Masked faces. Verdi, Uncle Tom and the unification of Italy

Abstract

This article explores Italian images of America during the Risorgimento and the time of Italy's unification. At the centre of this investigation are two remarkably painful theatrical representations of life in the New World: Verdi's 1859 opera Un ballo in maschera, set in seventeenth-century Boston; and Rota's 1852 ballet Bianchi e neri, based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's epic novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Often performed together during the same evening, both works presented Italians with an extremely disturbing image of America, a negation of Italy's own cultural values. The article reads these theatrical representations of America within a wider context of Italian debates on the United States. Italians did not always look at life in America as a political, social or constitutional model; and if in the eyes of many Italians the United States became an epitome of modernity later in the nineteenth century, they did not necessarily identify with the particular model of modernity America stood for. The article argues that historians have tended to overlook some of the complexities of Italy's image of America.