pentola” (6).

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later (Lettere sparse 66).A number of letters Verga wrote during these weeks document both the story’s success and Verga’s combination of satisfaction and perplexity over that success. The first report on the good news that he sends his family accompanies his transcription of an enthusiastic note from the critic Eugenio Torelli-Viollier, whose glowing comment on the novella would appear in Nuova illustrazione universale a few days later. The critic’s note gave him “great pleasure,” he tells his family, but he stresses that the novella “is a work that I jotted down recklessly and in which I placed no stock, but here it’s been a great success and, I have to confess, quite to my surprise.” 21 In letters to his family over the next week, the counterpoint between the novella’s success and Verga’s low regard for it is insistent: After the good outcome of “Nedda,” which, I repeat, is a mere trifle. (Lettere sparse 64) [“Nedda”] has gotten a lot more attention here than it deserved, and I hope it won’t take away from my other work, which means a lot more to me, and I think quite rightly. (Lettere sparse 65) Meanwhile “Nedda,” which is a real flash in the pan, has had more success than it deserved. (Lettere sparse 65)

Finally, in a letter to the critic Ferdinando Martini, he writes: I put off sending you “Nedda” because I didn’t think it was worth the cost of the stamps. (Lettere sparse 67)

These letters attest to the contrast between Verga’s low estimation of the novella and the enthusiasm of his Milanese readers. What is also striking is that his initially casual disregard for the novella was transformed, in the face of its success, into a persistent disavowal of its aesthetic merits and of his own personal investment in it. There is no way to establish why Verga rejected “Nedda” so vehemently.22 It may well have had something to do with the dramatic contrast between the rural, Sicilian setting of the novella and the posh, primarily continental worlds of Verga’s main work at the time, both Eva, published the previous year, and the two novels he was busily at21. Lettere sparse 63. The first lines of Torelli-Viollier’s note transcribed by Verga read: “Dear Verga, Two words to tell you that ‘Nedda’ is the finest thing you have written; it is absolutely beautiful and made a profound impression on me.” 22. See Debenedetti’s reflections on Verga’s psychological disposition with respect to “Nedda,” which the critic evidently wrote without seeing the letters cited above, in Verga 387–90.

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tempting to finish, Tigre reale and Eros. Looking back at “Nedda” five years later, Luigi Capuana, Verga’s collaborator and his most astute contemporary critic, called attention to this “extraneous” aspect of “Nedda”: What was the varannisa doing there, in her filthy, torn burlap dress, with her bare feet covered with mud, her face darkened by the sun and scored by suffering . . . what was she doing among those figures dressed in silk, velvet and lace, all covered with make-up and powder, redolent with perfume, wearing gloves with thirty-two buttons . . . ? She was indeed an intruder. (Verga 73–74)

Verga’s mixed feelings of consternation and pleasure are evidently also related to the contrast between the success he had obtained with this “little nothing” and the difficulty he was having finishing and then publishing the two novels.23 His letters make clear that his low regard for the novella is connected to its very brevity. Whatever Verga’s reasons were for denigrating “Nedda,” the combination of the rural milieu, Sicilian setting, and brevity was at the heart of its appeal to Milanese readers. In the first place, some of the key circles in which “Nedda” was enthusiastically received—most notably the salon of Countess Clara Maffei—had been the centers for the discussion of rustic-popular literature (“letteratura rusticale”) in the preceding decades (Melis, Bella stagione 20). At the same time, the rural aspect of “Nedda” was favorably interpreted from an ethnographic point of view, as a study of popular customs. Angelo De Gubernatis, for example, a prominent scholar of folklore and popular traditions, a close friend of Giuseppe Pitré, and a future collaborator of Illustrazione italiana, appreciated Verga’s “vivid presentation of some figures and customs of the Sicilian people” (Verga, Postille 63).24 Another prominent critic, Salvatore Farina, wrote that he did not think much of “Nedda” as a work of literature but added that he did like it as a “little sketch of rustic southern customs” (quadrettino di costumi rustici meridionali) (quoted in Dillon Wanke, “Cameroni” 106 n. 13). For both of these commentators, as for other Milanese readers, it is not 23. In another letter Verga contrasts “Nedda” with “the work of much greater proportions that I’ve been working on lovingly for so long and with which I am infinitely more pleased” (Lettere sparse 64). 24. For a discussion of De Gubernatis’s activities in this field, see Cocchiara, Storia degli studi 177–84, Popolo e letteratura 354–58, as well as the entry under his name in the Dizionario biografico. De Gubernatis and Pitré’s close relationship spans the half century between 1863 and De Gubernatis’s death in 1913 and is documented in their extensive, unpublished correspondence located in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Palazzolo, “Tre occhi” 183).

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just popular customs that are of interest but Sicilian customs. It is precisely this Sicilian dimension that is stressed by two influential critics, Eugenio Torelli-Viollier and Emilio Treves, who both praised “Nedda” and urged Verga to write more stories like it. Their reactions to the novella are particularly significant both because of their role as bellwethers in the Milanese publishing world and, in the case of Treves, because of his crucial role in Verga’s career from this point on. During the previous decade, Torelli-Viollier had been closely involved with all three of the major illustrated magazines of Milan: as editor of Sonzogno’s Illustrazione universale and Emporio pittorico in the 1860s, and as a regular contributor to Treves’s Nuova illustrazione universale in 1874. Two years later, he became founding editor of Il Corriere della Sera. In Chapter 6, I cited Torelli-Viollier’s enthusiastic review of “Nedda” from Nuova illustrazione universale, where he wrote that in “Nedda” “the local color is so real, the characters are depicted so well, that for the hour it takes you to read ‘Nedda’ you feel as if you live in Sicily, in that magnificent and squalid land, among that half-savage people” (21 June 1874: 27). He goes on to mention the appeal that the “half-African Sicily” could have for Italian readers. Torelli-Viollier highlights the particular aesthetic potential inherent in Sicily’s backwardness: its squalor, savagery, and affinity with Africa, condemned by the Nuova illustrazione writer Trevellini, constitute potential sources of literary inspiration. At the same time, what is significant in this context is that Torelli-Viollier uses “Nedda” and Sicily to advocate a new, regionalistic literary tendency, the very direction that Verga, and others, will take over the next decade. If Torelli-Viollier was one of the premier editors of illustrated magazines in Italy, Treves was fast on his way to becoming their premier publisher. In a note published in Nuova illustrazione two weeks after the review by Torelli-Viollier, Treves called Verga’s sketch a “jewel.” More specifically, he praised both the realism of Verga’s representation of Sicily and its brevity: “never before has an Italian author shown us Sicily with so much truth in a few pages. It is a picture of popular customs taken from real life; and in the midst of the story you feel the perfume and warmth of that fiery clime” (12 July 1874: 57). This was only Treves’s first public expression of interest in the novella. In private, he had sought out Verga two days after the story’s publication, begging him to “write something like ‘Nedda’” for his illustrated magazine, Museo di Famiglia (see Lettere sparse 64–65). He solicited Verga a number of times over the next few months, writing on 3 September 1874 that he would not let Verga “break his promise to write a novella and eventually, if necessary, a volume of novelle” (Verga e i Treves 36).Three

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weeks later, in a letter of 22 September 1874 from his villa in Sicily, Verga reassured Treves: “I’ll get to work on it before anything else I have in mind” (Verga e i Treves 36). Three months later, shortly before returning to Milan, Verga wrote to Treves: “Here is your Novella—actually one and a half novelle. . . . It’s understood that you are free to accept it or not for your magazine” (Verga e i Treves 36). The novella was “Le storie del castello di Trezza” (Stories of the castle of Trezza), which appeared in three installments between 17 January and 7 February 1875 in Nuova illustrazione universale; the “half” was the unfinished “Padron ‘Ntoni,” the sea sketch that constituted the germ of I Malavoglia. Without attempting to establish a direct link of cause and effect, we can nevertheless see that at this moment in his career Verga was responsive to the urgings of his Milanese readers and Treves in particular. Verga sought both fame and fortune from his writing. In a letter to his mother of 2 July 1874, he wrote in regard to “Nedda”: “Now I feel a great sense of satisfaction. All the talk [of success] is fine and well but actually pulling it off is better. Finally I have done something productive for the family instead of being a mere parasite” (Lettere sparse 68). This success and productivity clearly had something to do with the genre of the short story. As we saw, the disproportion between the brevity of “Nedda,” on the one hand, and its economic yield and successful reception, on the other, made a particularly strong impression on Verga. He must also have been struck by the contrast between the difficulty he had publishing his novel Eros with Treves, and the latter’s keen interest in his novelle. Treves’s letter of 3 September 1874, cited above, in which he reiterates his request for a novella from Verga also contains the publisher’s confirmation that he would not publish Eros. Verga’s turn to the novella in 1874–75 can be read in part as his response to the new demand for the short story that formed part of the growing magazine publishing industry centered in Milan. In a note to the readers toward the end of the first volume of Nuova illustrazione, Treves had announced a shift away from publishing novels in serial form, which he implied bored the readers, and toward short stories, but he also noted that “there are few Italian writers who know how to write short stories” (10 May 1874: 178). This comment helps us to understand the repeated overtures Treves made to Verga in the wake of “Nedda’s” success. The fact is that three of the four stories Verga published in the next year were solicited by Treves for his magazines. But, as I have suggested, Verga’s shift in genre is concurrent with a shift in geography. Beginning with “Nedda,” the novella is the form in which Verga begins to write about rural Sicily. Let us now turn to the first novella

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set in Sicily that Verga sent Treves in December 1874, “Le storie del castello di Trezza.”

a singular interest: “stories of the castle of trezza” Scholars have largely bypassed “Stories of the Castle of Trezza.”25 This novella, the longest Verga ever wrote, plays an important role, however, in his evolving engagement with the problematic of picturesque Sicily. It constitutes Verga’s first “response” to Treves’s request to write a novella set in Sicily for one of his illustrated magazines. As I noted in Chapter 6, its publication marks the beginning of a more consistent interest in a picturesque image of the south in Nuova illustrazione. Within the novella itself, the problematic of the picturesque is articulated at a number of levels. In the first place, “Stories” establishes the close connection between the sea and the picturesque, first signaled by the landscape painting in Eva, that will inform Verga’s major fiction in the coming years. At the same time, as in the preamble to “Nedda,” but in a more explicitly picturesque mode, “Stories” represents Sicily in terms of the problematic of representation itself and more specifically in relation to problems of perspective and distance. Finally, through an exploration of these issues, the picturesque Sicily in “Stories” opens a window onto a different, more realistic Sicily and a different, more profound human reality. More than any other text perhaps, “Stories” shows that Verga approaches the rural Sicily of his great realist works by way of the picturesque. A version of the castle in “Stories” had previously appeared toward the end of Verga’s 1866 novel, Una peccatrice. Certain similarities between the castle in the two texts, written almost a decade apart, are striking. A particularly important link is the notion of the abyss in both texts (the word appears five times in the pages set at the castle in Una peccatrice, four times in the opening pages of “Stories,” and once at the end) and, along with this, the motif of the two lovers falling into it, which is only an idea in Una peccatrice while it constitutes the climactic finale of “Stories.” Even more striking is the fact that the narrator in Una peccatrice sees this “highly poetic” castle through the frame of a window and from a distance:

25. One interesting exception is the afterword written by the Sicilian novelist Vincenzo Consolo for a new edition of “Stories” published by Sellerio in 1982; see Consolo, “Castello di vigilia.”

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As I sit here writing . . . I see through the curtains of my open window . . . the ancient, imposing, severely and highly poetic mass of the old ruined castle that is perched on a cliff above the sea; with its massive and crumbling walls . . . with this immense, clear sea, which from this distance seems calm and slightly choppy, and which thunders with its powerful voice among the precipices of the abyss that surround the foundations of the castle. (my emphasis)26

In “Stories” Verga not only uses the same “poetic” castle by the sea but, as we shall see below, also reworks the motif of viewing the seaside scene through a window and from a distance. His reelaboration of these elements, the castle and the act of picturesque viewing itself, enables us to measure the distance he has come and identify his new concerns. Whereas the castle above the sea in Una peccatrice functions as little more than a romantic setting for a tragic love story, in “Stories” it performs a complex and integral role in the problematic of the picturesque. In the first place, the title itself sets up a new set of geographic associations, situating the castle in a different space. It is the same castle, the castle of Aci-Castello, yet Verga has interestingly identified it with Trezza. Even though the cliffs of the Cyclops are absent in “Stories,” Verga has, at least in name, made an association with the landscape painting in Eva and with the site that will form the central location in his realistic fiction in the following years. There are two changes of perhaps greater significance. Firstly, the problematic of representation becomes central to the text. “Stories” consists of a story set at the castle in which a character narrates a story set at the castle. The storywithin-the-story is a form of ghost story, based on an event that had taken place at the castle in the Middle Ages. Secondly, the castle expresses, at two levels, a different, alternative reality with respect to that of the main characters in the story. Unlike the castle in Una peccatrice, which is little more than a “highly poetic” ornament for the love story, the castle in “Stories” engenders a contrast, gestures, in two different ways, toward worlds beyond. The story begins with three characters looking out over the sea from the castle: a husband and wife, and a young man—the storyteller—with whom 26. “Nel momento in cui scrivo . . . vedo, attraverso le tende della mia finestra aperta . . . la massa antica, imponente, severamente e grandemente poetica del vecchio e rovinoso castello che pende da una balza sul mare; coi suoi muri massicci e screpolati . . . con questo mare immenso, lucido, che da questa lontananza sembra calmo e lievemente increspato, e che muggisce colla sua voce potente fra i precipizii dell’abisso che circonda le fondamenta del castello” (Tutti i romanzi 1: 534–35; my emphasis).

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the wife will become tragically involved over the course of the story: “the sea became a bright blue, slightly flecked by the wind, and scattered with bits of foam. The sun was setting behind a pile of fantastic clouds, and the shadow of the castle lengthened, gigantic and melancholy, on the cliffs.” 27 As the novella begins, they are looking from the castle as the young man tells the story about the castle. The opening lines, and the novella as a whole, establish an overarching contrast between two ways of experiencing both the castle and the story. Standing at the window of the abandoned castle high above the sea, Matilde, the wife, looks “pensively into the impenetrable abyss”; her husband, on the other hand “listened with a bored air” (76). Whereas the wife is captivated by the scene and finds the story “interesting,” her husband is impatient to get home in time for dinner. The story begins then by calling attention to the act of narrative representation itself. But it calls attention more specifically to a particular kind of picturesque representation, and to the different responses that one can have to it. The description cited above shows that the picturesqueness of the setting could hardly be more marked. This exaggerative tendency becomes particularly clear in the first lines of the story-within-the-story. Luciano, the storyteller, sets out to make the tale as evocative and “spooky” as possible; he is, after all, telling a ghost story. To this end he makes the male protagonist of the story, Don Garzia, baron d’Arvelo, a perfect Sicilian stereotype: jealousy, violence, honor, and brigandage are all invoked in the opening sentence that describes him. “Stories” thus calls attention to the picturesque elements within it through the marked picturesqueness of both the setting and the characterization of the male protagonist in the story-within-the-story. Both in the story and in the story-within-the-story, however, the picturesque scene becomes the vehicle for something else. Let us start with the innermost core, the beginning of the passage that leads to the climactic moment in the story being told. Luciano tells us that the baroness was sitting in the castle by the window overlooking the sea: “the moon was reflected in the storied panes of the high window, and the sea gurgled quietly” (la luna specchiavasi sui vetri storiati dell’alta finestra, e il mare fiottava sommessamente). After a brief exchange with her page, she got up, went to open the window, and put her elbows on the sill. The sea was smooth and glistened. The fishermen were scattered along the beach, 27. “Il mare andavasi facendo di un azzurro livido, increspato lievemente, e seminato di fiocchi di spuma. Il sole tramontava dietro un mucchio di nuvole fantastiche, e l’ombra del castello si allungava melanconica e gigantesca sugli scogli” (Tutte le novelle 1: 76).

