Abstract
This chapter focuses on Alessio, ossia gli ultimi giorni di Psara (1827), not only one of the first Italian historical novels but also the brainchild of a woman, the poet and journalist Angelica Palli (Bartolomei). Alessio, one of the writer’s early works, testifies to her adhesion to transnational cultural, literary and political networks, and to her active involvement in the political movement for the unification of Italy, the Risorgimento. Alessio’s plot unravels within a real historical event that occurred during the Greek war of independence, the siege of the island of Ipsara by the Ottoman fleet. It focuses on the sentimental choice that the titular hero, Alessio, needs to make between the alluring Turkish prisoner Amina and his betrothed, Evantia. The novel, despite formally betraying its author’s stronger familiarity with poetry and tragic plays, embodies a complex and diverse set of influences. As a fundraising tool, it is the direct outcome of Palli’s Greek heritage, of her involvement in Livorno’s cultural life, of her family’s support of the Greek struggle for independence, and of her modern education. Moreover, if contemporary Italian and European literary debates on the moral and pedagogical value of historical novels shape its genesis, its originality lies in the author’s gift for an innovative psychological characterization of female characters.
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Notes
- 1.
Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) was an Italian poet and novelist. He became famous for his historical novel I promessi sposi (1827; The Betrothed), which embodied values of the Italian Risorgimento and offered a model of modern Italian language. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a French poet, novelist, and statesman who worked for the French embassy in Italy from 1825 to 1828.
- 2.
Alphonse de Lamartine’s autograph verses read: “En écoutant les vers dont vous peignez / de la tendre Sapho, les soupirs les malheurs, / jeune et savant demoiselle, / je pleure et dis: pourquoi cette Grecque beauté / n’eut’elle pas vostre esprit, votre coeur! / Phaon volage aurait été fidèle” (While listening to the verses in which you, young and cultured lady, depict the sights and misfortunes of tender Sappho, I cry and say: why didn’t this Greek beauty have your spirit, your heart! Fickle Phaon would have been faithful!). Quoted in Roberto Severino, A carte scoperte: Manzoniana e altri contributi critici e filologici sulla cultura italiana in America (Pisa: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1990), 21–37. Manzoni’s tribute was written in lapis on the same sheet of paper, just below Lamartine’s: “Prole eletta dal ciel, Saffo novella, / che la prisca sorella / di tanto avanzi in bei versi celesti, / e in tanti modi onesti / canti della infelice tua rivale, / del Siculo sleale, / dello scoglio fatal, m’attristi: ed io / ai numi dolente / t’offro il plauso migliore, il pianto mio. / Ma tu credilo intanto alma schietta, / che d’insigne vendetta / l’ombra illustre per te placata fora, / se il villano amator vivesse ancora” (chosen daughter of the heavens, new Sappho, you who so much surpass your elder sister in beautiful celestial verses, and who in many honest ways sing of your unhappy rival, of the disloyal Sicilian, of the fatal rock, you sadden me: and I, saddened with the gods, offer you the best praise, my tears. But believe it, clear soul, thanks to you the illustrious shadow would be placated with a great revenge if the evil lover were still alive). Quoted in Carlo Morbio, Alessandro Manzoni ed i suoi autografi: Ricordi personali, notizie e studi (Florence: Tipografia editrice dell’associazione, 1874), 35. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
- 3.
Palli’s historical novel and her contribution to the genre has been analyzed in depth by Giancarlo Bertoncini in Alessio: Romanzo istorico di Angelica Palli (Pisa: TEP, 2001); and “Una bella invenzione”: Giuseppe Montani e il romanzo storico (Naples: Liguori, 2004). The interdependence between her life and literary production is the focus of Alessandra D’Alessandro, Vivere e rappresentare il Risorgimento: Storia di Angelica Palli Bartolomei, scrittrice e patriota dell’Ottocento (Rome: Carocci, 2011).
- 4.
Sergio Romagnoli, “Il romanzo storico,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, (Milan: Garzanti, 1968), 8: 18. Among many others, La battaglia di Benevento (1827; The Battle of Benevento) by the Livornese writer Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi was published that same year.
- 5.
Poesie is of particular interest in that it is one of the first collections of patriotic verses by an Italian woman, a genre that will become very successful during the Risorgimento.
- 6.
Palli’s embrace of the novel form is even more courageous considering the disapproval and disdain that even some contemporary women writers expressed for the genre. For example, the Lucchese writer Costanza Moscheni (1786–1831), who at the time was very active in Tuscan academies, published Dei moderni romanzi (1828; On modern novels) in which she criticizes historic novels—and novels in general—as a source of pernicious ideas responsible for the corruption of readers’ morals.
- 7.
D’Alessandro, Vivere e rappresentare il Risorgimento, 16.
- 8.
