An Italian in Paris. De Amicis, the World Exposition of 1878, and the New Culture of Industrial Modernity

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between Italy and a new global culture developed in the nineteenth century through world’s fairs. It reconstructs the aspirations, reactions, and fears of a young nation on the eve of its industrialization through a report about the Paris Exposition of 1878, entitled Ricordi di Parigi (1879), by the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis. In introducing Italian readers to a new cosmopolitan culture, De Amicis’s text expresses Italy’s ambiguous position towards modernity — simultaneously striving to participate on the world stage, and to affirm its radical difference from it — and creates a narration of the 1878 event that successfully combines marginal and global points of view. By building a strong connection between Italian and French culture (notably through interviews with Hugo and Zola) and by engaging in a reflection on Paris as the alluring/deceiving symbol of a new city-world, De Amicis expands the journalistic scope of his book, turning it into an intellectual testimony to early industrialism (to be considered alongside more renowned testimonies by Marx and Baudelaire). Finally, we use social history and architecture to examine the relationship between the quest for an Italian style — reflected in the façade of national pavilions and in the design of national products — and the development of Italy’s approach to industrial modernity, conceived as a singular fusion of aesthetics, production, tradition, and innovation.