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or gathered around the entries to their shacks, and chatted about tuna fishing and the salting of anchovies; and far, far away, lost in the dark expanse, one could hear an oriental song droning on, and the waves dying like a sigh at the foot of the castle wall. The foam would whiten an instant, and then the sharp sea smell would waft up in puffs, also in waves. The baroness stood there distractedly contemplating all of this, and surprised herself, she positioned so high up in the gilt room of that lordly manner, finding that she was listening with singular interest to the conversations of those people positioned so far below at the foot of her towers. Then she looked at the black opening of those poor doorways, the flames from the hearth, the smoke that curled upward little by little from the roofs. Then she suddenly turned away.28

The passage describes a scene of vision (and, secondarily, of audition). What the baroness sees, and what we see her seeing, is seen through the frame of a window and from a distance. Framed thus from a distance, she sees a classic, picturesque scene on a Sicilian beach. All this is contained in the first long sentence of the passage beginning, “The sea was smooth and glistened” (Il mare era levigato e lucente). The second sentence, however, announces a shift of perception. Gazing thus, “distractedly,” she is surprised to find herself listening with “singular interest” to the conversations of the fishermen below. She begins to take an interest in the specific human reality of the scene, to notice how and where the fishermen live. This is an emblematic moment in Verga’s fiction, for it signals the emergence of a realistic perspective on Sicily from within the picturesque. The picturesque is the point of departure; it is through the picturesque that Verga becomes aware of the aesthetic interest of his native Sicily. But through the picturesque, another form of interest in Sicily and another form of representation develop. There are a few related aspects of the passage above to consider. In the first place, hearing plays a significant role here. It is specifically hearing that marks the shift from the picturesque to another form of perception; hear-

28. “Andò ad aprire la finestra, e appoggiò i gomiti al davanzale. Il mare era levigato e lucente; i pescatori sparsi per la riva, o aggruppati dinanzi agli usci delle loro casipole, chiacchieravano della pesca del tonno e dalla salatura delle acciughe; lontan lontano, perduto fra la bruna distesa, si udiva ad intervalli un canto monotono e orientale, le onde morivano come un sospiro ai piedi dell’alta muraglia; la spuma biancheggiava un istante, e l’acre odore marino saliva a buffi, come ad ondate anch’esso. La baronessa stette a contemplare sbadatamente tutto ciò, e sorprese sé stessa, sé posta così in alto nella camera dorata di quella dimora signorile, ad ascoltare con singolare interesse i discorsi di quella gente posta così in basso al piede delle sue torri. Poi guardò il vano nero di quei poveri usci, il fiammeggiare del focolare, il fumo che svolgevasi lento lento dal tetto; infine si volse bruscamente” (Tutte le novelle 1: 107).

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ing is the vehicle for the experience of proximity that runs counter to the distance required for the picturesque perspective. This, too, is powerfully emblematic in the context of Verga’s subsequent fiction, for the “conversations of those people” (discorsi di quella gente), the adoption of a popular narrative voice, will be at the heart of Verga’s realistic revolution in the coming years. At the same time, the elimination of traditional narrative distance and framing will play an important role in the antipicturesque tendency of some of his future work. It is also important to note how emphatic this passage is about the spatial dimensions of this act of vision, not just in terms of distance but in terms of high and low. Both the distance and the contrast between high and low help us to read the passage as a companion statement to the geographical poetics articulated in the preamble to “Nedda.” The emphasis on framing and distance is common to both. What is less obvious is that the conceptualization of high and low in the passage from “Stories” has a role in the preamble to “Nedda” as well. High and low in the passage from “Stories” mark the distance between the baroness and the fishermen in both spatial and socioeconomic terms. The preamble to “Nedda” fuses the spatio-geographic and socioeconomic contrast as well. The connection between these passages becomes all the more clear when we recall that a common way of referring to Sicily vis-à-vis the north is “laggiù” (down there), as Pasquale Villari put it, for example, at the end of the Southern Letters.29 The two passages seem incommensurable: “Nedda” foreshortens a distance of nearly one thousand miles, from the urban north to Sicily; “Stories” is already in Sicily, and foreshortens a distance that is within the range of human vision. But both passages stage the process of representation in spatio-geographic terms. With respect to the links between these two passages, it is finally to be noted that in the passage from “Stories” the lady’s gaze finally comes to rest on “the flames from the hearth.” So from within the picturesque castle another reality has come into view, the reality of the poor fishermen “chatting about tuna fishing and the salting of anchovies,” prefigurations of the protagonists of I Malavoglia.30 The representation of picturesque Sicily has engendered the representation of another Sicily. This gesturing toward another reality and another way of 29. See Chapter 7. It is notable that Emilio Treves, in a comment about “Nedda” in Illustrazione in 1880, described the setting in these terms: “laggiù, in Sicilia” (19 September 1880: 19). This connotation of laggiù would inform Verga’s use of the term in the opening of “Fantasticheria.” 30. Perroni first called attention to the link between this passage and I Malavoglia (“Sulla genesi” 522–23).

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seeing in the passage cited above is related to the more general emphasis in the novella on a deeper, more authentic reality, distinct from the bourgeois reality before us. It is this more profound dimension that is signaled by the notion of “the abyss” into which the wife and storyteller fall to their deaths at the end of “Stories.” Most of the novella is taken up with the story told by Luciano, in which the passage cited above has a pivotal function. The final section of the novella begins with the conclusion of his story: “Everyone had been entertained by the story” (La storia aveva divertito tutti); the story had also helped them digest their dinner (Tutte le novelle 1: 117). But for the wife the story had meant something more; it had moved her deeply, and the tale of forbidden love in the story had stirred her feelings of forbidden love for the storyteller. Taking notice of this, her husband pushes her and the storyteller one hundred fifty meters to their deaths, “into the abyss.” This novella, which so explicitly addresses the question of representation, thus also addresses the question of reception. The representation of an alternative reality either can serve as a diversion or can have the power to threaten, unsettle, if not destroy. The duplicity and ambivalence emphasized in “Nedda” evidently reappear. The question of how to represent Sicily, and how this representation will be received, will be at the heart of Verga’s aesthetic concerns in the coming years.

the problem with “padron ‘ntoni” Along with “Stories of the Castle of Trezza,” Verga sent the first part of another novella to Treves in mid-December 1874; in the accompanying letter he told the publisher that he wanted to give him some “idea of its different genre” (Verga e i Treves 37). In subsequent correspondence he would call this “half novella” “Padron ‘Ntoni,” and characterize it as a “marine sketch.” This constitutes an early moment in the elaboration of I Malavoglia.31 Most significant in relation to “Stories,” the “different genre” of this sketch evidently corresponds to the different reality glimpsed by the baroness from the window high up in her castle: the fishing village on the beach of Trezza. Each of the surviving drafts that might have grown out of this text, or that might be the “half novella” itself, involves a poor family of Sicilian fishermen.32 Nevertheless, because the novella was never completed 31. On the relation between this sketch and I Malavoglia, see Branciforti 100–101 and Cecco, “Per l’edizione critica.” 32. It is not entirely clear whether this “half novella” corresponds to the few pages of undated fragments published by Riccardi in the appendix to Tutte le novelle; see “Appendice” 957–61.

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or published, we cannot know for sure just what Verga sent to Treves that December. It is in fact the tormented writing history of “Padron ‘Ntoni” that I shall address in this section. Verga cannot, will not, send Treves the novella. For three years he keeps the publisher waiting. The abortive publication of “Padron ‘Ntoni” in Illustrazione marks out Verga’s evolving relation to the problematic of the picturesque and to Treves’s magazine in a vivid way. Through it we can register, however obliquely in 1876–77, the beginnings of a radical transformation in Verga’s relation to picturesque Sicily and in his art more generally. In the five years between December 1873 and January 1879, Verga had expressed a keen interest in Illustrazione, as both a reader and a contributor. Between September 1874 and January 1879 each of the fifteen letters in the published correspondence between Verga and Treves, with the exception of a dinner invitation, refer in some way to Treves’s magazine (Verga e i Treves 37–46). Though he continued to read the magazine during the second half of the 1870s,Verga’s overtures to publish “Padron ‘Ntoni” there, dating from December 1874 to October 1876, amount to nothing. On 21 September 1875, Verga announces that he will soon send Treves “Padron ‘Ntoni,” “the marine sketch of which you already know the beginning, for Museo di Famiglia.” He adds: “I could have finished it and sent it to you before, but I must confess that when I read it over again it seemed weak to me, and I have begun to redo it completely, and I would like to make it simpler, briefer and more effective. I hope you will like it” (Verga e i Treves 38–39). Just over a year later, on 28 October 1876, he again tells Treves that he will be sending him “Padron ‘Ntoni” soon, after he has rewritten it, only now he refers to it as “the novella for Illustrazione” (Verga e i Treves 43). Finally, in December 1877, we find the last reference to the novella for Illustrazione, in a letter from Treves. On the fourteenth Treves writes to inquire: “Have you written your novella for Illustrazione?” He continues: “Meanwhile here’s an act of penitence for you. Pitré has written a letter full of Sicilian words. Would you do me the favor of looking it over? It will be a good excuse to come see me, bringing along with you these page proofs” (Verga e i Treves 44). The “letter” to which Treves refers is Giuseppe Pitré’s essay Usi popolari natalizi in Sicilia (Popular Christmas customs of Sicily), written in the form of a letter from Palermo to the ethnologist Angelo De Gubernatis, which Treves will publish a month later (see Melis, Bella stagione 8–9).There are two aspects of this request to mention here. The first, more obvious point is that it signals the role played by the northern publishing industry in producing representations of the south. The second is that Treves is in a sense

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asking Verga to exchange one folkloric representation of Sicily for another: to compensate him for his failure to deliver his sketch, Treves asks Verga to assist in the production of another textual representation of Sicily, serving as interpreter and mediator between the undecipherable linguistic reality of Sicily and a national, predominantly northern readership. This epistolary anecdote in fact foreshadows the exchange between Verga and folklore studies, the work of Pitré in particular, that would become crucial to the elaboration of I Malavoglia between mid-1878 and mid-1880.33 But this development was subsequent and secondary with respect to the radical transformation in Verga’s art that was already taking place between the end of 1877 and the middle of 1878. During this period a shift in both Verga’s fiction and publishing activity is evident: from the sphere of picturesque Sicily to that of the Southern Question, from Treves’s Illustrazione italiana to the journal of Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, Rassegna settimanale. The troubled history of “Padron ‘Ntoni” offers some indication of this shift: two months after Treves’s December inquiry about the “novella for Illustrazione,” Verga was writing to Sonnino in Florence to offer “Padron ‘Ntoni”—which had now become a novel—to the newly founded Rassegna settimanale.34 In the four years of its publication between 6 January 1878 and 29 January 1882, the distinguished journal of Franchetti and Sonnino covered a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural issues, offering special attention to the Mezzogiorno.35 Verga’s link to the journal spans almost the entire arc of its existence, from the first to the penultimate issue.36 In the weeks before the first issue appeared, Franchetti wrote Verga twice to solicit the contribution of 33. In the final stages of composition Verga drew extensively upon Pitré’s Proverbi siciliani, raccolti e confrontati con quelli degli altri dialetti d’Italia, published in four volumes in 1879–80 by Pedone Lauriel of Palermo; see Cecco, “Contributo” 373. On Verga and folklore studies more generally, see Cirese, “Verga e il mondo popolare”; Bronzini, “Componente siciliana e popolare.” 34. A transcription of the letter of offer from Verga to Sonnino, presumably from the end of February 1878, appears in Perroni, “Sulla genesi” 513. 35. On Rassegna settimanale, see R. Villari, “Origini”; Salvadori 62–69; Carlucci; and more briefly, Tobia, “Una cultura” 447–48. With specific reference to the journal’s role in the genesis of verismo and Verga’s collaboration in particular, see Bigazzi 248–67; Melis, Bella stagione 95–105. 36. In the first issue Verga’s name appeared above that of Pasquale Villari on the list of those who “have offered their collaboration” to help start the new journal. Also in the first issue, the critic Ferdinando Martini praised Verga’s Eva in an article titled “Il realismo in arte”; see Luperini, Simbolo e costruzione 19 and Verga e le strutture narrative 6. “Don Licciu Papa,” of the Novelle rusticane, appeared in the penultimate issue of 22 January 1882.

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“some sketch or brief novella.” 37 Sonnino wrote again in early February reminding Verga of “our Rassegna, which keenly awaits some piece by you that we could publish in the Variety section” (quoted in Perroni, “Sulla genesi” 511–12). Verga’s offer of “Padron ‘Ntoni” was therefore in response to these solicitations. Franchetti and Sonnino would decline Verga’s offer because of the novel’s length.38 But, as we shall see, Verga’s involvement with Rassegna settimanale would intensify in the space of two years. What had happened then? Why did “Padron ‘Ntoni” become a novel? Why did Verga wait ten years to publish another novella in Illustrazione italiana? How did Verga’s path converge with that of Franchetti and Sonnino? There is a good deal we do not know about Verga’s artistic development between the end of 1876 and the middle of 1878, for during this year and a half he published no new material. Yet this was simultaneously the least productive and most decisive period in his career. When “Rosso Malpelo” appeared between 2 and 5 August 1878 in Fanfulla of Rome, a revolution had taken place in Verga’s art. The picturesque perspective on Sicily had been shattered. The quaint peasants and fishermen were gone. An “ugly rascal” named Rosso Malpelo, crushed to death in a Sicilian sand quarry, had taken their place. As we shall see below, when Verga nods to the picturesque toward the end of the novella through the imagery of moonshine and the shimmering sea, it is only in order to underscore the inescapable desolation of Malpelo’s antipicturesque world. Many things had happened to Verga in 1877–78. Among the most important appears to have been his encounter with Franchetti and Sonnino’s La Sicilia nel 1876, published in Florence at the end of 1876. As Romano Luperini has shown, both “Rosso Malpelo” and I Malavoglia are significantly indebted to La Sicilia nel 1876. In the former Verga draws upon the supplementary chapter by Sonnino on “Child Labor in the Sicilian Sulfur Mines”; in the latter he uses the accounts that both Franchetti and Sonnino provide of various aspects of rural Sicilian society.39 Scholars have also called

37. The second letter from Franchetti to Verga appears in the appendix to Melis, La bella stagione 283. 38. See the letter from Franchetti to Verga of 3 March 1878, where he writes, “we’re terribly sorry that it is a little too long for us”; quoted in Perroni, “Sulla genesi” 513. 39. See respectively Luperini, Verga e le strutture narrative 7–13 and Simbolo e costruzione 15–35. With respect to I Malavoglia, Luperini writes that Verga used La Sicilia nel 1876 “in order to objectively reconstruct the unitary and organic system of a rural-archaic world, in its ideological, social, and cultural specificity”; see Simbolo e costruzione 22.

