The Garden of the World: Byron and the Geography of Italy

Longing as an inner form of the perception of reality saturates Romanticism, in explicit formulas, such as Schlegel's "Senhnsucht nach dem Unendlichen,"or in symbols, as in Shelley's Alastor. Italian Romantic landscapes emphasize this striving for wholeness subsided into a phenomenology of fragmentation. They also provide a shared code, part of a language familiar to all those European artists who wanted to intervene in the controversy on modernity and the classics. In the IV Canto of Childe Harold, Byron draws constant attention to landscape, as a material "element of the mind". In Byron's multifarious Italian iconology, the landscape intensifies and fulfils the present form of the past, and in its contemplation, profound energies, both spiritual and political, are brought into play, so that the division -troublesome for all Romantics- between perception and thought gives way to a new, characteristic Byronic unity of aesthetic apprehension. Eighteen century Italian literates, such as Vincenzo Monti and Ippolito Pindemonte, had meditated on their Patria's geography almost exclusively as evidence of the political and spiritual decadence of Italy. Later authors, such as Foscolo and Leopardi, still considered the various forms of this landscape as anthropological evidence of an Italian culture, dwindling between the sublime and the tragic. The paper highlights how landscape in Byron is conceived in a much more modern way, as the natural scene representing culture, and this, in turn, is "a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other. As such, it is like money: good for nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless reserve of value." As such, the Italian landscape is not a tabula rasa but is already inscribed with the traces of previous texts; Byronic Italy is constructed and canonized through established paths and sights, and all of these elements make preconceptions, prejudices, stereotypes, and anticipations obvious and tangible, articulating them in a complex set of discourses. The landscape in Byron eventually discloses modes of narrative in the production of historical meaning through the development of spatial and visual histories: he poetically reworks a tradition of classical historical knowledge into a wider world of mental reveries and material reality, where the question of Italian literary tradition meets the Anglo-American debate about the meaning of Romanticism in all its implications for modernity.