Voices on China in early nineteenth-century Italian culture (1800–1850)

Abstract

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards, the testimonies of and studies on China grew in number in Europe and gave rise to a rich repertoire of historical, travel, memoir, scholarly and diplomatic literature of increasing importance. This surge in information on, communication with and representation of the Chinese world within European opinion continued to intensify at the beginning of the nineteenth century, revealing mainly critical attitudes towards China. This was in contrast with the way, in the seventeenth century and into the middle of the eighteenth, China had been the object of admiration and even of idealization in Europe. How did Italy, from the second half of the eighteenth century, participate in this great European debate over China? The existing literature investigated some eighteenth-century figures but without reconstructing in any comprehensive way the sources and channels through which Italian culture developed an image of China, in a dialogue with European culture. This chapter analyses the way in which Italian culture participated in this European debate, focusing on authors and works from the beginning of the nineteenth century, little considered so far for the reconstruction of this chapter in the history of Italian culture. Early nineteenth-century Italian culture expressed a lively interest in China with various publishing initiatives of a different nature and character. This chapter takes into consideration some of these publications, notably those by Giulio Ferrario, Cesare Cantù, Davide Bertolotti, Giuseppe La Farina, Giandomenico Romagnosi and Onorato Martucci. They allow us to follow the evolution of the vision of China proposed to the Italian reader in the period prior to the appearance of Carlo Cattaneo's and Giuseppe Ferrari's important writings on China, respectively in 1861 and 1865. This contribution is intended to show not just the lively interest towards Chinese history and civilization in Italian culture, in relationship with the most advanced European knowledge on the subject, but also the persistence of the Enlightenment legacy and its contribution to the development of a true global perspective. 1