{"id":1093,"date":"2016-02-29T11:41:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T11:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1093"},"modified":"2016-03-06T22:55:12","modified_gmt":"2016-03-06T22:55:12","slug":"on-this-day-in-1816-italy-romanticism-and-the-year-without-a-summer-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1093","title":{"rendered":"On This Day in 1816: Italy, Romanticism, and the Year Without a Summer (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

We continue the ‘On This Day’ series\u00a0with a post on Italian Romanticism from\u00a0Fabio Camilletti<\/a>, who is Associate Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures,\u00a0University of Warwick. This post has two parts; the second will be posted\u00a0here next week.<\/em><\/p>\n

As always, to contribute a blog\u00a0to this series\u00a0about the bicentenary\u00a0of a significant event in 1816, please contact Anna Mercer<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

29 February 1816: Italy, Romanticism, and the Year Without a Summer (Part I)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Damn Bonaparte!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018Maladett Bonaparte!\u2019 \u2013 \u2018Damn Bonaparte!\u2019: thus ladies exclaimed around 1816 (at least, according to Stendhal\u2019s testimony), when approaching Porta Orientale, the ancient door of Milan \u2013 nowadays Porta Venezia \u2013 from whence the Alps could be seen at the end of the Corso, where aristocrats\u2019 carriages used to parade.<\/p>\n

\"Milan<\/a>

Milan – Corso di Porta Orientale<\/p><\/div>\n

For them, Stendhal records, the French Emperor was the cause of the early frosts experienced in Lombardy since the French Revolution: in opening the route of the Simplon, Napoleon must have breached the natural wall of the Alps, which had thus far sheltered the city from the inclemency of Northern winds.<\/p>\n

Together with the frost, Bonaparte had also brought something else. Many years later, in The Charterhouse of Parma <\/em>(1839), Stendhal credits to another breach opened by Napoleon \u2013 in 1796, at the bridge of Lodi, during the first Italian campaign \u2013 the opening of a deeper and far more incisive breach <\/em>in Italy\u2019s national consciousness, which had slumbered through centuries of political servitude and literary Classicism:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Battle of Lodi<\/p><\/div>\n

On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of the youthful army that had just crossed the bridge at Lodi [\u2026]. The miracles of valour and genius of which Italy was the witness within a few months re-awoke a slumbering people [\u2026] In the Middle Ages, the republican Lombards had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their town razed to the grounds by the emperors of Germany. Since they had become \u2018loyal subjects\u2019, their main business was printing sonnets on little pink taffeta handkerchiefs whenever a girl belonging to some noble or wealthy family happened to get married [\u2026] Such effeminate customs were a far cry from the profound emotions aroused by the unforeseen arrival of the French army. Soon new and passionate customs arose. An entire people realized, on 15 May 1796, that everything it had hitherto respected was supremely ridiculous and sometimes odious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1796, in other words, modernity<\/em> had made its entrance into Italy \u2013 under the guise of an army whose soldiers \u2018were not yet twenty-five and their commanding general, who was twenty-seven, passed for being the oldest man in his army\u2019. Exactly twenty years later, in 1816, with Napoleon defeated and exiled in Saint Helena, one could easily believe that time had turned back. On the 6th<\/sup> of January, the Austrian monarchs \u2013 restored to their throne by the Congress of Vienna \u2013 had shown themselves again on the Corso di Porta Orientale. On that evening, the theatre La Scala had witnessed the premiere of Il ritorno di Astrea<\/em>, a Classicist and apologetic piece by Vincenzo Monti celebrating the return to order. Italy, sang its chorus, was still alive and \u2018divine\u2019, but only by the favour of the Austrian Emperor. Italians \u2013 as well as Hungarians, the Moravians, and the Czechs \u2013 were back to their status of \u2018loyal subjects\u2019, all worshipping the Austrian throne that appeared in the middle of the scene \u2013 as per the libretto <\/em>\u2013 at the end of the piece.<\/p>\n

In sum, all evidence showed that the \u2018new and passionate customs\u2019 of 1796 had died \u2013 but was it really so? After all, some were still feeling that sonnets printed on handkerchiefs were odious. And, after all, it felt colder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Fall of the Sun<\/em><\/p>\n

In a sense, the ladies parading in the Corso were right. The years from 1812 to 1816 had been particularly severe. 1816, in particular, would become globally known as the \u2018year without a summer\u2019 \u2013 a year of rains and floods in the whole Atlantic area, plaguing economies that had already been weakened by the Napoleonic wars. Literary works of 1816 bear the traces of such devastation, coupled with the idea that the entire world is growing colder and darker. In Byron\u2019s lodgings in Geneva, the poet, his physician John Polidori, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont, inspired by the unusual climate of that summer, took pleasure in reading German ghost stories: weather propitiated the abandonment to \u2018Northern\u2019 and Gothic imaginary, and the narratives produced in those weeks \u2013 the thunderstorms of Frankenstein<\/em>, the blackened sun of Byron\u2019s Darkness<\/em>, the Swiss glaciers of Shelley\u2019s Mont Blanc<\/em> and of Polidori\u2019s Ernestus Berchtold<\/em> \u2013 are all marked by the vestiges of something obscure and apocalyptic that is impacting Europe, deeply interweaving reality and imagination.<\/p>\n