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attention to certain intellectual and ideological affinities between Verga and the two Tuscan intellectuals during these years, from their common embrace of positivism to their political conservatism to their anti-industrial polemic in favor of an “agrarian alternative.”40 But besides providing him with documentary material, Franchetti and Sonnino offered Verga something else: a powerfully antipicturesque vision of Sicily. As we have seen, Franchetti had introduced his part of the book as an explicit attack on the picturesque view of Sicily held by visitors from the “continent.” Upon arrival in Palermo, “the traveler’s first impression is one of the most pleasant that can be imagined” (Inchiesta in Sicilia 2: 3). But after a while “the colors change, the aspect of everything is transformed. . . . all that scent of orange and lemon flowers starts to smell like a corpse” (Inchiesta in Sicilia 2: 4). The society depicted by Franchetti is dominated by violence and oppression. The Sicilian peasant at the center of Sonnino’s study “knows nothing but fatigue, sweat, and misery” (Inchiesta in Sicilia 2: 111). Both “Rosso Malpelo” and Verga’s redirection of “Padron ‘Ntoni” from Treves’s Illustrazione italiana to Franchetti and Sonnino’s Rassegna settimanale reflect a radical new phase in Verga’s art and, at the same time, in his engagement with the problematic of picturesque Sicily. But these are not the only signs of a major transformation dating from late 1877 to mid1878. Some time before the spring of 1878, Verga had also drafted part of “Fantasticheria,” which is both his first declaration of a realist poetics and a prelude to I Malavoglia.41 “Rosso Malpelo” and “Fantasticheria” are the two inaugural texts in Verga’s new realist art. In different ways, each is animated by an engagement with the problematic of picturesque Sicily. Though “Rosso Malpelo” is Verga’s first and most decisive revision of the picturesque perspective on Sicily, “Fantasticheria” addresses the problematic of the picturesque more explicitly and will serve as a useful place to start.

a pretty little picture: “fantasticheria” Published in August 1879, Verga’s “Fantasticheria” undertakes a demystification of Sicilian picturesqueness from start to finish. The story is told in the form of a letter to the rich lady friend who accompanied the narrator 40. Various observations on these affinities can be found in Luperini, Verga e le strutture narrative 12–18 and Simbolo e costruzione 18–22; Asor Rosa, “Cultura” 972–78; Giarrizzo, “La storia” vii–ix; Mazzamuto, Parvenu 123–57. 41. Russo, Giovanni Verga 125; Sciascia, “Verga e la memoria” 156. Its placement at the beginning of Vita dei campi in 1880 underscores its function as prelude to Verga’s new realistic Sicilian oeuvre.

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on a trip to the Sicilian fishing village of Aci-Trezza. The story begins with the narrator’s recollection of the lady’s view of Aci-Trezza from her train window. As James Buzard suggests, the “passing view from the window” was the very type of picturesque touring in nineteenth-century Europe (Beaten Track 189); it grants a distance and distinct slant of vision that are main preconditions of the picturesque.42 Watching from the train window, the lady is enthused by the sight of the village below: “I’d like to spend a month down there!” (Vorrei starci un mese laggiù!; Tutte le novelle 1: 121). But, when she and her companion actually return for a visit, they cut their stay short to two days: “in those forty-eight hours we did everything there is to do in Aci-Trezza” (in quelle quarantott’ore facemmo tutto ciò che si può fare ad Aci-Trezza; Tutte le novelle 1: 121). The distance between her and the village now eliminated, the charm of Aci-Trezza quickly vanishes, revealing to her eyes a tedious and ridiculous reality: “I don’t know how one can live here all one’s life” (Non capisco come si possa vivere qui tutta la vita; Tutte le novelle 1: 122). The contrast and confrontation between the two worlds exemplified by the lady on the one hand and the villagers on the other lie at the heart of “Fantasticheria.” By insistently and ironically rehearsing the lady’s reaction to the village, Verga contrasts the picturesque viewpoint with the grinding day-to-day reality of life in Aci-Trezza. This contrast is most succinctly expressed in the description of the villagers’ huts as “ramshackle and picturesque” (sgangherate e pittoresche); an aspect of the villagers’ poverty and misery becomes, from the distanced point of view of the affluent northern city dweller, “picturesque.” Thus it is, too, with “those gigantic rocks” mentioned in the phrase before this description, the very “Cyclops” of Eva. For the villagers they constitute the site of “all their hardships”; as for the lady, “they made you clap your hands in admiration” (vi facevano batter le mani per ammirazione; Tutte le novelle 1: 122). It is not only the lady who looks at Aci-Trezza through the eyeglass of the picturesque. However sardonically the narrator portrays her and her

42. The presence of the train here could also be analyzed from another perspective. As Asor Rosa suggests, “it would be interesting to note all the places in Verga in which the railway assumes the symbolic meaning of an extraneous and inimical force with respect to the popular world, which it touches only superficially, without affecting its profound immobility (as in ‘Malaria’) or, alternately, producing disturbance and disorder (as in I Malavoglia)” (“Punto di vista” 736). For a discussion of the significance of the anachronism of the train, which appeared in Aci-Trezza at least one year after the historical moment in which the tale is set, see Sciascia, “Verga e la memoria” 156–57.

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world view, he himself participates in her picturesque tour of the village as well. In his opening description of their exploits there, he tells of “a most romantic night” spent together on the sea. The narrator’s description of the dawn scene in which they reveled is an extended piece of picturesque landscape description, and culminates in the pictorial image: “un bel quadretto davvero!” (a pretty little picture indeed!).43 This, it must be stressed, is enunciated by the narrator, as the phrase that follows it makes clear (“and one could have guessed that you, too, appreciated it” [e si indovinava che lo sapevate anche voi; Tutte le novelle 1: 122]). Yet, notwithstanding such moments of first-person plural complicity, their perception of the village is articulated through a form of a double vision. The narrator repeatedly marks his distance from the inanities of his female companion, and there is a considerable dose of self-ironization and self-critique in “Fantasticheria” as well. Thus, while it is evident that the narrator, too, is alien to this world, he nevertheless distinguishes himself from the lady through his ability to appreciate certain aspects of the village’s social reality. The position he adopts in the text is therefore that of an intermediary, both a guide to and advocate for that world of the “oysters” that to her eyes appears ridiculous when viewed up close (Tutte le novelle 1: 127). The letter-confession of “Fantasticheria” thus constitutes an appeal to gaze upon a previously denigrated or simply ignored reality at the same time that it performs an act of critical revision of the picturesque mode in which Sicily is commonly depicted.

the antipicturesque in “rosso malpelo” “Fantasticheria” constitutes the most explicit statement in Verga’s oeuvre on the problematic of picturesque Sicily. Published one year before “Fantasticheria,” “Rosso Malpelo,” however, constitutes his first and most powerfully antipicturesque representation of Sicily. Whereas the former addresses the problematic of distance, the latter simply eliminates the distance between narrator and object of representation. Whereas the former presents a worthy family of fishermen, the latter depicts “an ugly rascal.” Whereas the former shows us that the picturesque seaside landscape harbors another reality, the latter moves not only away from the sea but, as it were, underground.

43. The lady is expressing the basic significance of “picturesque” (see Hussey and Salerno). As Hussey puts it, picturesque scenes and objects “were simply those that reminded a person of pictures that he had seen” (Picturesque 15).

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The antipicturesqueness of “Rosso Malpelo” is therefore evident in Verga’s handling of narrative distance, characterization, and setting. In the first place, “Rosso Malpelo” helps us to see that the elimination of narrative distance, the most noted and powerful innovation in Verga’s writing, is related to his engagement with the problematic of the picturesque. We have seen that in Eva, “Nedda,” and “Stories of the Castle of Trezza,” the picturesque representation of Sicily was closely related to the act of framing and to a distanced perspective. At the same time, in the latter two texts, the interplay of distance and proximity was highlighted. Finally, “Fantasticheria” made it clear that there are two ways of seeing Sicily, one that frames it as a “pretty little picture” to the delight of the distanced observer, the other that involves limiting one’s range of vision, “closing the whole horizon between two clods of dirt” (Tutte le novelle 1: 123). “Rosso Malpelo” is Verga’s first text to eliminate the distance between narrator and character in this way.44 The narrator does not frame the characters in the novella. We are given the popular perspective straightaway. From the opening line, the bourgeois reader is left on his or her own to deal with the nasty protagonist named Malpelo. By itself the elimination of narrative distance does not eliminate the picturesque from a text. As I shall note in the next section, other stories in Vita dei campi, like “Cavalleria rusticana” and “La Lupa,” also provide little narrative distance but because of their extreme Sicilianness retain a picturesque effect. In “Rosso Malpelo,” instead, the hero is “a malicious, bad boy”—not a peasant or fisherman with folkloric qualities but a mine worker. He is a nasty brute who lives by such mottoes as “the donkey must be beaten, because he can’t beat us” and “if you happen to give blows, be sure to make them as hard as you can” (Tutte le novelle 1: 168). He is not an innocent victim, à la Nedda, but rather a person wholly committed to the system of violence and oppression in which he lives. There is little that is charming or pleasant about him. Finally, “Rosso Malpelo” is antipicturesque at the level of setting. Verga has not only moved away from the sea but, in a sense, underground, into the infernal world of a Sicilian sand quarry, where first Malpelo’s father and then Malpelo himself meet their deaths. The major scenes in the story take place underground; the setting thus lacks the natural features that would mark the location as picturesque according to any of the traditional perspectives. But Verga takes his revision of the Sicilian landscape a step 44. For detailed analyses of these complex narrative procedures, see Luperini, Verga e le strutture narrative 62–73; Baldi 41–73; Lucente 68–97.

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further, articulating the novella’s distance from the picturesque in more pointed terms. In the middle of the novella we catch a glimpse of the natural landscape above ground. It is a pivotal moment, situated between the death of Malpelo’s donkey and the death of his companion Ranocchio (which is soon followed by Malpelo’s own death). The text describes the barren lava beds around Mount Etna known as the sciara. Verga uses the local-dialect term for this area, but does not explain it to the reader, who must construe its meaning from the context in which it is employed. As with the story as a whole, he provides no larger geographical context for this landscape, either through reference to Sicily, or to the area around Catania. Perhaps most significantly, he does not refer to Mount Etna itself, which as we have seen is one of the key topoi of picturesque Sicily. Instead of the picturesque slopes of Mount Etna, then, Verga describes the sciara. The description in question follows Malpelo’s set of reflections on the donkey’s death, which ends with the bleak observation—“And it would have been better if he had never been born” (E se non fosse mai nato sarebbe stato meglio): The sciara spread out melancholy and deserted, as far as the eye could see, rising and falling in peaks and ravines, black and wrinkled, without a cricket ever chirping or a bird coming to sing there. You could hear nothing, not even the pick strokes of the men working underground. Malpelo used to repeat that the earth there below was all hollow from the tunnels, everywhere. (She-Wolf 79)45

This landscape is described first in terms of what it lacks and secondly in terms of the world below, which through Malpelo’s commentary becomes the focus of the description. In other words, this aboveground moment serves to reemphasize the primacy of the subterranean (see Luperini, Verga e le strutture 29). The second part of the landscape description rehearses this contrast but now in a way that more explicitly presents Malpelo’s world in opposition to the picturesque. The passage begins: “Yet, during the beautiful summer nights, the stars shone brightly on the sciara too” (Pure, durante le belle notti d’estate, le stelle splendevano lucenti anche sulla sciara; She-Wolf 80; 45. “La sciara stendeva malinconica e deserta fin dove giungeva la vista, e saliva e scendeva in picchi e burroni, nera e rugosa, senza un grillo che vi trillasse, o un uccello che vi volasse su. Non si udiva nulla, nemmeno i colpi di piccone di coloro che lavoravano sotterra. E ogni volta Malpelo ripeteva che al di sotto era tutta scavata dalle gallerie, per ogni dove” (Tutte le novelle 1: 173).

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Tutte le novelle 1: 174). Malpelo liked to lie down and gaze up into the sky, we read, but he hated the moonlit nights, when the sea swarms with sparks and the countryside takes form dimly here and there, for then the sciara seems more barren and desolate than ever. “For us who are made to live underground,” thought Malpelo, “it should always be dark, everywhere.” (She-Wolf 80)46

This is in essence the one glimpse of the picturesque in the novella, and Malpelo hates it. It clarifies the antithetical and antagonistic relationship between “the moonlit nights, when the sea swarms with sparks” and the barrenness and desolation of Malpelo’s world. In “Rosso Malpelo,” then, Verga does not frame his characters, portraying them from a comfortable distance, nor does he provide his readers with the pleasures of Sicilianness. Neither does he give us the classic Sicilian landscape, whether of the seaside or the fields. He gives us instead a world of violence and domination, and characters who meet their final destiny buried by the “treacherous sands” (Tutte le novelle 1: 168).

the hybridity of vita dei campi and i malavoglia “Rosso Malpelo” is thus a devastating critique of the picturesque perspective on Sicily. Within the context of the fiction Verga published or completed during the next year and half, it in fact marks the extreme limit of his antipicturesque stance. None of the other novelle in Vita dei campi, published as a collection in the fall of 1880, nor I Malavoglia, which appeared in February 1881, presents a picture of Sicily as “barren and desolate” as that found in “Rosso Malpelo.” These other texts instead express a more hybrid approach to the problematic of picturesque Sicily. We have already seen that while addressing the problematic of picturesque Sicily “Fantasticheria” also expressed a certain ambivalence about it, acknowledging the attractions of the “pretty little picture” while criticizing them from the point of view of the grittier reality of Aci-Trezza. In this section I consider the ambivalence and hybridity of perspective that characterize a few of the other novelle in Vita dei campi and I Malavoglia. Yet I shall also suggest that the conclusion of I Malavoglia marks a strong

46. “Odiava le notti di luna, in cui il mare formicola di scintille, e la campagna si disegna qua e là vagamente—allora la sciara sembra più brulla e desolata.—Per noi che siamo fatti per viver sotterra, pensava Malpelo, ci dovrebbe essere buio sempre e dappertutto” (Tutte le novelle 1: 174).

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break with the picturesque perspective on Sicily and that this break coincides with the publication of “La roba” in December 1880, the first of the markedly antipicturesque Novelle rusticane. I shall discuss both the problematic of the picturesque in these texts and how their critical reception relates to this problematic. The critical reception of Vita dei campi, I Malavoglia, and in the next section, Novelle rusticane, shall help us to chart Verga’s movement away from the orbit of Illustrazione italiana into that of Rassegna settimanale, from picturesque Sicily to the Southern Question. The question of the picturesque in these texts can be considered both in terms of the problem of narrative perspective and in terms of characterization, setting, and plot. The elimination of the narrative frame achieved in “Rosso Malpelo” was the dominant tendency in the novelle of 1879–80 and I Malavoglia. Only in “Fantasticheria,” in the preface to “L’amante di Gramigna,” and in the preface to I Malavoglia, does a narrator frame the story for the reader, establishing a distance between the bourgeois world of the narrator and reader and the popular world of the narrative. In the preface to “L’amante di Gramigna,” in fact, the narrator announces his aim to tell the story “with more or less the same simple and picturesque words used in popular narration” (Tutte le novelle 1: 191). In all three cases, however, the narrator addresses the problem of narrative perspective itself, renouncing his own prerogative. In the actual narrative parts of the novelle in Vita dei campi and of I Malavoglia, the traditional, distanced narrator is absent, tending rather to be in the midst of things and a part of the local, popular world. Yet, as I suggested in the previous section, while framing and narrative distance, when explicit, tend to be associated with a picturesque perspective, they are not the only components of the picturesque. In most of the stories in Vita dei campi and, in some respects, in I Malavoglia, Sicily still appears as a source of delectation for the reader. This is particularly true of Vita dei campi. “Jeli il pastore,” “Cavalleria rusticana,” and “La Lupa” reflect a picturesque emphasis on the primitive, archaic, exotic, folkloric, mythic aspects of Sicily.47 The characters in these stories are primitive, with powerful, raw passions. Jeli the shepherd has an immediate relationship with 47. See Baldi 136–37. Masiello is particularly emphatic about the primitivism of “Jeli” but also of Vita dei campi as a whole; see “Lingua del Verga” 100–110 and Verga tra ideologia e realtà 35. Luperini argues instead that Verga stages the undoing of the idyllic in “Jeli”; see Orgoglio 21–32. Baldi also counters Masiello’s onesided view, while acknowledging the primitivist tendencies; 55 n. 18, 136–37. Asor Rosa underscores the folkloric and primitivist aspects of “Cavalleria rusticana” and “La Lupa” in particular, while acknowledging the range of aesthetic approaches in Vita dei campi as a whole; see “Primo” 21, 29–33, 38.

