"'That both English and Italians ... may be civil and humane to each other': l''Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy' di Giuseppe Baretti"

The essay focuses on Giuseppe Baretti’s "Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy" published in London in 1768 as a firm refutation of Samuel Sharp’s slanderous "Letters from Italy" (1765) and of the books written by “those other English writers, who after a short tour have ventured to describe Italy and the Italians”. In the Preface, Baretti ascribes their distorted reports about the Bel Paese to “premature and rash judgments” and sets out to provide the English public with a new account of Italian life and culture interspersed with observations on the mistakes of those travelers whose only aim was to write fashionable books full of “slander and invective” just to please their readers’ “malignity and love of novelty”. His account results in an illuminating cultural document in which Italy is ‘explained’ to the English by an Italian intellectual long accustomed to England and English life. This allows him not only to ‘deconstruct’ Sharp’s book by punctually rebutting the prejudices and stereotypes Doctor Sharp shared with many of his contemporaries, but also to provide the reader with pregnant comparisons between the two countries. The essay also points out that Baretti’s position somewhat mirrors that of the traditional travel writer: while the latter usually reports upon a foreign nation to his fellow countrymen often surrendering, as it happens in Sharp’s "Letters", to common views and preconceived ideas, Baretti writes a book about his own country for the benefit of a foreign audience, whose culture and mentality he nevertheless knows well enough to be able to orientate his account in order to make it as appealing as possible to his English readers. A careful negotiation on the part of the author is therefore necessary, which the paper unveils in both its cultural components and argumentative strategies.