Beyond the Grand Tour : unearthly Italy

Abstract

'I have been between Heaven & earth since our arrival at Venice. The Heaven of it is ineffable-Never have I touched the skirts of so celestial a place' Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in in June 1851: 'The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water up between all that gorgeous colour & carving, the enchanting silence, the moonlight, the music, the gondolas.' Her notion of being in touch with both the divine and the earthly provides my way into the 'Beyond the Grand Tour' theme for this issue of the Anglo-Italian Journal. In this essay, I shall examine the peculiar way in which Romantic writers in Italy are drawn to the figures of enchantment as a way of testing how human craftsmanship might generate-in both positive and negative ways-the otherworldly or the unearthly. I am not, of course, claiming that Italy has a monopoly on ideas of the 'beyond': when Ruskin rhapsodises over the Simplon Pass and the Rhone's 'unearthly acqua-marine, ultramarine, violet-blue, gentian blue, peacock-blue, river of paradise blue, glass of a painted window meted in the sun', he veers joyously between earthly and unearthly images, but he is still on the other side of the Alps.