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the natural world around him. The dueling characters in “Cavalleria rusticana,” Turiddu Macca and Alfio Mosca, live according to an archaic code of honor. The she-wolf of “La Lupa” is a wild, passionate beast. As for the setting of these novelle, “Jeli” takes place in fields ripe with the harvest, while the figure of the she-wolf stands out against the background of the “green, freshly seeded fields” (Tutte le novelle 1: 190). Both novelle present rural, country scenes in striking contrast to the underworld of “Rosso Malpelo.” A prominent feature in the setting of “Cavalleria rusticana” is the prickly pear bush, which, as I noted in my discussion of Illustrazione in Chapter 6, is an emblem for the south and Sicily in particular. Finally, all three of these stories end with a violent finale. These stories, it is true, are not set by the sea. Yet while the sea is the clearest marker of the picturesque in Verga’s fiction, Vita dei campi shows that it is not the sine qua non of the picturesque. Life in the Sicilian countryside, as “Jeli” above all makes clear, can be picturesque as well. Before taking up the question of how the presence of the sea in I Malavoglia relates to the problematic of the picturesque, let us consider the critical reception of Vita dei campi in relation to the picturesque elements mentioned above. When Verga’s novelle were published in Vita dei campi in September 1880, they were greeted enthusiastically by critics (see Musitelli Paladini, Verga 48–49). Most significant for our purposes, the collection was actively promoted in Illustrazione itself. Treves began on 19 September with a note praising Verga’s new collection (19). In it he begins by recalling that with “Nedda” Verga had already “vividly demonstrated two things: first that down there [laggiù] in Sicily there is a rural life that has virtually been unexplored by artists, and second that the artist best suited to do so is a Sicilian: Verga” (19). Then in the 7 November 1880 issue of the magazine, Treves dedicated three-quarters of a page to reprint excerpts from the rave reviews of Verga’s collection.48 Three out of the five excerpts establish “Nedda” as the point of departure, highlighting the lasting impression that the story had made on readers. The excerpt from Luigi Capuana’s review characteristically attends to the formal merits of Verga’s collection. Another stresses that these stories are “anything but arcadian” noting that the life “Verga depicts is terrible. . . . it is a life of misery, ruin, and corruption.” But the dominant perspective of the other three is more stereotypical and picturesque. In La Perseveranza of Milan, Filippo Filippi writes: “I have never been to Sicily, and yet reading Verga I see those places, I speak with those

48. All the reviews cited below appear on p. 295.

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singular peasants, who are so simple and ferocious.” In Il Corriere del mattino of Naples, Federigo Verdinois comments: “Reading those stories you really breathe that fresh air, that Sicilian air, you really feel in contact with the rich, hot, primitive nature of that island.” And finally Bruno Sperani (alias Beatrice Speraz) for La Gazzetta letteraria of Turin writes that in Vita dei campi “you feel above all life; and it is the life of that hot clime with its ineffable and haunting melancholy, with the flashes of passion that often lead to death.” There may be “too much blood” in this collection. But, Sperani concludes, in a place “where the blood is hot it needs to flow.” While these and other reviews show that critics’ responses to Verga’s novelle were hardly uniform, they nevertheless voice great enthusiasm and emphasize a keen interest in the rural simplicity and primitivism of Verga’s Sicily, the characters’ fiery nature, the evocative power of the Sicilian landscape. The significance of this view, we shall see, becomes apparent when contrasted with the magazine’s treatment of Novelle rusticane two years later. The reviews of Vita dei campi express a view of Sicily, and of the south, broadly in line with articles on the south published in Illustrazione italiana. The article and illustrations next to this set of reviews call attention to another aspect of Verga’s fiction in these years, another element of consonance between the vision of Sicily in Verga’s novelle and that of Illustrazione italiana: his interest in folklore studies. The article, titled “Il cantastorie” (The Singer of Tales) is one in a series on “Naples and the Neapolitans” that ran from the spring of 1880 through the spring of 1881, written by Verga’s Neapolitan friend Carlo Del Balzo.49 The cantastorie was that dying breed we encountered in Chapter 6 in the impassioned and nostalgic presentation of the philologist Pio Rajna (see p. 216). The presence of this figure here, described in markedly picturesque terms by Del Balzo, highlights the overlap between the folkloric prism of Treves’s magazine and the field of folklore studies proper.50 More important, Del Balzo’s piece of “light” ethnography 49. On 15 February 1880 Del Balzo had published “La Lupa” in his Neapolitan Rivista nuova di scienze, lettere, ed arti. “Cos’è il re,” one of the first of the Novelle rusticane to be written, also appeared there, exactly one year later. Verga helped Del Balzo in his negotiations with Treves over the publication of this series of articles, which, he said in a letter to Del Balzo, “I really like a lot” (Lettere sparse 89). Treves published Del Balzo’s Napoli e i napoletani in book form in 1884. 50. The opening article in the series is dedicated to Neapolitan street vendors, “those characteristic figures . . . who form the most animated, picturesque part of the Neapolitan people” (2 May 1880: 275). It is interesting, however, that Del Balzo introduces the 1884 Treves edition of Napoli e i napoletani with the disclaimer, “Non ho scritto questo libro per vaghezza del pittoresco” (I did not write this book out of a love for the picturesque; xiii).

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alongside the positive reviews of Verga’s novellas reminds us that the years after “Rosso Malpelo,” in which Verga completed the rest of Vita dei campi and I Malavoglia, are those in which his interest in folklore studies was most pronounced. The numerous proverbs in I Malavoglia are the clearest expression of Verga’s folkloric turn in 1879–80 and of his debt to Giuseppe Pitré in particular. Yet Verga’s use of proverbs in I Malavoglia is emblematic of the novel’s hybrid perspective on that archaic world more generally. On the one hand, proverbs are the prime expression of the traditional, cyclical way of life that provides the “immense contrast with the turbulent, incessant passions of the great cities” (Carteggio Verga-Capuana 80); they express the “serene peace of those mild, simple sentiments that succeed one another, calm and unchanging from generation to generation” (Tutte le novelle 1: 127). Proverbs are most closely associated with the figure of the grandfather, Padron ‘Ntoni. But through these proverbs, and through Padron ‘Ntoni, Verga also expresses the inevitable destruction of that traditional way of life. The novel charts a generational trajectory from Padron ‘Ntoni to his grandson, ‘Ntoni, from a man who lives (and dies) by proverbs to one who rejects them.51 I Malavoglia is thus a book saturated with Sicilian folklore but that bids farewell to folkloric Sicily.52 ‘Ntoni’s farewell to folkloric Sicily is a farewell to picturesque Sicily as well. Over the course of the novel, Verga goes to great lengths to deemphasize the idyllic aspects of this seaside village, in his portrayal both of the social community and of the landscape. Aci-Trezza is a dog-eat-dog world where the law of economic self-interest prevails over the traditional family values of the Malavoglia clan.53 At the same time, Verga largely denies us the pleasures of the Sicilian landscape. As Carlo Levi perceptively noted, Verga renounces descriptions “of the sea and the countryside, and of beauty” (Words 132–33). We “see” the landscape rarely and fleetingly. In cinematic terms, the narrative perspective in the novel is close-up, in the midst of things, with rare “long shots” of the landscape around us. In the final pages of the novel, however, the village is framed in a long shot at the moment that ‘Ntoni sets out to leave it. What he sees and hears 51. See, for example, ‘Ntoni’s critical remarks about his grandfather’s use of proverbs in chapter 10, which, as Luperini notes, is the transitional chapter in the novel, marking the passage from Padron ‘Ntoni’s story to ‘Ntoni’s story; see I Malavoglia 178. 52. Dombroski offers an incisive discussion of the ethnographic dimension of I Malavoglia in Properties of Writing 23–43. 53. On this aspect of Verga’s representation of village life, see above all Baldi 75–132.

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above all is the sea. These emotionally charged pages constitute yet another of the moments in Verga’s oeuvre that stage the aesthetic process through which Sicily becomes picturesque, linking this perspective both to distance and the sea. The newfound perspective that ‘Ntoni has on both the village and the sea is engendered by his moving away from it. It is just when ‘Ntoni is “far away” (lontano) from the village that he begins to take stock of the scene for the first (and last) time, appreciating both the village and the sea in an entirely new way. As Luperini notes, ‘Ntoni’s farewell, “so rich with symbolic meaning, is Verga’s own farewell, the rejection of the romantic dream of uncontaminated and alternative values.”54 This farewell to the sea and picturesque Sicily at the end of I Malavoglia was written in the same few months as “La roba,” a story that inaugurates the supremely sea-less and antipicturesque Novelle rusticane. As we shall see, it is this collection that moves farthest away from Illustrazione italiana and is most closely aligned with the interests and vision of Franchetti and Sonnino and their journal, Rassegna settimanale. There is an aspect of the critical reception of I Malavoglia that is important to take into consideration first. In marked contrast to the critical reception of Vita dei campi, the responses to I Malavoglia were lukewarm, confused, and in certain instances hostile. As Verga wrote in a disconsolate letter of 11 April 1881 to Capuana, a month after the novel appeared from Treves, “I Malavoglia has been a flop, a complete and utter flop. . . . many people, beginning with Treves, have spoken ill of it to me” (Carteggio Verga-Capuana 111–12). Actually, Treves had promoted the novel extensively in the weeks before and after its publication in mid-February 1881, banking on Verga’s previous successes.55 The subsequent lack of attention to I Malavoglia in Illustrazione is therefore particularly suggestive. Three months after its publication, I Malavoglia fades from view. The contrast between the rave reviews of Vita dei campi republished in the magazine and the treatment of the novel is striking: in the bottom corner of one page, as the last item in a section of brief notes, we find the following somber notice: “Verga’s most recent novel has had the rare fortune of prompting Italian critics to examine his work with care and seriousness.”56 54. See Simbolo e costruzione 52, 59, as well as the commentary in Luperini’s edition of I Malavoglia 325–28. 55. Together with a set of advertisements, one week before the novel appeared Treves published the entire preface of this “new work by the author of Vita dei campi and Eva,” adding, “we think that the preface is stunning” ( 6 February 1881: 90–91). 56. 29 May 1881: 343. Evidently in response to this critical and commercial failure, Treves also modified his publicity strategy for the novel. In this same issue,

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Appreciation for the novel would not come from Illustrazione but from another quarter. The most powerful endorsement of I Malavoglia was written by the Neapolitan critic Francesco Torraca, a regular contributor to Rassegna settimanale. In his noted review, first published in Il Diritto of Rome and reelaborated a few months later for publication in Franchetti and Sonnino’s journal,Torraca suggests that Verga’s novel cannot be judged only in literary terms.57 He observes that the preface to the novel reads as if it were written by a “professor of sociology.” More specifically, he concludes, “I salute I Malavoglia as proof of uncommon intellectual force and daring that will help to make known the social conditions of Sicily in the same way as the writings of Franchetti and Sonnino.”58 I am certainly not suggesting that the critical failure of I Malavoglia is simply due to the antipicturesque aspects of the novel, nor conversely, that Torraca’s admiration for the novel was primarily inspired by them. The rest of his review shows that this is clearly not the case. Nevertheless, Torraca had understood the affinities between Verga’s “sociological” approach to the south in the novel and that of Franchetti and Sonnino, an approach that is animated in part by a polemic against the picturesque view of Sicily. It is this antipicturesque position that is formulated most consistently in Verga’s second and last collection of novels set in rural Sicily, Novelle rusticane.

the negation of the sea in novelle rusticane In the same few months that Verga penned ‘Ntoni’s farewell to his seaside village, “La roba,” the first of the Novelle rusticane to be published, appeared in Rassegna settimanale. As we saw earlier, Franchetti and Sonnino had invited Verga to contribute a short story to their journal in the winter of 1877–78 but nothing had come of it. Now, three years later, a “privileged relationship” was established between Verga and the journal (Melis, Bella

he shifts from advertising I Malavoglia by itself to listing all five of Verga’s works published by Fratelli Treves (351). 57. On the authorship of the anonymous review in Rassegna settmanale, traditionally attributed to Torraca, see Melis, Bella stagione 100–105. It is significant that Emilio Treves—who sent the review to Verga on 10 August 1881—takes for granted that it was written by Torraca; see Verga e i Treves 58. With reference to the affinities between Il Diritto and Rassegna settimanale more generally, it is to be noted that that two journals eventually were fused; see R. Villari, “Origini” 66. 58. Torraca 382–83. Melis provides a richly documented investigation into the cultural context in which Torraca wrote this review and Verga his novel in Bella stagione.

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stagione 105). Over the next year and a half, three more of the Novelle rusticane would appear in Rassegna settimanale. One of the most striking aspects of Novelle rusticane is the total absence of the sea from this collection’s physical landscape.59 The sea is not only absent from this world, however; it is a negative, disfigured presence. We see this each time the sea is mentioned in Novelle rusticane, but most pointedly in “La roba.” The opening lines of the story introduce the bleak, landlocked world that characterizes the collection as a whole: “The traveler who goes along the Lake of Lentini spread out like a piece of dead sea, or along the scorched stubble of the Plain of Catania, . . . “ (She-Wolf 139; Il viandante che andava lungo il Biviere di Lentini, steso là come un pezzo di mare morto, e le stoppie riarse della Piana di Catania, . . . [Tutte le novelle 1: 262]; my emphasis). These lines contain the two distinguishing features of the sea in Novelle rusticane. The seven times the word sea appears in the collection, it is either used with negative connotations or figuratively employed, and in most cases, both. Literal references to the sea appear only in “Il Mistero” (twice) and “Pane nero” (once), each in association with some form of deprivation or misfortune. The first time the sea is mentioned in “Il Mistero,” the connotations are hammered home with seven negatives in one sentence. The passage describes a man’s imprisonment from his wife’s point of view: And when they took him away over the sea, where he had never been, the poor fellow, with his sack over his shoulder and bound to his fellow prisoners, stuck together like onions, he turned to look at her for the last time with that sad face, until he could see her no more, for no one returns from the sea, and no one heard anything about him again. (Little Novels 56–57; my emphasis)60

The second reference to the sea in “Il Mistero” offers a brief reprise of the same theme (Tutte le novelle 1: 246), while the one reference to the sea in “Pane nero” appears in the middle of a highly charged passage describing the violent storm in which the protagonists’ mother meets her death (Tutte le novelle 1: 306). All three literal references underscore the distance and extraneousness of the sea from the world of these narratives.

59. The obvious exception is the final story, “Di là del mare” (Across the Sea), which has a special status in the collection, as I discuss in the next section. 60. “E quando se l’erano portato via per mare, che non ci era mai stato, il poveretto, colla sporta in spalla, e legato coi compagni di galera, a resta come le cipolle, egli si era voltato a guardarla per l’ultima volta con quella faccia, finché non la vide più, ché dal mare non torna nessuno, e non se ne seppe più nulla” (Tutte le novelle 1: 242; my emphasis).

