Romanticism in Italy
Romanticism in Italy was a distinctive blend of European romantic ideals and Italian cultural traditions. It emphasized relationship with nature, emotion, imagination and individual freedom, as well as reevaluating the spiritual, religious, and historical aspects of national identity, generating a desire for political union.
Romantic culture in Italy thus played a key role in the Risorgimento, tying itself to the struggle for national unity. While sharing common ground with Romanticism elsewhere in Europe, such as opposition to the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism, Italian Romanticism developed distinctive characteristics influenced by Italy's own classical heritage and its unique political context.
Early developments
Italian Romanticism found its early development influenced by the Napoleonic era and its dramatic shifts in political landscapes and social structures.The experience of the Jacobin republics contributed to the convergence of two factors: the desire for independence from foreign domination, and the need for liberal reforms, that would guarantee freedom of thought, in economy and religion, against the despotism of absolutist regimes.
File:Ugo Foscolo.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.7|Portrait of Ugo Foscolo by François-Xavier Fabre
Among the first pre-Romantic authors, influenced nevertheless by classicism, Vittorio Alfieri in his tragedies exalted individual heroism against all tyranny, including that arising from the French Revolution, and incited the redemption of the homeland and the struggle for self-affirmation.
Ugo Foscolo imbued the concept of homeland with sentimental and even epic or mythological meanings, and actively worked to awaken Italians' national consciousness and desire for freedom. In The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, inspired by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the cemetery poem Sepulchres, Foscolo combined classicist themes, including the cult of antiquities, with typically Romantic sensibilities, exploring feelings such as pain, joy, passionate love, and inner torment.
Another example of cemetery poetry along the English lines is in Ippolito Pindemonte, permeated with a melancholic spirit. Following the model of Giuseppe Parini, Vincenzo Monti also combines classicism with patriotism, looking to Dante and Petrarch as the founders of Italian national feeling.
As regards the legal and political reflection of the late eighteenth century, a strong link with the philosophical principles of the Italian Enlightenment was maintained, although Vincenzo Cuoco, who examined the failure of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, anticipated romantic and proto-nationalist themes by referring to Giambattista Vico; he highlighted the need to defend the historical specificities of peoples, with their "customs" and traditions, against the abstract application of universal principles.
The literary debate on Romanticism
A controversy between classicists and romantics broke out in January 1816, the date on which Italian Romanticism is usually officially begun, when the French writer Madame de Staël published in Milan, on the magazine Biblioteca Italiana, her article On the manner and utility of translations, in which she invited Italians to know and translate foreign literatures as a means of renewing their own culture.Young intellectuals such as Pietro Borsieri, Giovanni Berchet, Ludovico di Breme, firmly sided with the romantic renewal advocated by Staël, while others such as Pietro Giordani remained faithful to the principles of classicism.
Berchet wrote a pamphlet entitled Grisostom's Semi-Serious Letter to His Son, considered the manifesto of Italian Romanticism, for which true poetry springs from the popular spirit. Di Breme defined Romanticism as «the liberation of the soul from the constraints of old forms and as a creative impulse»; he was among the founders of a new liberal magazine, Il Conciliatore, organ of romantic school established in 1818 at Milan, whose members included, in addition to Borsieri, Berchet, di Breme, Silvio Pellico, Tommaso Grossi, Maroncelli, Scalvini, Confalonieri, Lambertenghi, Romagnosi, but their activity was nipped in the bud by Austrian censorship, which imprisoned many of them or forced them into exile.
The experience of the Conciliatore, which was addressed to the most progressive bourgeoisie and aimed to involve italian people in the diffusion of romantic sentiment and patriotic ideals, was taken up in Florence by the journal L'Antologia, founded by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux and Gino Capponi; in Naples by Giuseppe Ricciardi's Il Progresso, which Baldacchini and Cagnazzi collaborated on.
Meanwhile, the uprisings of the Risorgimento following the Restoration of Conservative Order were already spreading across the peninsula, and to these tensions Italian Romantic literature would prove closely linked. More than any other form of literature, Romanticism was committed to the construction of a national identity. At least in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was less concerned with defining strategies of struggle and institutional forms of government, and more focused on moralistic, humanitarian, and pedagogical aims.
