Introduction : 'Un Paese Tutto Poetico' – Byron in Italy, Italy in Byron
1 Introduction : ‘Un paese tutto poetico’ – Byron in Italy, Italy in Byron Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia Th e connection between Byron and Italy is one of the most familiar facts about British Romanticism. 1 Th e poet’s many pronouncements about the country (where he lived between 1816 and 1823), its his- tory, culture and people, as well as about his own experiences in Italy and among Italians, are well known and part of his legend. More particularly, Byron’s debauchery in Venice and would- be heroics in Ravenna are often known even to those acquainted with the poet’s biography only in its most simplifi ed versions. In contrast, though the critical panorama has been changing in recent years, serious attention to Byron’s literary engagement with Italy has tended to be discon- tinuous. Yet he wrote much of his greatest poetry in Italy, and under its infl uence, poetry that would have a profound bearing not only on the literature but also the wider culture, history and politics of the whole of Europe, and not least Italy itself. As a result, Byron’s relationship with Italy, and the poetry it pro- duced, speaks to a much broader modern- day audience than simply a literary one. Th is book bears witness to this fundamental fact about Byron’s Italian writings by relating the texts Byron wrote in Italy to numerous features of early nineteenth- century European (and par- ticularly, of course, Italian) culture, and highlighting many of their hugely infl uential contributions to the histories of all kinds of lit- erary and non- literary discourses concerning, for example, identity (personal, national and European), politics, ethnography, geography, religion – even tourism.
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