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Every other mention of the sea in Novelle rusticane is figurative and, with only one exception, suggests a state of affairs that is not only negative but somehow perverse.61 In each of these two instances, moreover, the word appears in a prominent position at the beginning of the story. In the second sentence of “Libertà,” the peasants in revolt, preparing to massacre the town gentry, are described as follows: “Like a sea swept by a storm. The crowd frothed and waved in front of the gentlemen’s club, in front of the town hall, on the steps of the church: a sea of white caps” (She-Wolf 206).62 In the opening lines of “Malaria” the sea is also used to emphasize a negative condition. The second sentence of the story continues the description of the malarial plain begun in the first: “The blazing sun and colorless moon are both born and die there, and the Pleiades, which seem to swim in an evaporating sea” (She-Wolf 139; Vi nasce e vi muore il sole di brace, e la luna smorta, e la Puddara, che sembra navigare in un mare che svapori [Tutte le novelle 1: 247]). Beginning with the “dead sea” of “La roba,” both the physical absence and the negative figuration of the sea in Novelle rusticane signal the death of the picturesque Sicily, of Sicily represented as a natural, primitive source of delectation for the northern reader. Here Sicily becomes instead the setting for the struggle for survival, for the expression of selfish, materialistic interests, and is bereft of idyllic suggestions. The protagonists of these stories are “degraded” and lack the fresh, naive heroism of the major characters in Vita dei campi and in I Malavoglia.63 Instead, in Novelle rusticane Sicily becomes the space in which to highlight the meanness and misery of life in contemporary Italy and of the human condition more generally. Contemporary critics were quick to pick up on Verga’s shift away from picturesque Sicily. One critic writing for the literary journal La Domenica Letteraria complained that he missed the sunny south he had found in “Nedda.” Verga, he wrote, “has decided to be the cold, detached observer of that animal world of his. And the divine Italian sun no longer shines there where it is most beautiful, and ferments nothing but dung” (Domenica Letteraria 182). But the most forceful expression of this view is to be found, 61. The exception is in “Malaria”: “the fields of grain moved in waves like a sea” (She-Wolf 126; le biade ondeggiavano al par di un mare [Tutte le novelle 1: 253]). 62. “Come il mare in tempesta. La folla spumeggiava e ondeggiava davanti al casino dei galantuomini, davanti al Municipio, sugli scalini della chiesa: un mare di berrette bianche” (Tutte le novelle 1: 319). 63. On the “degradation of the hero” in Novelle rusticane, see Tellini’s introduction to Verga, Novelle xxiv–xxvi.

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strikingly, in Illustrazione itself. In an anonymous review published on 17 December 1882, the critic for Illustrazione notes the distance that separates Verga from Giulio Carcano, one of the founding fathers of the rustic literary tradition to which “Nedda” was indebted: What a difference between Carcano, for example, and Verga!—The ancient poetic idyll of the countryside has been killed: the clear, idyllic dawns of bygone days are now funereal, spattered with blood. The huts of the peasants, which appear so sweetly picturesque from a distance, have been opened by this writer’s violent hand, and inside, we find hunger, ignorance, filth, crime. There are no more fresh breezes tipped with dew, but malaria, no more madrigals to the sound of flutes, but a hasty RIP recited to the sound of a shovel digging a ditch. (399)

The critic then asks “if we have not shifted from one extreme to another. Before, everything was beautiful and virtuous in the countryside—now, everything is ugly and wicked. . . . Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” he concludes, as in the “unmatched achievement of ‘Nedda’” (399). Hunger, ignorance, filth, crime—this list reads as a catalog of some of the key motifs in the writings of the Meridionalists. The reviewer for Illustrazione has correctly identified the main thrust of Novelle rusticane as antiidyllic and antipicturesque. It is clear that Verga’s representations of Sicily have essentially left the orbit of Illustrazione, gravitating instead around Rassegna settimanale where four of these novelle appeared—the orbit of the Southern Question, the Agrarian Question, the Social Question. The reviewer for Illustrazione is not as explicit as Torraca, but he, too, recognizes that Verga’s main concern may not be to delight his readers. What he has not grasped is that this interdiscursivity is at the heart of Novelle rusticane: the literary representation of Sicily under the sign of the Southern Question.

the return of the picturesque in “across the sea” and cavalleria rusticana Verga does not, however, present us with a clear, linear movement. There is a general shift in his realistic fiction between 1878 and 1882 away from picturesque Sicily. Yet, as we have seen, even after “Rosso Malpelo” Verga incorporates various picturesque elements in the other novelle in Vita dei campi and in I Malavoglia. Novelle rusticane is his most consistently antipicturesque collection, yet Verga strikingly ends the collection with one of the most blatantly picturesque representations of Sicily in his oeuvre, the novella “Di là del mare” (Across the Sea). “Across the Sea” is a verita-

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ble reprise of the various aspects of picturesque Sicily evident in Verga’s previous work. The two most important aspects of the picturesque that return here are, on the one hand, narrative framing and distance and, on the other, the sea itself.The perspective in the novella is that of a man and woman sailing on a ship northward away from Sicily. It has been suggested that the novella functions as a kind of pendant to “Fantasticheria”: the earlier novella depicts a man and woman arriving in Sicily (Dillon Wanke, “Abisso inesplorato”). Here, they are departing. Yet “Across the Sea” may also trace a reversal of the movement we found in “Nedda,” which staged a form of travel from north to south, whereby the narrator is imaginatively transported, for the first time, into the midst of the rural Sicilian world. “Across the Sea” begins by emphasizing the distance that separates the narrator (and his partner) from Sicily, a distance that increases until, at the end, he finds himself in a northern city. The loss of proximity engenders the loss of that immediacy and specificity that had characterized the narrative point of view in Vita dei campi, I Malavoglia, and the previous Novelle rusticane. Rural Sicily is presented here instead as a series of commonplaces. To begin with, for the first time since “Jeli il pastore,” Verga refers in broad geographic terms to Sicily. Not surprisingly, the main introductory description includes the two key picturesque features of the island, Mount Etna and the coast: “Already Sicily rose up like a cloud at the edge of the horizon. Then Etna lit up all of a sudden, covered in gold and ruby, and the pale coast opened up here and there in obscure bays and promontories” (Little Novels 213; Diggià la Sicilia sorgeva come una nuvola in fondo all’orizzonte. Poi l’Etna si accese tutt’a un tratto d’oro e di rubini, e la costa bianchiccia si squarciò qua e là in seni e promontorii oscuri [Tutte le novelle 1: 327]). The landscape itself is now articulated as a commonplace, with an oriental inflection to boot: “the landscape, with broad oriental lines, with warm and robust tones” (Little Novels 219; il paesaggio, colle larghe linee orientali, dai toni caldi e robusti [Tutte le novelle 1: 330–331]). But what is most obvious after all the other landlocked Novelle rusticane, in which the sea was either removed or disfigured, is the presence of the sea itself, repeatedly described in terms of “unexplored abysses” and “mysteries.” It is the sea that provides the specific, moody atmosphere for the set of reflections on Sicily in the novella. Finally, the novella concludes with a return to the urban north, to an “immense misty and gloomy city,” situating the narrator “amidst all the crowded, hurrying throng, and the incessant noise, and the fever of immense general activity” (Little Novels 224; in mezzo al via vai affollato e frettoloso, al frastuono incessante, alla febbre dell’immensa attività generale, affannosa e inesorabile [Tutte le novelle 1: 334]).

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What has returned in other words, is the explicit, contrastive perspective, and the view from a distance that had marked the representation of the south in Eva, “Nedda,” and “Stories of the Castle of Trezza.” “Across the Sea” thus rehearses the process of Sicily’s becoming picturesque (again) in terms of spatial and geographical distance. But how can we explain Verga’s return to the picturesque in “Across the Sea,” and the hybrid approach to the picturesque more generally in his oeuvre? Verga’s redeployment of the picturesque perspective in “Across the Sea” may not be unrelated to the proposal made by Francesco Casanova of Turin, with whom Verga had signed a contract to publish the Novelle rusticane in the fall of 1881. Casanova proposed to insert a set of illustrations in the collection, and Verga was enthusiastic about the plan.64 As he wrote to Capuana back in Sicily on 7 December 1881: “Do me a big favor, as soon as you can. For the illustrations of my volume—the one I’m publishing after Vita dei campi—Casanova would like some photographs, designs, and sketches of Sicilian folk costumes, landscapes, peasant types. It’s a legitimate request, which shows his artistic intelligence and which bodes well for my book.” 65 He asks Capuana to send him materials that can render this corner of Sicily “intelligible to even those who are distant from it and who cannot have a clear and artistic idea of it.”66 His list of requests leaves little doubt that the idea he wishes to illustrate is that of a “typical” and folkloristic Sicily, an idea that is in fact at odds with the one offered by the novelle themselves.67 Verga is here attempting to frame Sicily for his readers, to picture it in a way that is both clear and aesthetically pleasing. The following year Verga 64. Written in the spring of 1882 after the other eleven Novelle rusticane had already been published in journals, “Across the Sea” was the only novella to appear exclusively in the volume published by Casanova. With respect to the problematic of the picturesque, it is worth noting that the original title for the volume specified in the 12 November 1881 letter of agreement with Casanova was Bozzetti siciliani (Sicilian sketches); see Bernardi. 65. “Fammi un gran piacere, e subito, il più presto che puoi. Casanova, per le illustrazioni al mio volume che pubblicherò di seguito a Vita dei campi, desidera delle fotografie, disegni, schizzi di costumi, paesaggi, e tipi contadineschi siciliani. E’ una richiesta legittima che mostra la sua intelligenza artistica e promette bene per il mio volume” (Carteggio Verga-Capuana 135). 66. Carteggio Verga-Capuana 135. Less than a month later Capuana sent Verga a packet of seventeen photographs of peasants and landscapes from his village; see Carteggio Verga-Capuana 138. 67. Verga himself was struck by the dissonance between his novelle and the illustrations by Alfredo Montalti. In a letter of 15 December 1882 to Capuana, who was preparing to write a review of Novelle rusticane, he wrote: “If you speak of my stories, I beg you to be nice to Montalti. . . . don’t speak of how off the mark they are, I beg you” (quoted by Riccardi, introduction 1032).

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took this strategy of representation a step further in his adaptation of “Cavalleria rusticana” for the stage. He frames the drama with a subtitle: Cavalleria rusticana: Popular Scenes. The first line of stage directions reads: “A little village square, irregular”—irregularity being, as we have seen on numerous occasions in this study, one of the traditional components of picturesqueness since the end of the eighteenth century.68 The play was a clamorous success at the Carignano Theater in Turin where it premiered on 14 January 1884, as it was at other theaters across the center-north where it opened in the following months. Today critics recognize that Cavalleria rusticana marked a turning point in the theater of postunification Italy not only for the originality of the subject matter but for its innovatory dramatic conception (Sansone 199). Yet, according to one scholar, the main reasons for the play’s success at the time were to be found in “the exoticism of the drama, in the distance that lay between that code of honor and those passions and the sophisticated bourgeois public that could observe that world from afar.”69 Thus, one year after the dismayed review of the Novelle rusticane in Illustrazione, Verga returned to the magazine crowned in triumph. “Bravo Verga!” Treves wrote twice in his weekly column after the opening of Cavalleria rusticana in Turin (20 January 1884: 39–40). In a full-page illustration celebrating its opening at the Manzoni Theater in Milan one month later, Verga’s portrait appears surrounded by his “Sicilian peasant types” in picturesque scenes that would become, after Mascagni’s opera of 1890, famous the world over (see figure 16). In the bottom right-hand corner, the prickly pear bush, that Sicilian icon, is given prominent billing. Verga’s oeuvre thus presents an extraordinarily varied set of representations of Sicily that range from the picturesque “Stories of the Castle of Trezza” and certain novelle in Vita dei campi to the antipicturesque “Rosso Malpelo” and Novelle rusticane. A certain chronological progression from the former perspective to the latter and back again is reflected in the vicissitudes of his relationship to Illustrazione. Yet this tendency is neither simple nor consistent. In 1883–84, as Verga was planning and writing the stage version of “Cavalleria rusticana,” he also worked on his second and last great novel set in rural Sicily, Mastro-don Gesualdo.70 This novel, whose genesis is closely bound up with the writing of Novelle rusticane, pushes Verga’s 68. See Verga, Teatro 9. James Buzard provides a useful discussion of the significance of this and other aspects of picturesqueness in relation to bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century in Beaten Track 187–209. 69. Angelini 962. On the play’s folkloristic appeal to contemporary audiences, see as well Borsellino 88. 70. Verga would not complete the novel, however, until 1888–89.

16. Cavalleria rusticana. Illustrazione italiana, 1884.

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emphasis on the bleak and, in one noted description of the landscape, infernal aspect of Sicily to the limit.71 Like Novelle rusticane, this text is set in the interior of the island, except for the last chapter in Palermo, where, all the more strikingly, the sea makes no appearance.72 This variety of perspectives underscores the profoundly experimental nature of Verga’s art and, consequently, of his relationship as a writer to the representation of Sicily. As we have seen, Verga’s shifting vision of Sicily also reflects his evolving engagement with the key domains in which an image of the south took shape in Italian bourgeois culture during the 1870s: illustrated journals, the Southern Question, as well as folklore studies.Verga’s fiction thus participates fully in the broader process of cultural elaboration through which the south becomes a charged imaginative terrain in the consciousness of Italians. At the same time, we can see that his work brings into focus the specifically aesthetic and poetic dimensions of that process, foregrounding the interaction between geography and representation. Verga’s fiction shows how the south, and Sicily in particular, becomes mythopoetic image, cultural representation, forces itself upon textual production, and in the process, upon the literature of united Italy. Verga’s texts themselves stage this process in a series of key passages: Eva’s choice of that particular seaside landscape in Sicily with its gigantic rocks (“Oh, they’re so beautiful!”); the “indescribable attractions” of the fireside spectacle in “Nedda,” which carry part of you “vertiginous distances” southward; the “singular interest” of those fishermen in “Stories of the Castle of Trezza”; the harbor scene in “Fantasticheria,” which “makes you clap your hands in admiration”; the village, which, at the end of I Malavoglia, comes into focus as a place of serenity and beauty; and in “Across the Sea,” the island of Sicily, which becomes a landscape of heightened charm and mystery as it “rises up like a cloud at the edge of the horizon.” Each of these texts stages the moment when Sicily becomes poetic image and shows, more broadly, the imaginative claims this place makes on the bourgeois subject.At the same time, as each of these passages makes clear, Verga explores the spatial and geographical coordinates of this poetic process. He shows, in other words, not only how the imagination makes the place, shaping it, but how place 71. I am referring to chapter 4 in part 1 of the novel. See Luperini’s insightful analysis of these pages in Simbolo e costruzione 68–74, in which he connects this harsh landscape to that of “Rosso Malpelo.” 72. In Mastro-don Gesualdo more generally, Verga excludes and negatively figures the sea as he had in Novelle rusticane. The word appears only twice in the novel, both times in the same figurative guise as in “Libertà”: as a metaphor for the unruly, menacing force of the mob (see 216 and, above all, 410).

