Authenticating Italy : poetry, tourism and Browning's 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬

Abstract

'I sail this morning for Venice - intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes.' So Robert Browning wrote of his poem Sordello in April I 838, succinctly articulating what would remain for him a guiding creative principle: poetry needed place. To complete the troublesome Sordello, at which he had labored sporadically for five years, Browning sought something intangible, something that could be provided only by immersion in Italy. Twenty-five years later, in what would become his longest and, by most accounts, his signature work of Italy - The Ring and the Book- Browning again identified his creative process as one of discovery, a 'pilgrimage/O'er old unwandered waste ways of the world,' hoping to 'chance upon some fragment of a whole, I Rag of flesh, scrap of bone in dim disuse' (I.750-753).