Manzoni and Leopardi
The main instigator of a national redemption was Alessandro Manzoni. He formulated the objects of the new Romantic school, saying that it aspired to try to discover and express "the true historian" and "the moral truth", not only as an end, but as the widest and eternal source of the beautiful, against mythological-pagan "fictions". It is realism that characterizes Italian literature from Manzoni onwards.Although starting from Enlightenment and neoclassical positions, shaped by the models of Giuseppe Parini and Cesare Beccaria, he developed his own personal vision of Romanticism, influenced by his religious conversion to the Catholic faith and by his conception of history as marked by Divine Providence.
Hid historical novel The Betrothed is the work that has made him immortal. The idea of the historical novel came to him from Sir Walter Scott, but he succeeded in something more than an historical novel in the narrow meaning of that word; he created an eminently realistic work of art.
So The Betrothed is generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language, understandable by both scholars and common people.
In it, Manzoni dives down into the innermost recesses of the human heart, and draws thence the most subtle psychological reality. In this his greatness lies, which was recognized first by his companion in genius, Goethe. As a poet too he had gleams of genius, especially in the Napoleonic ode, The Fifth of May, and where he describes human affections, as in some stanzas of the Hymns and in the chorus of the Adelchi. But it is on the Bethored alone that his fame now rests.
File:Leopardi, Giacomo - ritr. A Ferrazzi, Recanati, casa Leopardi.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|Portrait of Giacomo Leopardi by Stanislao Ferrazzi
The great poet of the age was Giacomo Leopardi, born thirteen years after Manzoni at Recanati, of a patrician family, bigoted and avaricious. He became so familiar with Greek authors that he used afterwards to say that the Greek mode of thought was more clear and living to his mind than the Latin or even the Italian. Solitude, sickness, domestic tyranny, prepared him for profound melancholy. From this he passed into complete religious scepticism, from which he sought rest in art.
Everything is terrible and grand in his poems, but besides being the greatest poet of nature and of sorrow, he was also an admirable prose writer. In his Operette morali, dialogues and discourses marked by a cold and bitter smile at human destinies that freezes the reader, the clearness of style, the simplicity of language and the depth of conception are such that perhaps he is not only the greatest lyrical poet since Dante, but also one of the most perfect writers of prose that Italian literature has had.
He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century Although he was educated in the Enlightenment culture, he highlights its negative and destructive aspects, and despite his pessimistic materialism he maintains a paradoxical relationship with Platonism, which does not cancel but rather exalts the «eternal mystery/ of our being», reaching an unconscious harmony with German Romanticism, even though he has nothing in common with Idealism.
Patriotic and political literature
Manzoni's pedagogical realism inspired the spread of the historical novel, which included works by Massimo d'Azeglio, Tommaso Grossi, Cesare Cantù, Giovanni Ruffini, Silvio Pellico, Luigi Capranica, Niccolò Tommaseo and others.Their novels conveyed patriotic ideals behind events set in the distant past, especially the Middle Ages, to circumvent Austrian censorship.
File:Del Primato Morale e Civile degli Italiani.jpg|thumb|upright=0.7|Moral and civil Primacy of Italians, in which Gioberti defended the moral supremacy of Italy as a «princely nation».
But after 1840, even history returned to its spirit of learned research, from the manner of Botta and Colletta, as is shown in such works as the Archivio storico italiano, established at Florence by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, the History of Italy in the Middle Ages by Carlo Troya, a remarkable treatise by Manzoni himself, and the fine history of the Sicilian Vespers by Michele Amari.
The literary movement that preceded and was contemporary with the political revolution of 1848 may be said to be represented by four writers: Giuseppe Giusti, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Vincenzo Gioberti and Cesare Balbo. Giusti wrote epigrammatic satires in popular language. Guerrazzi had a great reputation and great influence, but his historical novels, though avidly read before 1848, were soon forgotten. Gioberti was a powerful polemical writer; his Moral and civil Primacy of Italians will last as an important document of the times, manifesto of Neo-Guelphism which recalling the medieval Guelphs outlined the goal of a national federation of the various Italian states, of which Catholic universalism would be the religion that defined Italian identity, since «Italy is the most cosmopolitan of nations». Like Gioberti in his early years, Balbo was zealous for a civil papacy and a federation of Italian states, but presided over by the House of Savoy; his Summary of the History of Italy is an excellent example.
By contrast, Giusti and Guerrazzi called themselves neo-Ghibellines, personified also by Pepe, Cattaneo, Ferrari, Sismondi, La Farina, and the playwright Giovanni Battista Niccolini.
Patriotic literature was still expressed in the novel Confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo, about the exploits of Giuseppe Garibaldi's Thousand.
Late Romanticism was represented, among others, by Francesco Dall'Ongaro, Giovanni Prati, Aleardo Aleardi.