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and location participate in the construction of cultural representation. As both Verga’s letters and fiction make clear, it is “from a certain distance,” from the great cities of the north and from the perspective of the bourgeois subject, that Sicily becomes evocative, alluring, picturesque. Verga’s literary representations are thus not only an essential contribution to the imaginative geography of the south but a unique and powerful contribution to our understanding of the cultural conditions and aesthetic processes through which images of the south were produced in nineteenthcentury Italy. Verga shows us, indeed, how southern Italy became the “south.” But Verga’s texts are not only useful for understanding how the Mezzogiorno became a region of extraordinary symbolic force in Italian culture. They exemplify the kind of interaction between geography and representation more generally that I have highlighted in this study. He is a crucial part of the geography lesson that Italy, with its Southern Question, has to offer.

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Conclusion What the South Enables Us to Say

The Southern Question has been, in the words of the historian Piero Bevilacqua, the “critical consciousness of the nation-building process in Italy.” Bevilacqua continues, “to look at the whole of Italy from the south— from the place where the foundations of the new state, for a variety of reasons, had been most fragile—has in fact offered a sort of cognitive advantage for assessing with greater realism and sensitivity the solidity of the unitary framework, for singling out the weak points in its formation, for reflecting upon the problems of the future” (“Questione settentrionale” 9). What I have attempted to show here is that this “cognitive advantage,” the advantage of looking not only at Italy, but at bourgeois civilization, modernity, and Europe, from the Mezzogiorno, needs to be examined across a wide range of discourses and that the issue of representation is central to the Southern Question. In conclusion I want to draw out some of the connections between two writers whom I have discussed separately as an example of the perspective we gain by thinking, as it were, from and with the south. I want to show that the south enables both Giacomo Leopardi and Giovanni Verga to say something they could not say otherwise. The imaginative geography of north and south powerfully animates the poetic visions of both Leopardi and Verga. The elimination of the picturesque perspective on southern nature, the transformation of the picturesque object into a threat, and the concomitant critique of northern civilization suggest an interesting affinity between Leopardi’s “La ginestra,” the poem I discussed in Chapter 3, and certain aspects of Verga’s work, the focus of Chapter 8. Like Leopardi, Verga seizes upon the aesthetic and ideological force of looking at northern civilization from the south and, at the same time, of looking at the south from the ground up. As in “La ginestra,” Verga, in the novella-manifesto “Fan297

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tasticheria,” compares humans in their struggle with nature to ants and asks the reader to consider “closing the whole horizon between two clods of dirt.”1 In Verga more generally a new ground-level proximity to nature enables the accentuation of its harshness and destructive force. This critique of northern progress from the south constitutes a general link between Verga’s Sicilian stories and novels and “La ginestra.” But one text in particular, the novella “Rosso Malpelo,” manifests a particularly strong affinity to Leopardi’s counterrepresentation of southern nature in “La ginestra.” I am not simply referring to the fact that the pessimistic materialism of both writers finds its consummate expression in these two texts, but rather to the specific way in which both of these texts employ the figure of southern nature, and of the southern volcanic earth in particular, to critique northern civilization. As we saw, “Rosso Malpelo” marks the decisive beginning of Verga’s new realistic phase. As in “La ginestra,” the landscape of “Rosso Malpelo” is harsh and desolate, pointedly antipicturesque. But it is of course not just a question of the setting.The two texts are emphatically telluric, each explicitly dwelling upon the earth in its concrete, material, and indeed mineral form. This focus on the earth, and on volcanic earth in particular, is finally related to the fact that both texts are about burial, about the destruction of human life through interment. “La ginestra” and “Rosso Malpelo” are both preoccupied with the materiality of the earth that assimilates human life. The “arid back” of Vesuvius is that which has covered over human civilization and will do so again and again; in “Rosso Malpelo” the sands at the foot of Etna form the final destiny of man and beast alike. The volcanic earth constitutes the site where both writers urge the reader to look, as in a mirror, at the ultimate fate of humankind. Both texts are animated by a polemical, imperative force: you, progressive northern man, see what it looks like from down here (quaggiù). In “La ginestra” and “Rosso Malpelo” the natural, volcanic south is thus the opposite of the picturesque object: it does not give delight and comfort to the bourgeois reader who contemplates it from afar; it is rather like lava thrown in the reader’s face. Leopardi and Verga deconstruct the northern view of the backward south, which is premised on the idea that northern

1. Tutte le novelle 1: 123. Leopardi writes of a “popolo di formiche” (population of ants; v. 205), while Verga writes of an “esercito di formiche” (army of ants; Tutte le novelle 1: 123). Giancarlo Mazzacurati’s observation that “few texts can explain ‘Fantasticheria’ better than ‘La ginestra’” is worth recalling here (“Illusione” 51).

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civilization will improve and rectify the natural south. By associating the south with the indomitable force of nature, a nature that overwhelms civilization, Leopardi and Verga contest the triumphalism that informs the majority of northern representations of the south in the nineteenth century and after.2 The south offers both Leopardi and Verga a “cognitive advantage” for reflecting upon the myths and illusions of modern bourgeois civilization. I rehearse Leopardi’s and Verga’s positions because I want to suggest that something about the Mezzogiorno, something, more precisely, about the way geography and culture have interacted in the Italian case, gets people talking and writing; it not only prompts them to refigure and reconceptualize their political, ideological, and other concerns in a southern key, but in certain instances it enables their articulation. This is the case with many of the political writers discussed in this study, and even more strikingly with Verga, who not only exploited the imaginative geography of the south in Italian culture but reflected upon its conditions of possibility as a cultural representation. This tendency to think geographically helps us finally to address the thorny question of the relation between the representations of southern Italy and the reality “behind” them. Isn’t there something to these representations, we may well ask; hasn’t the south, in fact, been different—impoverished, crime-ridden, downtrodden, but also somehow more human and authentic? Of course there is; certainly the south is different—but not that different, not wholly “other,” not “Africa.” What my examination of the representations of the south in this study generally reveals is the difficulty of dealing with hybridity and liminality, and thus the tendency to turn a spectrum of differences into a dichotomy. My aim in this book has not been to deny the differences between the south and other parts of Italy. Certainly my study participates in the cultural obsession with the south analyzed here. But I have sought to unravel the diverse investments and stakes involved in “othering” the south and to foreground the role that representations play in constructing this reality. What both Leopardi and Verga, as well as others in the twentieth century like Antonio Gramsci, teach us is that the Southern Question is an imaginative resource that enables writers to say things they might not otherwise say, and to say them in a way that makes us listen. 2. See Vincenzo Consolo’s comment on the affinities between Leopardi’s and Verga’s harsh visions of nature in his essay “Sopra il vulcano” 5–6.

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Index

Abba, Giuseppe Cesare, 157n3 An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (Baretti), 54–55 Aci-Trezza (Sicily), 5, 66, 66n55, 68, 255, 275–76, 276n42 “Across the Sea” (Verga), 289–91, 291n64, 291n67, 294 Africa, as figure for southern Italy, 2, 3, 57, 57n30, 64, 146–47, 148–49, 164–65 Alfieri, Vittorio, 206 Algarotti, Francesco, 27n25 “L’amante di Gramigna” (Verga), 281 Amari, Emerico, 177–78, 177n28 America, as modern, 60, 60nn39–40 Annali universali di statistica, 92, 103, 112 Annali universali di statistica (Gioia), 29–31, 29n31, 30n32, 31n34, 35–36, 104 Annuario geografico italiano, 106 Antologia, 89, 89n5, 92, 121 Archinti, Luigi, 213 Ardigò, Roberto, 193n7 Arfé, Gaetano, 158 Artom, Isaac, 182 Asia, 26–27 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 276n42, 281n47 Associazione Libraria Italiana, 195n10 Azeglio, Massimo d’, 168–69, 168–69nn19–20, 170, 183

backwardness: and picturesqueness, 16–19, 65–66, 188; in pre-unification representations, 76–81, 77n73 Balbo, Cesare, 22, 36, 38, 114n40 Baldi, Guido, 281n47 Balsamo, Paolo, 241n20 Balzac, Honoré de, 6 Bandi, Giuseppe, 157n3 barbarism: southern, vs. civilized north, 164–70, 165–66nn15–17, 168–69nn19–20. See also Bourbons, and barbarism bare feet, 220–21, 220n34 Baretti, Giuseppe: An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, 54–55 Bédarida, Paul, 44n12 Il Bel Paese (Stoppani), 260n16 Benevento (Italy), 40 Bernal, Martin, 134n15 Bevilacqua, Piero, 7, 297 Bhabha, Homi, 76n70 Bianco di St. Jorioz, Alessandro, 165n15 Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane (Pitré), 215–16 Biblioteca di Viaggi (Treves), 255n11 Biblioteca italiana, 93–94, 94n14 Bixio, Nino, 160 Bizzocchi, Roberto, 94n14 Bodin, Jean, 23 Bollati, Giulio, 20n14, 21

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Bonstetten, Charles-Victor de: L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord (also The Man of the North and the Man of the South), 27–29, 28n28; and Staël, 28, 28n28. See also Annali universali di statistica Borromeo, Guido, 170–71, 172 Borsieri, Paolo, 55 Bossi, Umberto, 1 Bourbons: and barbarism, 126–55, 163n13; and anti-Bourbon sentiment, 126–27, 128, 128n2, 136–37, 151, 153 (see also specific texts); and copyright law, 127–28; and De Sanctis’s Scritti varii, 144, 147–50, 152; and Europe vs. Italy, 127–31, 128–29nn2–4, 133–34, 134n13; and Gladstone’s Letters, 4, 126– 27, 131–39, 132nn9–11, 136n17, 143, 144, 152n26; “Italy ends at the Garigliano,” 139–43, 140n20, 142n21; and liberals, exile/repression of, 128, 128n3, 132, 152; Miraglia on, 150–51, 153–55; and Moderatism, 130–31, 140, 153; and Muratism, 143–44, 148, 150; and the Orient, 134; and the picturesque, 153–55; and Piedmont, 128–29, 129n4, 130; and polarization, 151; and Scialoja’s Finances of the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sardegna, 151–52, 151–52nn25–26; Settembrini on, 152–53; and the south as Africa, 146–47, 148–49; and Trinchera’s “Neapolitan Question,” 144–47, 149–50, 152 bourgeoisie, 16–17, 86, 92, 195 Braudel, Fernand, 14, 15n5 Breda, Mr., 213–14, 215, 221 Bride of Messina (Schiller), 54 brigandage, 182, 182n33 Brosses, Charles de, 60, 60n41, 61 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 16 Brydone, Patrick, 44n13; A Tour through Sicily and Malta, 57, 57n33

Bulferetti, Luigi, 231n13 Buzard, James, 276 Cafagna, Luciano, 86, 102, 102n21 Cagnazzi, Luca de Samuele, 78–79, 80, 88n4, 107, 110n32 Calabria (Italy), 153–55, 197 Calvino, Italo: The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 256n14 Candeloro, Giorgio, 178n30 “Il cantastorie” (Del Balzo), 283–84, 283nn49–50 Cantina napoletana (in Illustrazione italiana), 219–20, 220, 221, 261 Capponi, Gino, 122n49 Capuana, Luigi, 220n34, 247n26, 251, 252, 263, 282, 291, 291nn66–67 Carcano, Giulio, 289 Carignano, Eugenio di, 179 Casanova, Francesco, 291, 291n64 Casanova, Giacomo: History of My Life, 38, 46–49, 52, 53, 60 I casi di Napoli dal 29 gennaio 1848 in poi (Massari), 132, 132n9, 136–37 Cassinis, G. B., 166 Castagnola, Stefano, 245n24 Cattaneo, Carlo, 3, 92–93, 102–12, 102n21, 112n37, 119, 120, 127; “La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane,” 111–12, 206; Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia, 106, 109, 111; “On Ancient and Modern Sardegna,” 111; Il Politecnico, 103, 106n26, 112; in Rivista europea, 105–11; “The State of the Finances in the Kingdom of Naples,” 103–5, 109 Cavalieri, Enea, 241 “Cavalleria rusticana”: as folkloric/ picturesque, 281–82; prickly pear in, 282 Cavalleria rusticana, 294–95; completion of, 292n70; as folkloric/ picturesque, 250; stage adaptation of, 219n33, 291–92, 293; Treves on, 292

Index Cavour, Camillo: correspondence on the south, 158–63, 159n6, 162n10; on Europe as a model, 22, 130; on military force, 183; on regional selfgovernment, 177n28; on unification, 156n1 Cenni, Enrico, 153n27 Chabod, Federico, 226 China, 134 cholera epidemic, 110, 110n30 Cialdini, Enrico, 182n34 “Ciò che gli stranieri non osservano in Italia” (Villari), 227 cities, growth of, 195, 221 “La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane” (Cattaneo), 111–12, 206 civilization, 6, 20; and barbarism, 164–68; Europe as model for modern, 19, 22, 50–52, 102–7, 111–12, 118–19, 121–25, 131, 133, 134–36, 188, 213–16; Gioia on, 31, 33; and nationalism, 86; and pre-unification representations, 50–52, 52n23; Stendhal on, 70–71; and Naples, 60–64; Pantaleoni on, 191–92; south’s distance from/ oppositional relation to, 73–76, 91, 97, 120, 188, 213–16, 228, 238– 39, 299; and travelers to Naples and beyond, 59–60, 60nn39–40; valorization of center-north, 73– 76, 206, 245 climate: and Italy as Europe’s south, 23–28, 23n21, 26nn23–24, 27n25, 36; and travelers to Naples and beyond, 59, 64–65. See also Annali universali di statistica; Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians; Bonstetten, L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws Colbertism, 105 communes, medieval, 205–6 Il Conciliatore, 54–55 Condizioni politiche e amministrative

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della Sicilia (Franchetti), 224, 237– 40, 241n20, 242–43 Contarino, Rosario, 231n14 Corinne, or Italy (Staël): on backwardness/picturesqueness, 17–18; influence of, 17, 27; Leopardi on, 32; on Naples vs. Africa, 57; picturesque populace in, 67; on textual traditions, 52–53; on Vesuvius, 44–45 Il Corriere della Sera, 196, 264 Cosmorama pittorico, 3–4, 92–102, 95, 96nn15–16, 98–100, 101n19, 120 Creuzé de Lesser, Augustin, 37, 56–57, 62 Crispi, Francesco, 161–62 Croce, Benedetto, 46, 53, 87n3, 152, 206n24 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 78, 163n13 Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants (Salamone Marino), 221 De Augustinis, Matteo, 107, 108, 110– 11, 110n32 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 256n13, 257, 257n15 De Bourcard, Francesco, 117n44 De Gubernatis, Angelo, 263, 263n24 Del Balzo, Carlo: “Il cantastorie,” 283– 84, 283nn49–50 D’Elia, Costanza, 53, 80 Della Nazionalità italiana (Durando), 38–39, 39, 39n1 Della Rocca, Enrico, 182 Della Valle, Giuseppe, 78, 103–4 Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (Gioberti), 22, 65n52, 85, 87, 113–20, 114–17nn40–43, 119n46 Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia (Gioberti), 119–20, 132, 132n9 De Martino, Ernesto, 50–51 De Sanctis, Francesco: “Science and Life,” 206; Scritti varii, 144, 147– 50, 152; Storia della letteratura italiana, 228n8

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De Seta, Cesare, 56, 56n28, 65–66, 65n54 “Di chi è colpa?” (Villari), 194, 226 Di Giacomo, Salvatore, 242n22 Dina, Giacomo, 226 Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians (Leopardi), 31–36, 32nn35–36, 35n39, 59, 120, 122 Dondero, Marco, 32n35 Donzelli, Carmine, 8 Dumas, Alexandre, 172n22 Dupaty, Charles: Lettres sur l’Italie, 64–65, 64n51, 118n45 Durando, Giacomo: Della Nazionalità italiana, 38–39, 39, 39n1 elites, isolation of, 226–28 Ellison, Cori, 61n43 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23n21 Emporio pittoresco, 196, 264 Enlightenment thought, 77 Eros (Verga), 265 Etna (Sicily), 43–44, 44nn12–13, 56, 99, 260, 260n19, 279 Eurocentrism: and barbarism, 2; Italy as Europe’s south, 22; in northern views of the south, 119; and the Other, 5–6; of pre-unification representations, 49–50, 52 Eva (Verga), 251, 253–57, 256–57nn12–15, 259–60, 262– 63, 266, 267, 273n36, 294