The \u2018year without a summer\u2019, as is nowadays well known, had most probably been caused by the eruption, on 10 April 1815, of the Indonesian volcano Tambora: ashes and toxic gases caused a remarkable lowering of temperatures all over the world for several years, giving birth to unusually cold summers, rigid winters, and hurricanes; volcanic ashes gave sunsets a brightly red colour, as portrayed in William Turner\u2019s canvases. Two months later, on 18 June 1815, an unexpected night rain had transformed the area surrounding the village of Mont Saint-Jean, near the Belgian town of Waterloo, into a sort of morass: the French army had had to wait for the sun to dry the wet ground, and when Napoleon had finally be able to draw his attack, late in the morning, cannons had remained blocked by the mud, leaving the Prussian troops the time to re-join the British infantry. On that evening, both armies had lost many men, but the British-Prussian coalition of Wellington and von Bl\u00fccher had won, and the French had been defeated.<\/p>\n

The connection between Waterloo and Tambora is merely speculative: there remains its involuntarily symbolic charm, and the idea that only some apocalyptic fatality could destroy the power of Napoleon, a sort of Icarus or Phaethon who had more ruinously fallen, the more he had attempted to ascend. Not incidentally, when commemorating Napoleon\u2019s death in the poem \u2018The Fifth of May\u2019 (1821), Alessandro Manzoni would surreptitiously evoke the mythologem of the reckless son of Apollo: Napoleon, once \u2018shining in his throne\u2019, has fallen; in his exile at Saint Helena, \u2018at the silent dying of a useless day\u2019, the Emperor\u2019s \u2018lightning eyes\u2019 \u2013 but Manzoni uses the lyrical term \u2018rai\u2019, literally meaning \u2018rays\u2019 \u2013 bend down, subtly delineating the image of a dying sun. By so doing, Manzoni transforms the chariot of Napoleon-Apollo of imperial iconography into the wrecked carriage of Phaethon: the sun of Austerlitz reveals itself to be a false star, betraying the folly and haughtiness of a usurper who had come to the point of defying God.<\/p>\n

\"Pierre-Nolasque<\/a>

Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, Allegory of the Battle of Austerlitz<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Apocalyptic Imaginaries<\/em><\/p>\n

Not only literature bears the traces of such symbolic short circuits. In the \u2018year without a summer\u2019 all Europe seems to be crossed by apocalyptic fears, a sort of post-traumatic aftermath of Waterloo, mixing science and superstition, political metaphors, and the entire panoply of the age\u2019s taste \u2013 from the grotesque to the sublime, and through the Gothic. Popular imagery often points to the sun as a seemingly dying star on the point of extinguishing or exploding. Rumours had spread about the planet getting colder, and between 1815 and 1816 spots had been seen on the surface of the sun. Both phenomena could be perfectly explicable: Carlo Riccati, a nobleman from Piedmont who had written a first-hand chronicle of the first two years of the Bourbon Restoration, explained through the data of the Milan observatory of Brera that temperature fluctuations and sunspots were perfectly natural. Still, the idea that the sun was extinguishing, and that a fragment of it was about to fall on earth, had run all over the continent. Rumours fixed the catastrophe for the 18th<\/sup> of July, and it is interesting \u2013 Riccati notes \u2013 how this whisper had been particularly welcomed in such a formerly revolutionary country as France: while travelling through France and the Brabant, in July 1816, one would have wondered \u2013 he writes \u2013 to see so many people believing in such superstitious ways among those who had lately erected temples to Reason.<\/p>\n

Finally, on the 26th<\/sup> of July, the newspaper Gazzetta di Milano<\/em> commented the \u2018ridiculous prophecy\u2019 that had been cheating so many between Alsace and Belgium. The article was ironic, but also ironic was its incidentally being followed by an article in praise of Wellington, including a meditation on Napoleon that reactivated, again, the image of Phaethon:<\/p>\n

Wellington was the first who dared to challenge Bonaparte when this latter, at the peak of his glory, aspired to rule the continent. Wellington made the dream of human ambition to vanish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is, therefore, as if an unconscious but tenacious knot encompassed \u2013 in the collective imaginary of 1816 \u2013 the falling sun and the ruination of Napoleon\u2019s star. The very distribution of the 18th<\/sup> of July gossip is eloquent: Paris, the Alsace, Belgium \u2013 that is to say, the military geography of the Hundred Days. On the 11th<\/sup> of July, Riccardi notes, people in Gand (less than 45 miles from Waterloo) had mistaken the trumpet of a cavalry regiment for that of the angel of the last day; like the French army, terror had invaded the entire Europe. Thus comments the Gazette de Lausanne<\/em> on the 23rd<\/sup> of July:<\/p>\n

