Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi windows, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de voyage, and the Italian national uprisings of 1847-9

Abstract

Throughout the 1840s, the Italians were a people in search of a myth of national liberation. There was no shortage of candidates for this role; this decade was, in the words of Derek Beales, 'the great age of Risorgimento writing', with thinkers and propagandists as diverse as Mazzini, D' Azeglio and Gioberti outlining their respective visions of the shape which any future Italian nation state ought to assume. The election of Pio Nono to the Papal throne in June 1846 led, however, to the clear ascendancy of one of these myths; namely, the Neo-Guelphism of Tommaseo and Gioberti, which saw in the Pope the potential saviour and liberator of Italy. This was the period of what the historian Ghisalberti calls the 'idillio italico-papale', the Italian people, encouraged by the liberal acts with which Pio Nono inaugurated his reign, projected onto him their desires for a free and united country. This 'idyll' was, however, brought to an abrupt end by the Pope's actions during the conflicts of 1848-9, beginning with the famous 'Allocution', by means of which he distanced himself from the conflict with Austria, and culminating in the restoration of his temporal power with the aid of foreign arms. Faced with such incontrovertible evidence, the Italian people abandoned Neo-Guelphism and resumed its search for a myth of national liberation in other directions; as Ghisalberti, again, puts it, 'il popolo, costretto a rinunciare alla troppo seducente identificazione di Pio Nono con il Papa della Lega Lombarda ... comincio a abbandonare il suo idolo, in cerca di nuovi illusioni e di nuovi miti'.