78–79, 110, 110n31, 126, 127, 139. See also Bourbons and barbarism Ferrari, Giuseppe, 166n16, 178, 179n32 Filangieri, Gaetano, 53n24 Filippi, Filippo, 282–83 The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sardegna (Scialoja), 151–52, 151–52nn25–26 The Fishmonger of Mergellina (in Illustrazione italiana), 221, 222, 223 folklore studies, 215–17, 273, 283–84, 294 foreign views of Italy, 14–19, 15n5 Forti, Francesco, 89n8, 91n9, 109, 119, 120; “Italy ends at the Garigliano,” 87–92, 140–41 Fortunato, Giustino, 46, 225, 225n5, 238–39, 248–49 Foscolo, Ugo, 206 Franchetti, Leopoldo, 4, 91–92, 147, 172n22, 188, 189, 219; Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, 224, 237–40, 241n20, 242–43; Sonnino’s collaboration with, 237; and Verga, 5, 8, 273–74; Villari on, 233; Villari’s influence on, 225, 236–37. See also Rassegna settimanale; La Sicilia nel 1876 Francis I, king of the Two Sicilies, 142 Francis II, king of the Two Sicilies, 187 Fucini, Renato, 206n24, 225, 231n14

“Fantasticheria” (Verga), 270n29, 275–77, 276–77nn42–43, 280, 281, 290, 294, 297–98, 298n1 Farina, Salvatore, 263 Farini, Luigi Carlo, 130, 139, 176, 181; “This is not Italy! This is Africa,” 146, 164–65 Fazio, Enzo-Giorgio, 58n36 federalism, 87, 140 Felice, Domenico, 26n24 Ferdinand I, king of the Two Sicilies, 40n2 Ferdinand II, king of the Two Sicilies,

Galanti, Giuseppe Maria, 78, 79, 80 Galasso, Giuseppe, 40–41, 117n44 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 156, 161, 180 Garigliano River, 87–92, 88n4, 139– 43, 140n20, 142n21, 183n35 Garin, Eugenio, 193 Garzanti, 198n16 Genovesi, Antonio, 40, 53, 77–78, 77n73, 79–80, 147 geographical poetics, 251, 294–95. See also Verga, Giovanni geography of textual production: in postunification Italy, 194–97,

Index 195nn9–10; in pre-unification Italy, 52–55, 54n26 Gigault de la Salle,Achille Etienne, 65n53 “La ginestra” (Leopardi), 3–4, 35, 121, 122–24nn50–52, 122–25, 297–99, 298n1 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 139; Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, 22, 65n52, 85, 87, 113–20, 114–17nn40–43, 119n46; Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia, 119– 20, 132, 132n9; Prolegomeni, 119 Gioia, Melchiorre: Annali universali di statistica, 13, 29–31, 29n31, 30n32, 31n34, 35–36, 104 Il Giornale di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti per la Sicilia, 91n9 Gladstone, William: Letters to Lord Aberdeen, 4, 126–27, 131–39, 132nn9–11, 136n17, 143, 144, 152n26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 16, 53n24, 57 Gramsci, Antonio, 299; La questione meridionale, 219n33 Greece, oppression/corruption in, 163n13 Greenfield, Kenneth, 92, 129n4 Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 62, 138 Grew, Raymond, 130 Gualterio, Filippo Antonio, 87–88, 150; The Recent Italian Revolutions, 139–43, 142n21, 144 Hackert, Philipp, 66n55 Hay, Denys, 52 Hellenism, 56, 56nn28–29, 58, 59, 72 Histoire de Juliette (Sade), 63n50, 64 History of Ancient Art (Winckelmann), 42–43, 57n30 History of My Life (Casanova), 38, 46–49, 52, 53, 60 Holland, Lady, 162n10, 165–66 L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord (also The Man of the South and the Man of the North) (Bonstetten), 27–29, 28n28

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Houel, Jean, 65n53, 66n55 House of Savoy, 128–29, 140 Hussey, Christopher, 277n43 Illustrazione italiana, 4, 197–223; Cantina napoletana, 219–20, 220, 221, 261; and depreciation of the south, 206–7, 206n24; The Fishmonger of Mergellina, 221, 222, 223; founding of, 197–98, 198n18, 198nn15–16; masthead illustration of, 45, 198–99, 200–201, 202, 203, 204–5, 205n19, 206–7; masthead illustration of, Vesuvius in, 204, 214–15, 217; and Nuova illustrazione universale, 189, 198–99, 198n18, 200–201, 202, 207–11; picturesque south in, 211–21, 214– 15, 218, 219n33, 220, 222, 223, 223n35; popularity of, 198; and Verga, 5, 250, 272, 283, 292; on Verga’s “Nedda,” 212–13, 289; on Verga’s Novelle rusticane, 288–89; The View of the Channel of Ischia at Piedigrotta, 217, 218; A Wedding: A Local Custom from Basilicata, 218–19, 219n33. See also Nuova illustrazione universale Illustrazione—Rivista italiana, 205n19 I Malavoglia (Verga), 250, 280–86, 294; antipicturesque nature of, 280–81, 284–85, 286; completion of, 251; critical reception of, 281, 285–86; and “Fantasticheria,” 275, 275n41; and folklore studies, 273, 284; heroism in, 288; narrative point of view in, 281, 290; and “Padron ‘Ntoni,” 265, 271; proverbs in, 284, 284n51; publication of, 280; La Sicilia nel 1876’s influence on, 274, 274n39; and “Stories of the Castle of Trezza,” 270; and Treves, 282, 283n49, 285–86nn55–57 Indies, 50–51, 51n22 Italian views of Italy, 19–23, 20n14, 21n15

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Italy as Europe’s south, 3, 6, 13–36; Bonstetten on, 27–29, 28n28; and the bourgeoisie’s rise, 16–17; and climate, 23–28, 23n21, 26nn23–24, 27n25, 36; and Eurocentrism, 22; foreign views of Italy, 14–19, 15n5; Gioia on, 13, 29–31, 29n31, 30n32, 31n34, 35–36; Italian views of Italy, 19–23, 20n14, 21n15; and Italy’s backwardness/picturesqueness, 16–19, 65–66; Leopardi on, 31–36, 32nn35–36, 35nn38–39; and the Moderates, 22; and progress, 16 “Italy ends at the Garigliano,” 87–92, 88n4, 139–43, 140n20, 142n21, 183n35 Jacini, Stefano, 130 James, Henry, 19 Jameson, Anna, 18–19 Jannazzo, Antonio, 237n16 Johnson, J. W., 23 Kingdom of Naples, 40, 40n2 Kingdom of Sardinia, 129 Kingdom of Sicily, 40n2, 42 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 39n1, 40–46, 40n2, 41n4, 42n7 Kirby, Paul Franklin, 61n45 La Farina, Giuseppe, 139, 173–75 Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de, 16 Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 58 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di: The Leopard, 1, 9 Lanza, Giovanni, 153, 187 La Platière, Roland de, 61n44 lazzari/lazzaroni (Neapolitan indigents), 61, 101, 102, 197 The Leopard (Lampedusa), 1, 9 Leopardi, Giacomo, 121n47; Discourse on the Current State of the Customs of Italians, 31–36, 32nn35–36, 35n39, 59, 120, 122; “La ginestra,” 3–4, 35, 121, 122–24nn50–52, 122–25, 297–99, 298n1; Lo Zibal-

done di Pensieri, 31–33, 35, 35n38; “Palinode to the Marquis Gino Capponi,” 122, 123n51 Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia. See Southern Letters Letters From Italy (Sharp), 55 Letters to Lord Aberdeen (Gladstone), 4, 126–27, 131–39, 132nn9–11, 136n17, 143, 144, 152n26 Lettres sur l’Italie (Dupaty), 64–65, 64n51, 118n45 Levi, Carlo, 284 liberal elites, isolation of, 226–28 Lombardi Satriani, Luigi, 215 Lombroso, Cesare, 23n21 Lo Piparo, Franco, 216 lottery, 104, 208 Luperini, Romano, 8, 274n39, 281n47, 285 Machiavelli, Niccolò: The Prince, 172n22, 240 Mack Smith, Dennis, 159n6 Macry, Paolo, 195n10 Maffei, Clara, 263 Magna Graecia, 42–43, 45, 48 Mamiani, Terenzio, 122 Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao, 175 Manna, Giovanni, 171n21 The Man of the South and Man of the North. See L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord Mario, Alberto, 157n3 Mario, Jessie White, 225, 231n14 Martinelli, Vincenzio, 27n25 Martini, Ferdinando, 273n36 Masiello, Vito, 281n47 Massari, Giuseppe, 132n8, 132n11, 133, 138, 143, 152; anti-Bourbonism of, 163; I casi di Napoli dal 29 gennaio 1848 in poi, 132, 132n9, 136–37; on Milan, 164n14; in parliamentary debate about the south, 176–77, 177n27, 178n29; on the south, 161n8, 163–64, 166, 169–70 Mastriani, Francesco, 242n22

Index Mastro-don Gesualdo (Verga), 292, 294, 294nn71–72 Maury, Alfred, 37–38 Mazé de la Roche, Gustavo, 182n34 medical imagery: in Franchetti and Sonnino’s Sicilia nel 1876, 246– 47, 247n26, 248; and unification, 172–76, 172n22, 175–76nn24–25, 177n27, 178–79, 178n31 medievalism of the south, 245, 245n24 Mediterranean, 16, 119; decline in power of, 14 Mellana, Filippo, 179n32 Meridionalism, 4, 7, 189, 193, 194, 224, 224n1, 289. See also Southern Question Meriggi, Marco, 54n26, 106 Mezzeria in Toscana (Sonnino), 238 Mezzogiorno. See southern Italy Milan: pictorial culture in, 93 (see also Cosmorama pittorico); publishing industry in, 92, 195–96 (see also Illustrazione italiana) military force, 177n27, 178–83, 179n32, 182–83nn34–35 Minghetti, Marco, 130, 177, 177n27, 179n32, 192 Miraglia, Biagio, 150–51, 153–55 missionaries, 50–51, 51n22 Moderates/Moderatism, 22, 112–13, 119–20, 130–31, 140, 153, 158n4, 165, 192. See also Del primato morale e civile degli italiani; unification Modica (Sicily), 213–14 Molfese, Franco, 181 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 51–52, 52n23 Montalti, Alfredo, 291n67 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de: on Asia, 26; on climate, 23–27, 26n23, 27n25, 36; on Italy’s decline, 15, 20; The Spirit of the Laws, 23–27, 26n23, 28, 36; on Turkey, 26 moral mapping of Italy, 164, 170–72, 171n21 Moscati, Ruggero, 162n9

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Mozzillo, Atanasio, 53, 53n24, 61, 72, 102 Murat, Lucien, 143 Muratism, 143–44, 148, 150 Museo di Famiglia, 264 Museo di scienze e letteratura, 88 Musset, Paul de, 65n53 Naples: compared to Africa, 57, 57n30, 64; as a capital, 72; criticism by travelers to, 61–64, 61n45; Gioberti on, 115–17, 120; Gladstone on, 138–39; golden age of, 60, 60n42; Gualterio on, 139–43, 142n21; as musical center, 60–61, 61nn43–44, 74n68, 116; as a “paradise inhabited by devils,” 46–52, 49n19, 51n22, 52n23, 146–47, 168n18; as philosophical center, 61, 74n68, 116; population growth in, 62; as primitive/savage, 64–65, 70–71, 195; Renan on, 72– 76, 74n68; vs. the south, 40–41, 41n4, 45; Villari on, 229–31, 231n14 Nassau Senior, William, 133, 137–38 national identity, 14, 20n20, 21–22, 36, 55, 114, 129–30; and barbarism, 153, 181 nationalism/nationalist movement, 1, 2, 56, 86, 139–43 nationalism of northern elites. See northern views of the south National Society, 130 Navarro, Michele, 50, 51 Navarro della Miraglia, Emanuale, 255, 255n10 “The Neapolitan Question” (Trinchera), 144–47, 149–50, 152 “Nedda; A Sicilian Sketch” (Verga), 189, 253, 257–65, 294; duplicity/ ambivalence in, 260–61, 271; Etna in, 260–61; and Eva, 259–60, 262– 63; geographical poetics of, 257, 270; hearth as frame in, 257–60; Illustrazione italiana on, 212–13; as a pivotal work, 257, 265; publication of, 257n16; reactions to, 256, 261– 65, 262–63nn21–23, 282; and

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“Nedda; A Sicilian Sketch”(continued) “Stories of the Castle of Trezza,” 270, 270n29, 271 “negation of God erected into a system of government” (Gladstone), 131. See also Letters to Lord Aberdeen New Yorker, 204 Nievo, Ippolito, 157n3 Nigra, Costantino, 171 Nochlin, Linda, 216 Northern League, 1, 7 northern views of the south, 85–125; in Annali universali di statistica, 92, 103, 112; in Cosmorama pittorico, 3–4, 92–102, 95, 96nn15–16, 98–100, 101n19, 120; on ethnographic diversity, 113–14, 114n40; Eurocentrism, 119; Forti’s views, 87–92, 89n8, 91n9, 109, 119, 120; Gioberti’s Primato, 85, 87, 113–20, 114–17nn40–43, 119n46; “Italy ends at the Garigliano,” 87–92, 88n4; Leopardi’s “La ginestra,” 3–4, 35, 121, 122–24nn50–52, 122–25; Moderatism, 112–13, 119–20; on Naples, 115–17, 120; and nationalism’s/bourgeoisie’s rise, 86, 92; on Piedmont, 112–16, 117, 120; in Rivista europea, 92–93, 103, 105–6, 112. See also Cattaneo, Carlo north vs. south, 6–8, 6n1. See also Southern Question Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia (Cattaneo), 106, 109, 111 Novelle rusticane (Verga), 251, 256, 283, 285, 286–89, 287n59, 288n61, 290, 294n72. see also “Across the Sea” Nuova illustrazione universale, 189, 198–99, 198n18, 200–201, 202, 207–11, 260n19, 264 Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians. See Del primato morale e civile degli italiani

“On Ancient and Modern Sardegna” (Cattaneo), 111 L’Opinione, 226 Orano, Paolo, 172n22 Orient, compared with southern Italy, 57, 134–35, 169, 210–11 Orientialism (Said), 5–6 Osterkamp, Ernst, 56n28, 57n33 Otherness, 5–6 “Padron ‘Ntoni” (Verga), 265, 271–75, 271n32, 273n33, 274n38 “Palinode to the Marquis Gino Capponi” (Leopardi), 122, 123n51 Palmerston, Lord, 133 Pantaleoni, Diomede, 165n15, 167, 182–83; “Le ultime elezioni politiche in Italia,” 190–92 Paris Commune, 226 Parliamentary Commission for the Inquiry into the Social and Economic Conditions of Sicily, 193, 194, 240n19 parliamentary debate, 166n16, 176– 79, 177–78nn27–31 Partenope (Stampiglia), 61n43 The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Calvino), 256n14 Patriarca, Silvana, 129 Una peccatrice (Verga), 266–67 Penny Magazine, 93 Petrusewicz, Marta, 128, 152 the picturesque, 2–3; and backwardness, 16–19, 65–66, 188; and the Bourbons, 153–55; cult of, 65; people in, 66–67, 66–67nn56–57; of the postunification south, 196– 97; and travelers to Naples and beyond, 65–67. See also Verga, Giovanni Piedmont, 112–16, 117, 120; attitude of toward south, 161–62nn8–10, 161–64, 162–64nn12–14; and the national movement, 128–29, 129n4, 130 Pitré, Giuseppe, 217, 263, 263n24, 273,

