Unlike many nineteenth-century British travelers and expatriates who left detailed accounts of Italy, Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) never wrote a travelogue nor did he extensively comment on his Tuscan experience first in Florence, at Palazzo Medici and Villa Castiglione, then in Fiesole at Villa Gherardesca, which he bought in 1829 and where he lived until 1835. Nevertheless, much of his literary production – both in verse and in prose – is interspersed with hints at Italy and his best known and most acclaimed work, Imaginary Conversations, features a lot of Italian historical and literary characters, both of the past and of the present. Landor certainly intended to provide his English readers with a first-hand insight into contemporary Italian history, while dialogues in which he himself appears as one of the interlocutors focus on topics concerning customs and manners of the Bel Paese. Landor’s picture of Italy is inferable not only from his "Conversations", but also from such writings as "High and Low Life in Italy", his epistolary autobiographical novel, serialized by Leigh Hunt in the "Monthly Repository". This might throw interesting light both on his attitude towards Italian history, life and literature, and on his own Weltanschauung, revealing the idiosyncrasies of an intellectual who, like many contemporary British exiles, chose Italy as a refuge from the cultural and political claustrophobia of his motherland.
"England (...) thou canst not show what charmed me there": Walter Savage Landor's Italy"
FERRARI, ROBERTA
2013-01-01
Abstract
Unlike many nineteenth-century British travelers and expatriates who left detailed accounts of Italy, Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) never wrote a travelogue nor did he extensively comment on his Tuscan experience first in Florence, at Palazzo Medici and Villa Castiglione, then in Fiesole at Villa Gherardesca, which he bought in 1829 and where he lived until 1835. Nevertheless, much of his literary production – both in verse and in prose – is interspersed with hints at Italy and his best known and most acclaimed work, Imaginary Conversations, features a lot of Italian historical and literary characters, both of the past and of the present. Landor certainly intended to provide his English readers with a first-hand insight into contemporary Italian history, while dialogues in which he himself appears as one of the interlocutors focus on topics concerning customs and manners of the Bel Paese. Landor’s picture of Italy is inferable not only from his "Conversations", but also from such writings as "High and Low Life in Italy", his epistolary autobiographical novel, serialized by Leigh Hunt in the "Monthly Repository". This might throw interesting light both on his attitude towards Italian history, life and literature, and on his own Weltanschauung, revealing the idiosyncrasies of an intellectual who, like many contemporary British exiles, chose Italy as a refuge from the cultural and political claustrophobia of his motherland.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