For discussions on the participation of Italian women in Italian academies, conversazioni, and salons, see Tatiana Crivelli La donzelletta che nulla temea: Percorsi alternativi nella letteratura italiana tra Sette e Ottocento (Pavona: Iacobelli, 2014); Elisabetta Graziosi, “Arcadia femminile: Presenze e modelli,” Filologia e critica 17 (1992): 321–58; Presenze femminili: Fuori e dentro l’Arcadia (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); “Revisiting Arcadia: Women and Academies in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” in Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, eds. Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, and Catherien Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 103–24; Maria Iolanda Palazzolo, I salotti di cultura nell’Italia dell’Ottocento: Scene e modelli (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985); Maria Teresa Mori, Salotti: La sociabilità delle élite nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (Rome: Carocci, 2000); and Maria Luisa Betri and Elena Brambilia, eds., Salotti e ruoli femminile in Italia: Tra fine Seicento e primo Novecento, (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2004).
- 9.
Alphonse de Lamartine, Correspondance de Lamartine 1807–1818, 2nd ed., ed. Valentine de Saint-Point (Paris: Hachette & Furne, 1881) 1: 177.
- 10.
See Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).
- 11.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giulia, o la nuova Eloisa, trans. Panaiotti Palli (Livorno: Masi, 1813); and Lucian, Opuscoli diversi di Luciano Samosatense tradotti dal Greco in italiano da Panajotti Palli nativo di Jannina in Epiro, trans. Panaiotti Palli (Livorno: Masi, 1817).
- 12.
For an overview of the Roman institution of Arcadia see Paul Colilli, “The Arcadian Academy” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Albert N. Mancini and Glenn Palen Pierce (Farmington Hills: Gale Cengage Learning, 2008), 339: 279–85.
- 13.
Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–73) was a writer and patriot; Enrico Meyer (1802–77) was a writer, pedagogist, and patriot; and Giovanni Battista Niccolini (1782–1861) was a playwright and patriot.
- 14.
Giovanni Salvatore De Coureil (1760–1822) was a poet, translator, and pedagogue.
- 15.
Part of De Coureil’s letter to Domenico Anguillesi, dated January 27, 1819, is quoted in D’Alessandro, Vivere e rappresentare il Risorgimento, 29.
- 16.
The work of Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), an Italian dramatist and poet, was considered the model of Italian tragedy. His political ideas strongly influenced Risorgimento intellectuals. He was romantically tied for many years to Louise Stolberg, Countess of Albany. Her salon in Florence became internationally renowned because of Alfieri’s presence.
- 17.
Bertoncini, “Una bella invenzione,” 99. Bertoncini specifically points to the drama L’esule di Venezia (The exile of Venice), which appeared in Poesie, as the locus of Palli’s shift from myth to (medieval) Italian history.
- 18.
Giovan Pietro Vieusseux (1779–1863) was an Italian writer and editor of French-Swiss origin. He worked for his family business in Northern Europe and Livorno before settling in Florence, where in 1819, he opened the Gabinetto, a reading room in his Palazzo Buondelmonti. It provided local readers and foreign visitors with European periodicals and featured an annexed room with a circulating library in Italian, French, and English. During the nineteenth century, the Gabinetto Vieusseux succeeded in connecting Italian and international intellectuals and became a reference point for the Risorgimento movement. In 1820, Vieusseux founded Antologia, a monthly publication that quickly became the leading Italian literary and cultural journal of the first half of the nineteenth century.
- 19.
Giuseppe Montani (1786–1833) was a literary critic, essayist, historian, and one of the most assiduous contributors to Antologia. Antonio Benci (1783–1843) was a writer and translator who wrote on various cultural topics for Antologia.
- 20.
See Sansone Uzielli, “Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (ossia sessanta anni fà),” Antologia 13 no. 39 (1824): 118–144. Sansone Uzielli (1797–1857) was a translator and frequent contributor to Antologia. With his translations and editorials, he brought the work of Walter Scott to the attention of the Italian public. Between 1824 and 1825, he was in charge of a new section of Antologia called “Rivista letteraria inglese” (Review of English literature) where he reviewed the most important books published in England.
- 21.
In an article which appeared in Antologia no. 12 (December 1821): 535, Mayer ended his survey of modern Greek writers who “diffusero i lumi delle lettere in Italia” (spread the lights of letters in Italy) by citing Ugo Foscolo and Angelica Palli.
- 22.
Jean-François Champollion, Lettres à Zelmire, ed. Edda Bresciani (Mayenne: L’Asiathèque, 1978).
- 23.
The letter dated January 28, 1827, reads: “J’applaudis à votre determination de vous livrer à un genre d’écrits qui manque entièrement à votre belle Italie: tout ce qui existe de nouvellistes n’est bon qu’à corrompre les moeurs et à entretenir la sybaritique torpeur dont s’arrangent si bien certains intérêts politiques” (I applaud your determination to dedicate yourself to a type of writings that are completely missing in your beautiful Italy: all there is of novelistic doesn’t but corrupt customs and entertain the sybaritic torpor in which certain political interests thrives), Champollion, Lettres à Zelmire, 37.
