Hygiene in the Harem: The Orientalism of Cristina di Belgioioso

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If Edward Said wrote little about Italian Orientalism (with the excep? tion of asides to Marco Polo and Dante), it is likely in large part because Italy has no Flaubert, no Gautier, no Nerval; no Lane, no Burton, no George Eliot; no major canonical writers who traveled to, imagined, researched, and wrote about the Orient in the nineteenth century. Italian Orientalism has correspondingly not been the topic of the kind of scholarly analysis we have seen in the British and French contexts since the 1978 publication of Said's Orientalism. And yet if Italy's canonical novelists did not share the fascination of the Brit? ish and French with the Orient, preoccupied as they were with the internally imagined geographies of north and south, Italy does have a long tradition of what we now classify as travel writing: accounts by merchants, explorers, exiles and emigrants too numerous to count. Among these is the mid-nineteenth-century princess-patriot and anti emancipationist feminist, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso, whose politi? cal exile in Anatolia in the 1850s provided the occasion for Belgioioso to take up the Orientalist tradition with reformist zeal. An active proponent of Italian Unification, Belgioioso sought politi? cal exile in the 1830s in order to escape retribution from the Austrian authorities; she chose France, already in many senses her intellectual and cultural home.1 After the failure of the revolutions of 1848