"Con occhi di donna: 'The Idler in Italy' della Contessa di Blessington"

On 25 August 1822 Margaret Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, left England to- gether with her younger sister, Mary Ann, and her second husband, Charles John Gardiner, for a journey on the continent which, in the footsteps of the Grand Tour- ists of the 18th century, led her to spend a long period of time in France and Italy, in particular Genoa, Florence and Naples. A friend to several outstanding literary figures of the period (Lord Byron and Walter Savage Landor among others), she was involved in a lifelong relationship with Count Alfred d’Orsay and led quite a daring life for her times. She wrote several novels and described her Grand Tour experience in two travel books, The Idler in Italy and The Idler in France, which were quite successful at the time of their publication, respectively in 1839 and 1841. Her travelogues convey the image of a clever resourceful woman, whose gaze on reality goes well beyond the limits of landscape description or the annotation of tempo- rary impressions: she often ponders on female nature and on gender relationships, now and then also proposing insightful comparisons between women in different countries. A reading of her Idler in Italy helps us delineate a picture of the female condition in this period of transition, in the early years of a reign, Queen Victoria’s, during which the debate on women and their role in society will develop in different contexts and at different levels.