18 July has passed, and this day, which had to be devastated by the most terrible cataclysm, has offered no other marvel than the return of nice weather. This terrible catastrophe of the planet has often been predicted, but never, perhaps, has terror exalted so many minds and run over so many countries. Since a month, all Belgian churches were full of anxious and fearful masses of people. In Germany there have been towns were people stopped working and disdained daily occupations. In Naples a priest has announced terrible devastations from the pulpit. In Paris, still on the 17th, travelling booksellers distributed a poor writing bearing the title of Details on the end of the world, gathering an alarmed people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The weather could well have improved, but what collective imaginary was confusedly trying to express, all over Europe, was the idea of a fracture from whence it was impossible to come back. The falling sun, the Northern winds coming from the Simplon, the very idea of something terrible and fateful that has forever changed Europe and the world, unchaining the fury of elements, are nothing but ways of metabolizing and elaborating a historical transition: Napoleon \u2013 and, more broadly, the French Revolution and the war, in a word: modernity \u2013 was seen as having dissolved the timeless connection binding humankind and nature, opening a fissure between a pre-modern, Arcadian world and a new, enlightened and technicized, one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Et In Arcadia Ego<\/em><\/p>\n

On 29 February 1816, in Milan, the weather was fine; temperature, however, had remained low, at least if compared to contemporary standards \u2013 between 4 and 10-15 degrees, in February-March \u2013 oscillating between 2 degrees in the morning and 5.5 degrees in the afternoon. This data is taken from the measurements of the Milan observatory of Brera, published as an appendix to each volume of Biblioteca italiana<\/em>, a literary and scientific journal printed in Milan and directly funded by the Austrian government. On that day, the first issue of the periodical made its first appearance: the journal was opened by a short text by Madame de Sta\u00ebl, Sulla maniera e la utilit\u00e0 delle Traduzioni<\/em> (On the Custom and Usefulness of Translations<\/em>), which \u2013 as the following months would make clear \u2013 was to be the inaugural act of the so-called \u2018Classicist\/Romantic quarrel\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Biblioteca<\/a>

Biblioteca Italiana vol. 1, 1816<\/p><\/div>\n

The debate would enflame Italy for years, dividing those who felt that it was necessary for Italian literature to open itself to the literary novelties coming from the rest of Europe (the \u2018Romantics\u2019) and those who reclaimed, instead, the legacy of Classical tradition as the most characteristic trait of Italian identity. In years of political and cultural censorship, the quarrel incorporated and challenged, under the guise of a literary skirmish, a deeply political problem concerning Italian identity and its role within the broader scenario of modern Europe. While Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich contemptuously claimed that Italy was \u2018a geographical expression\u2019, the quarrel raised questions that would deeply permeate Italy\u2019s later cultural history: the onerous heritage of its historical past, its troubled transition into modernity, its ambiguous relationship with foreign cultures and their \u2018lure of Italy\u2019 \u2013 in many cases, a badly dissimulated colonial attitude.<\/p>\n

Of this attitude, Sta\u00ebl\u2019s article was a perfect example. She made a conventional paean of praise to Italian culture and its tradition: still, Sta\u00ebl could not help but noticing how Italian culture had lost its central and propulsive role, and how the most lively cultural experiences were now taking place elsewhere, in the \u2018rest of Europe\u2019, \u2018beyond the Alps\u2019, in the North. Even Italy\u2019s sun, an already outworn Grand Tour clich\u00e9, was almost useless, for a people \u2013 such as the Italian \u2013 plagued by centuries of Classicism and sterile classical philology: presently, it was nothing but a motionless star, shining over a landscape made of ruins and tombs.<\/p>\n

\"5.<\/a>

Sablet’s El\u00e9gie romaine, 1791<\/p><\/div>\n

This image was combined, in the article\u2019s ending, with an insulting consideration of the role of Italy in the Europe to come, relegating it to an unspecified \u2018prestige\u2019 in literature and the arts:<\/p>\n

nations must have some interest moving them. Some have it in the war, some in politics: Italian must find their prestige in literature and the arts, without which they would lie in a dark sleep, whence even the sun could not awake them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fracture between North and South, and between cold and warm, aimed thus at delineating a specific political and cultural geography, placing Italy in a subaltern position against Transalpine Europe: an equation between climate and the national inclinations grounded in the thought of the French Enlightenment, but which in 1816 could possess far more literal resonances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We continue the ‘On This Day’ series\u00a0with a post on Italian Romanticism from\u00a0Fabio Camilletti, who is Associate Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures,\u00a0University of Warwick. This post… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1093"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}