Index 273n33, 284; Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane, 215–16; Usi popolari natalizi in Sicilia, 272 Placanica, Augusto, 41, 53, 53n24, 80 Poerio, Carlo, 131, 152 Il Politecnico (Cattaneo), 103, 106n26, 112 Pontecorvo (Italy), 40 Porciani, Ilaria, 199 “Positive Philosophy and the Historical Method” (Villari), 193, 193n7 positivism, 193–94, 193n7 prickly pear, 219, 219n33, 282 Primato. See Del primato morale e civile degli italiani The Prince (Machiavelli), 172n22, 240 progress, 16. See also civilization Prolegomeni (Gioberti), 119 protectionism, 110–11 Protest of the People of the Two Sicilies (Settembrini), 134–35, 134n16 publishing industry, 92, 195–96, 195n10 La questione meridionale (Gramsci), 219n33 Radcliffe, Ann, 57 Rafaeli, 161–62 Ragionieri, Ernesto, 157n3 Rajna, Pio, 217, 283; “Rinaldi,” 216, 221 Ranieri, Antonio, 121n47 Ranuzzi, Annibale, 106 Rassegna settimanale, 237, 273–74, 273n36, 275, 286–87, 289 Rattazzi, Urbano, 172n22 The Recent Italian Revolutions (Gualterio), 139–43, 142n21, 144 Reclus, Elisée, 256n12 Reggio, Vito d’Ondes, 108 Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland (Riedesel), 57–58nn33–34, 57–60

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Renan, Ernest, 23n21, 72–76, 73n66, 74n68, 76n69, 136, 137 Renda, Francesco, 190, 242 The Return from the Festival of the Madonna dell’Arco (Vianelli), 66–67, 69 Ricasoli, Bettino, 130, 178n31 Ricciardi, Giuseppe, 22 Riedesel, Hermann von: Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland, 57–58nn33–34, 57–60; and Winckelmann, 58, 58n35 the Right, and the 1874 election, 190–92 “Rinaldi” (Rajna), 216, 221 Risorgimento, 2, 3, 15. See also Bourbons, and barbarism; northern views of the south; unification Rivista europea, 92–93, 103, 105–11, 112, 129n4 Romagnosi, Giandomencio, 103 Romanelli, Raffaele, 54n26 Romano, Ruggiero, 62 Rome, symbolic function of, 205 Romeo, Rosario, 21 “Rosso Malpelo” (Verga), 250, 256, 274, 275, 277–80, 281, 282, 294n71, 298–99 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 61 Ruggiero, Guido de, 22 Sacchi, Defendente, 92, 93, 97, 99, 101–2 Sacchi, Giuseppe, 93 Sade, Marquis de: Histoire de Juliette, 63n50, 64; Voyage d’Italie, 62–64, 63nn48–49, 64n51 Said, Edward, 73–74; Orientialism, 5–6 Saint-Non, Richard de: Voyage pittoresque, 65–66, 65n54, 68, 255 Salerno, Luigi, 67n57 Salomone Marino, Salvatore, 216–17; Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants, 221 Salvemini, Biagio, 110

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Salvemini, Gaetano, 225 Savarese, Gennaro, 32n35, 35n39 Scapigliatura, 196 Schiller, Friedrich: Bride of Messina, 54 Scialoja, Antonio, 158, 182; The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sardegna, 151–52, 151–52nn25–26 “Science and Life” (De Sanctis), 206 Scirocco, Alfonso, 110n31, 128n3 Scritti varii (De Sanctis), 144, 147–50, 152 “La scuola e la questione sociale in Italia” (Villari), 225 “See Naples and die,” 49, 49n19, 64 Serao, Matilde, 225, 242n22 Serristori, Luigi, 91, 107 Settembrini, Luigi, 152–53; Protest of the People of the Two Sicilies, 134–35, 134n16 La Settimana illustrata, 196 Shannon, Richard, 136n17 Sharp, Samuel: Letters From Italy, 55 La Sicilia (Treves), 255, 255n11 La Sicilia nel 1876 (Franchetti and Sonnino), 240–49; on Etna, 260; and Franchetti’s Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, 240; medical imagery in, 246–47, 247n26, 248; the picturesque in, 242, 242n22; polemical nature of, 193, 240–41, 240n19; preface to, 240; on private interests vs. public good, 243; on Sicily’s difference/ isolation from mainland, 243–45, 244n23, 247–49; on Sicily’s role in solving its problems, 193, 246, 246n25; sociological analysis in, 241–42; Southern Question introduced in, 224; as a travel journal, 241; and Verga, 250; Verga as influenced by, 274–75, 274n39; on violence/oppression, 242, 243, 275 Sicily: crime/violence in, 232, 242–43; as deep south, 56–57; public order

in, 192–93; vs. the south, 41–45; sulfur mines of, 231–32; Villari on, 231–32. See also Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia; La Sicilia nel 1876 Sismondi, Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de, 89, 206 Smith, Adam, 60n40 Social Question, 226–27 Society for the Encouragement of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 106 Solaroli, Paolo, 168, 168n18, 170 Sommer, Giorgio, 219n33 Sonnino, Sidney, 188, 219; Franchetti’s collaboration with, 237; Mezzeria in Toscana, 238; and Verga, 5, 8, 273– 74; Villari’s influence on, 225, 236– 37. See also Rassegna settimanale; La Sicilia nel 1876 Sonzogno, Edoardo, 195, 196, 264 Sorrentino, Tommaso, 171–72 south, compared to Africa, 57, 57n30, 64, 146–47, 148–49, 164–65 southern Italy, postunification representations of. See Illustrazione italiana; Southern Question; Verga, Giovanni southern Italy, pre-unification representations of, 3, 37–81; backwardness in, 76–81, 77n73; and civilization, 50–52, 52n23; and England as model, 78; and Enlightenment thought, 77; Eurocentrism of, 49– 50, 52; geography of textual production, 52–55, 54n26; and the Indies, 50–51, 51n22; Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 39n1, 40–46, 40n2, 41n4, 42n7; and Magna Graecia, 42–43, 45, 48; Naples as a “paradise inhabited by devils,” 46–52, 49n19, 51n22, 52n23; Naples vs. the south, 40–41, 41n4, 45; Sicily vs. the south, 41–45; “south,” elasticity of, 38–40; and volcanoes, 43–45, 44–45nn12–15, 56. See also travelers to Naples and beyond Southern Letters (Villari), 194,

Index 224, 225–36, 225n5, 228n9, 230–31nn11–14, 270 Southern Question, 4, 5, 224–49; in Franchetti’s Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, 224, 237–40, 241n20, 242–43; Meridiana on, 7; and national identity, 7; publicization of, 188; scholarship on, 7; in Villari’s Southern Letters, 194, 224, 225–36, 225n5, 228n9, 230– 31nn11–14. See also Meridionalism; La Sicilia nel 1876 Spagnoletti, Angelantonio, 110n30 Spaventa, Silvio, 152 Sperani, Bruno, 283 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 23–27, 26n23, 28, 36 St. John de Crèvecouer, J. Hector, 60n39 Staël, Madame de, 28, 28n28, 44n14. See also Corinne, or Italy Stallybrass, Peter, 170 Stampiglia, Silvio: Partenope, 61n43 “The State of the Finances in the Kingdom of Naples” (Cattaneo), 103–5, 109 Stendhal, 67–72; on Dupaty, 64n51; on Italians vs. the French, 70; on Naples as a capital, 72; on northern vs. southern man, 70–72, 71nn63– 64, 80–81; on the south as a land of spirit, 18; travel journals of, 67 Stoppani, Antonio: Il Bel Paese, 260n16 Storia della letteratura italiana (De Sanctis), 228n8 “Stories of the Castle of Trezza” (Verga), 213, 265, 266–71, 270n30, 294 Swinburne, Henry, 53n24 Tarchetti, Igino Ugo, 196–97 Tenca, Carlo, 106 textual production, geography of. See geography of textual production Thom, Martin, 66n56, 102 Tobia, Bruno, 205 Todorova, Maria, 6, 6n1

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Torelli-Viollier, Eugenio, 196, 212–13, 255n11, 262, 262n21, 264 Torraca, Francesco, 286, 286n57 A Tour through Sicily and Malta (Brydone), 57, 57n33 travelers to Naples and beyond, 55– 76; and Brydone’s Tour through Sicily and Malta, 57, 57n33; and civilization/modernity, 59–60, 60nn39–40; and climate, 59, 64– 65; criticism of Naples by, 61– 64, 61n45; and glory of past vs. degradation of present, 58, 58n36, 59–60; growth in numbers of, 55–56; and Hellenism, 56, 56nn28–29, 58, 59, 72; and Naples as musical center, 60–61, 61nn43–44, 74n68; and Naples as philosophical center, 61, 74n68; and Naples as primitive/savage, 64–65, 70–71, 195; and Naples vs. Africa, 57, 57n30, 64; and naturalization of Neapolitan activity, 65, 65n52, 118n45; and the picturesque, 65– 67; prejudices of, criticism of, 58, 58n37; Renan’s letters, 72–76, 74n68; and Riedesel’s Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland, 57–58nn33–34, 57–60; and Sade’s Voyage d’Italie, 62–64, 63nn48–49, 64n51; and Sicily as deep south, 56–57; Stendhal’s journals, 67, 70–72, 71nn63–64, 80–81; and Vesuvius and Etna, 56 Trevellini, L., 208–11, 210n28, 214, 215, 264 Treves, Emilio, 195, 196, 197–98, 198n15; Biblioteca di Viaggi, 255n11; La Sicilia, 255, 255n11; and Verga, 212, 213, 264–66, 270n29, 271–73; on Verga’s Cavalleria rusticana, 292; and Verga’s I Malavoglia, 282, 283n49, 285–86nn55–57. See also Illustrazione italiana Trinchera, Francesco: “The Neapolitan Question,” 144–47, 149–50, 152

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Tronto River (Italy), 183n35 Troya, Carlo, 133 Turiello, Pasquale, 225, 225n5 Turkey, governance of, 26 “Le ultime elezioni politiche in Italia” (Pantaleoni), 190–92 uncanniness, 76, 76n70 unification, 1, 3, 4, 156–83; and barbaric south vs. civilized north, 164–70, 165–66nn15–17, 168– 69nn19–20; correspondence about, 157–61, 157n3, 159nn5–6, 176; difficulties of, 156, 156n1; dissatisfaction/disillusionment with, 194; Garibaldi’s military actions, 156, 161, 180–81; and medical imagery, 172–76, 172n22, 175–76nn24–25, 177n27, 178, 178n31; military force under, 177n27, 178–83, 179n32, 182–83nn34–35; and moral mapping of Italy, 164, 170–72, 171n21; northernness vs. southernness accentuated by, 2, 4; parliamentary debate on the south, 166n16, 176–79, 177–78nn27–31; and Piedmontese attitude toward south, 161–62nn8–10, 161–64, 162–64nn12–14 urbanization, 195, 221 Usi popolari natalizi in Sicilia (Pitré), 272 Venturi, Franco, 15, 21, 41n4, 60n41, 77 Verdinois, Federigo, 283 Verga, Giovanni, 4–5, 121, 147, 188, 250–95; on Aci-Castello, 255, 255n9; on Aci-Trezza, 5, 66, 255, 275–76; “Across the Sea,” 289–91, 291n64, 291n67, 294; “L’amante di Gramigna,” 281; as critique of unification, 194; Eros, 265; Eva, 251, 253–57, 256–57nn12–15, 259–60, 262–63, 266, 267, 273n36, 294; “Fantasticheria,” 270n29, 275–77, 276–77nn42–43, 280, 281, 290, 294, 297–98, 298n1; and folklore studies,

273, 283–84, 294; and Franchetti, 5, 8, 273–74; and Illustrazione italiana, 5, 250, 272, 283, 292; Mastrodon Gesualdo, 292, 294, 294nn71– 72; on Milan, 196, 252–53; Novelle rusticane, 251, 256, 283, 285, 286– 89, 287n59, 288n61, 290, 294n72 (see also “Across the Sea”); “Padron ‘Ntoni,” 265, 271–75, 271n32, 273n33, 274n38; Una peccatrice, 266–67; and perspective, 9; and positivism, 194; on the railroad, 210n28; and Rassegna settimanale, 273–74, 273n36, 275, 286–87, 289; “Rosso Malpelo,” 250, 256, 274, 275, 277–80, 281, 282, 294n71, 298–99; the sea in works of, 256, 256n14, 266, 282, 287–88, 290, 294n72 (see also “Stories of the Castle of Trezza”); La Sicilia nel 1876’s influence on, 274–75, 274n39; as a Sicilian writer in Milan, 252–53, 252n4; and Sonnino, 5, 8, 273–74; and the Southern Question, emergence of, 5, 289; “Stories of the Castle of Trezza,” 213, 265, 266–71, 270n30, 294; and Treves, 212, 213, 264–66, 270n29, 271–73; verismo in works of, 250; Vita dei campi, 220n34, 278, 280– 86, 281n47, 288, 290. See also Cavalleria rusticana; I Malavoglia; “Nedda; A Sicilian Sketch” verismo, 194, 250 Vesuvius (Bay of Naples), 43–45, 44– 45nn14–15, 44n12, 56; in Cosmorama pittorico, 97, 99, 100; in Illustrazione italiana, 204, 214–15, 217; Leopardi on (see “La ginestra”); in paintings, 67 Vianelli, Achille: The Return from the Festival of the Madonna dell’Arco, 66–67, 69 Victor Emmanuel II, king of Italy, 156, 181, 187 Vieusseux, Giampietro, 89, 89n5 The View of the Channel of Ischia

Index at Piedigrotta (in Illustrazione italiana), 217, 218 Villamarina, Marquis de, 158, 159nn5– 6, 161–62, 161n8, 162n12, 182 Villari, Pasquale, 4, 36, 134n13, 152, 188, 219; “Ciò che gli stranieri non osservano in Italia,” 227; “Di chi è colpa?”, 194, 226; exile/death of, 225; influence of, 225; “Positive Philosophy and the Historical Method,” 193, 193n7; “La scuola e la questione sociale in Italia,” 225; Southern Letters, 194, 224, 225–36, 225n5, 228n9, 230– 31nn11–14, 270 Vita dei campi (Verga), 220n34, 278, 280–86, 281n47, 288, 290 volcanoes, 43–45, 44–45nn12–15, 56. See also Etna; Vesuvius

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Voyage d’Italie (Sade), 62–64, 63nn48–49, 64n51 Voyage pittoresque (Saint-Non), 65–66, 65n54, 68, 255 Waquet, Françoise, 19–20 A Wedding: A Local Custom from Basilicata (in Illustrazione italiana), 218–19, 219n33 White, Allon, 170 Winckelmann, Johann, 58, 58n35; History of Ancient Art, 42–43, 57n30 Wolff, Larry, 6, 6n1 Woolf, Stuart J., 21 Xavier, Giovanni, 50 Lo Zibaldone di Pensieri (Leopardi), 31–33, 35, 35n38

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