- 24.
There is no trace of this novel among Angelica Palli’s writings, but it is clear from Champoillon’s letter that it is something they had discussed: “un an en Egypte…c’est bien assez…et pour explorer les monuments et pour recueillir tous les matériaux du Roman égyptien que vous aviez le projet de faire avant le grand accès de philosophie qui vous domine” (one year in Egypt…it’s enough…both to explore the monuments and to collect all the material for the Egyptian novel that you were planning before the great attack of philosophy that is dominating you), Champoillon, Lettres à Zelmire, 58.
- 25.
Carlo Pepoli (1796–1881) was a poet, journalist, librettist, and politician. A friend of Leopardi, he is known for writing the libretto I Puritani (1835; The Puritans) for Vincenzo Bellini.
- 26.
The letter, dated June 20, 1826, is published in Bertoncini, “Una bella invenzione,” 259, while the ode, in its Italian version, is transcribed on 256n47.
- 27.
This letter, dated January 5, 1827, appears in Giambattista Niccolini, “Lettere di Giambattista Niccolini,” in La viola del pensiero: Ricordo di letteratura, nuova serie (Livorno: Vigo, 1863), 254.
- 28.
Commenting on the novel, Champoillon notes: “Il y a des lignes touchantes et d’une sensibilité réelle. Je dis des lignes parceque votre narration est rapide, peut-être même un peu trop; mas le temps vous pressait et cepedant le cadre quoique simple eût permis quelques développements de plus” (There are some touching lines and a real sensibility. I say some lines because your narrative is quick, maybe even a little bit too much; but you were under time constraints and, however simple the plot, it would have allowed for some more developments), Lettres à Zelmire, 58.
- 29.
Published in her volume Poesie.
- 30.
The sieges of Missolonghi by the Ottomans—unsuccessful in 1822 and 1823 but resulting in the city’s capitulation between 1826 and 1827—made a strong impression on European minds. This was due in part because the city’s defenders were financed and lead by Lord Byron in 1824. His death and the city’s heroic defense caused the intervention of European powers and inspired poetic tributes in honor of the British poet’s heroic death. When in 1819 the British sold the island of Parga to the Ottoman Empire—it had been Venetian until 1797—its fleeing Greek inhabitants became symbols of persecution and injustice. Even as late as 1831, in his The Refugees of Parga, the Italian painter Francesco Hayez portrayed persecuted Pargian exiles to remind the public of the Italian people’s situation.
- 31.
Bertoncini, “Una bella invenzione,”142.
- 32.
“Innestare nei casi finti d’ignoti individui il prospetto in grande delle vicende politiche delle nazioni” (To graft in the imaginary events of unknown people the great outline of the political events of nations), Uzielli, “Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since,” 124.
- 33.
Angelica Palli, Alessio, ossia gli ultimi giorni di Psara, ed. Giancarlo Bertoncini (Livorno: Salomone Belforte, 2003), 29.
- 34.
Ugo Foscolo’s poem Dei sepolcri (1807; Of the Sepulchre) is probably the most important outcome of this discussion. We also know from Palli’s correspondence that she was familiar with Foscolo’s foundational essay Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura (1808; On the origin and use of literature), in which he advocates for a type of literature that is morally and civically useful and conceives of the novel as an educational tool. See Bertoncini, “Una bella invenzione,” 125.
- 35.
Agnoli’s comment is reported in Emilio Persico, Letteratura filellenica italiana, 1787–1870 (Rome: Bondi, 1920), 84.
- 36.
Bertoncini, “Una bella invenzione,” 86–7.
- 37.
“Je me declare tout à fait pour la prisonnière turque, et c’est votre faute à vous, si, involontairement, vous avez attire tout l’intérêt sur Amine” (I declare myself completely taken by the Turkish prisoner, and it is your fault if, involuntarily, you have attracted all the interest on Amina), Champollion, Lettres à Zelmire, 59.
- 38.
Angelica Palli to Panaiotti Palli, 18 February 1832, Biblioteca Labronica di Livorno, Carte Angelica Palli, box 6.
- 39.
Angelica Palli, Cenni sopra Livorno e i suoi dintorni (Livorno: Giulio Sardi, 1857); and Angelica Palli, Discorsi di una donna alle giovini maritate del suo paese (Turin: Pomba, 1851).
- 40.
Angelica Palli worked on this project in various stages beginning right after the Italian unification, when a comprehensive reform of the educational system began. Unfortunately, her project did not materialize during her lifetime.
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Zanini-Cordi, I. (2024). Angelica Palli and Alessio: Love and Patriotism in the Early Italian Historical Novel. In: Martin, C.E., Donato, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40494-8_7
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