THE IMAGE OF ITALY AND THE ITALIAN IN ENGLISH TRAVEL BOOKS: 1800-190

From the days of Chaucer to the end of the nineteenth century English interest in Italy and things Italian proved to be an enduring force of considerable importance. Though it waned in the latter part of the seventeenth century, this interest survived to return with renewed fervor during the Romantic age and lingered on long afterwards. The fascination that Italy exercised on the English psyche during these five hundred years is of a complex and ambiguous nature, and it can rightly be termed one based on love/hate attitudes.;On the one hand, Italy was a strong magnet for the enlightened English traveller, for it offered incomparable scenery, extraordinary antiquities and the cultural refinements of a civilization that was already old when England's was still barbaric. On the other hand, the cultivation of pleasure that the Italians practiced and the sensual life-force that seemed to emanate from the very soil of Italy overwhelmed the puritanical northern intellect, and the English traveller either took refuge in indignant self-righteousness or reduced Italy to a series of pathos-filled perspectives. Not until the late decades of the nineteenth century did English visitors to Italy allow themselves to flow with the current of her life-force and draw from it spiritually revitalizing qualities.;Regardless of their response to the Italian experience, the travel-authors undoubtedly played a major role in sustaining English interest in Italy, for their travel books kept the image of Italy and the Italians alive in the mind of the English reading public.;Though the attitudes of the travel-authors towards things Italian varied sharply from Addison to Gissing, there is a psychological impetus common to all of them--an extraordinary attraction towards Italy and a desire to establish a fruitful, creative relationship with the finer qualities of life that Italy had to offer. This desire, however, remained largely unfulfilled. At best the English traveller could take back to England what John Symonds called "glittering fragments" of the "mythopoetic" world of the Mediterranean, and the realization that it was a world no longer accessible to the over-civilized English psyche.