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Viaggiatori, avventurieri, émigrés. Fenomeni di migrazione culturale settecentesca nella storiografia letteraria risorgimentale e postrisorgimentale

Additional information

Authors
Type
Book chapter
Year
2019
Language
Italian
Abstract
Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new critical attention was devoted to phenomena of cultural mobility and ‘migration’ among Italian intellectuals of the 18th century. As Arturo Graf maintained in his seminal "L’Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII" (1911), these ‘pilgrimages [...] of literati and scientists, taken with that culture and its civil customs, or prompted by hopes of a better future’ turned into actual ‘relocations’. Starting from Cesare Balbo’s invitation to write ‘a magnificent and peculiar history of the Italians outside Italy’ ("Sommario della Storia d’Italia dalle origini fino ai nostri giorni", 1846-47), this paper will investigate the hypothesis according to which the late 19th- early 20th-century critical interest in these ‘relocations’ was still influenced by the Risorgimento. The analysis will take into account Leo Benvenuti’s "Dizionario degli italiani all’estero" (1890), overtly inspired by Balbo in its intention to provide a helpful tool for the writing of that history, as well as the more ambitious essays by Alessandro D’Ancona ("Viaggiatori e avventurieri", 1912) and Benedetto Croce ("L’elemento italiano nella società europea del Settecento", 1926-27), still referable, though implicitly, to Balbo.
Book
Mediazioni letterarie: itinerari, figure e pratiche, a cura di E. Di Pastena
Publisher
Pisa, University Press, vol. I
Start page number
261
End page number
279