Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Florence

Abstract

In the eighteenth century a distinct brand of Anglomania started to flourish in Italian literary circles, soon mirrored by a growing interest in Britain for all things Italian.1 Suffice to mention, as examples of these early, sporadic connections, Melchiorre Cesarotti’s acclaimed Italian translation of Ossian’s poems (1782) and, later, the exiled Ugo Foscolo’s essays on Dante and Petrarch published in the prestigious Edinburgh Review (1818). During the following decades a more sustained interest in Italian culture as a whole – as well as in the country’s political changes taking place through the Risorgimento – fostered more regular exchange between the Italian peninsula and Britain.2 Amongst the British elites, in particular, the intellectual, theorist and activist Giuseppe Mazzini and the writer Alessandro Manzoni rapidly achieved fame as iconic figures symbolizing Italy’s process of political liberation from foreign oppressors. In the years that followed the Italian unification, the city of Florence gained prominence as the geographical fulcrum of an activity of cosmopolitan cultural exchange between British and Italian intellectuals that had not had notable precedent in the history of the two nations. Late nineteenth-century Florence nurtured what has been described as ‘a distinct fin-de-siecle anglomania’:3 it was the Italian city where English culture circulated most extensively in its fashionable literary salons and lively publishing scene. These modern forms of transnational interactions (widespread in but not limited to Anglo-Italian circles) did not remain isolated, but rather played an important role in shaping the international literary profile of the Tuscan centre. This article discusses one of these cosmopolitan cultural exchanges between two leading figures in the fin-de-siecle Florentine Anglo-Italian