Reviewed by: Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom Peter Vassallo Roderick Cavaliero , Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), pp. 246. £20 hb. 1850434263. This book , as the blurb claims, is a vivid history of the English Romantics' love affair with Italy. Roderick Cavaliero sets this love affair in pre-unification Italy – the romance of Italy as perceived in the political and literary imagination of travellers in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. Cavaliero guides the reader expertly through the chequered history of Italia – a country of splendid ruins which enticed the educated gentleman on the Grand Tour – with genial good [End Page 279] humour and learning worn lightly, with studied nonchalance ('sprezzatura'), reminiscent of Castiglione's accomplished Courtier. Italia Romantica charts the Romantic vision of Italy as it was developed by the second generation English Romantic poets and by travellers and writers, men and women, who were enchanted or disenchanted by the ideal Italia they had read about and by their actual encounter with Italian customs, art, literature, politics and in some cases, banditti. Throughout the book Cavaliero skilfully blends historical fact with peculiar contemporary anecdote culled both from known and rare sources, thereby giving this lively survey its fascinating readability. In Chapter 1 Cavaliero conjures up glimpses of Italy, especially Rome and Naples, in the first decadeof the nineteenth century, through the personal impressions of numerous travellers who were entranced by the sublimity of its monuments and landscape and yet appalled by the apparent degradation of its people, as Shelley had observed.He is particularly adept at evoking the atmosphereof Romantic Rome, its beauty, its rowdiness and its squalor, around the time when Keats eked out his 'posthumous existence' in rented rooms above the Piazza di Spagna, tenderly nursed by his loyal friend, the artist Joseph Severn. Familiar ground is covered through an unfamiliar route: tourists sampling 'minestra' in trattorie or seated uncomfortably in the boisterous open boxes of the theatre or gaping at the decorative interiors of baroque churches – all this set against the wider historical dimension of post – Napoleon Italy, freshly awakening to a vision of a liberated nation. Another chapter focuses retrospectively on the 'fatal beauty' of Italy which attracted hordes of ravaging armies despoiling herof many of her monuments and works of art which Byron trenchantly deplored in Canto Four of Childe Harold. Cavaliero also reflects on the fashion, or passion, for art- collecting among well-to-do Grand Tourists who, while 'getting the classics out of their system', deprived the country of some of its valuable objets d'art. A central chapter deals extensively with the impact of Madame de Stael's seminal romantic novel Corinne or Italy (1807) on the sensibility of travellers to Italy and which conditioned their awed response to Italian history, literature and art. Byron, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, had come under Corinne's spell, especially its interweaving of aesthetics and politics, and Cavaliero traces this book's remarkable reputation in Europe. The influence of Italian literature especially Dante, Ariosto and Tassois competently surveyed and Cavaliero demonstrates how the Italian strain (especially the ottava rima burlesque style), adapted and anglicized by John Hookham Frere affected the English Romantic poets, Byron in particular, who appropriated it in Beppo, The Vision of Judgment and Don Juan. In subsequent chapters Cavaliero ranges widely over romantic drama (Felicia Hemans's The Vespersof Palermo), Italian opera (Verdi's opera on this theme, I Vesperi Siciliani), rare first-hand accounts of spectacular volcanic eruptions (Vesuvius and Etna) and an engaging chapter on brigandage and banditry. Showing how Ann Radcliff had created an appetite for bandits among her readers, Cavaliero proceeds to give an informed account of the gangs of bandits who congregated around Naples and the Abruzzi, regaling the reader with lively anecdotes of banditry culled from a variety of unusual sources. His narration of the fortunes of the notorious bandit Michele Arcangelo Pezza ( nicknamed 'Fra Diavolo') is particularly striking and told with considerable verve. The final chapters deal with the rise of the Phoenix from its ashes – Italy slowly and laboriously shaking off the yoke of foreign tyranny, the flickering of Mazzini's dream of Italian...