Pino Blasone

Italy, through a Gothic Glass

John Carter, The Entry of Prince Frederick into the Castleof Otranto: Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University; 1790 1 - Edgar Allan Poe and the Italian Gothic2 - Otranto, from Horace Walpole to Maria Corti3 - A Roman Itinerary, in the Victorian Age 1 - Edgar Allan Poe and the Italian Gothic Romantic, or "Romish"? Here, the literary definition "Italian Gothic" will be employed with a double

meaning. Actually, we can consider it as an Italian setting of stories in Gothic tales ornovels, or even in fictional poetry. Let us remember, the so called narrative genre wasalready born with such a peculiarity, in the 18th century British literature. It was not only alinguistic paradox but, in part at least, an inversion of meaning too. Coined in Italy during

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the Renaissance, the label Gotico had been applied to northern Europe, to German originallybarbarous peoples, to medieval culture and to a genre of art different from classicalcivilization or classicistic art, flourished especially in Italy.

Long after the Protestant Reformation, during the late age of Enlightenment and inthe early Romantic period, the perspective has changed. Southern, Latin or Catholic Europe– generically Italy and firstly Rome, as see of the "Romish Church" – now begins to beperceived as a land of decadence and obscurantism. Yet, at the same time, it gains the charmof Mediterranean landscapes, of ancient ruins and old buildings, where primitive passionsare free to act out of the strict control by the reason, both in a positive and in a negativeway. More these places get exotic, objects of wish for few privileged "Italian tours", more"the Italian" becomes a stereotype of the other, though inside an European or Westerncontext. So, contempt and nostalgia go arm in arm.

No wonder, thus, at the oldest Gothic novels set in Italy, as The Castle of Otranto byHorace Walpole, A Sicilian Romance and The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Italian by AnnW. Radcliffe (and so on with many others, including the historical novel Valperga by MaryShelley). Early, such a literary fashion spreads in Germany. Frederich Schiller's novel TheGhost-Seer, or The Apparitionist, is set in Venice. E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel The Devil'sElixir and tale Princess Brambilla are set in Rome. The tale The Marble Statue, by Josephvon Eichendorff, at Lucca...

Later, notoriously, we have also a literary "American Gothic". Nathaniel Hawthorne'stale Rappacini's Daughter and The Marble Faun (more than a novel, a "romance",according to the author) are set at Padua and in Rome respectively. On the same line, sometales by Edgar Allan Poe are set in Italy: The Assignation – at first published, in 1834, asThe Visionary –, in Venice; The Oval Portrait, in an undefined spot on the Apennines;probably, The Cask of Amontillado too, what we may infer from several Italian names anddetails strewn in the text.

A robe of more than glory A bit like the quasi-masks of Spallanzani and Coppola in Hoffmann's tale The

Sandman, in The Cask of Amontillado the character of Fortunato (the name means "lucky",but he becomes the unlucky victim in this horror story) reflects the untrustworthy cliché ofan Italian meddler, cheat or braggart. His "enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time andopportunity – to practice imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires". Indeed,such is a bias or pretext in the insane mind of Montresor, criminal protagonist and story-teller at once, persuaded that "Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit". Yet, which was thereal opinion or conviction of the author? The Assignation is literarily dedicated to anothercharacter and protagonist or positive, nay idealized, stereotype:

Ill-fated and mysterious man! – bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own

imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Oncemore thy form hath risen before me! – not – oh not as thou art – in the cold valley andshadow – but as thou shouldst be – squandering away a life of magnificent meditation inthat city of dim visions, thine own Venice – which is a star – beloved Elysium of the sea, andthe wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning

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upon the secrets of her silent waters. Yes! I repeat it – as thou shouldst be. There are surelyother worlds than this – other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude – otherspeculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct intoquestion? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as awasting away of life, which were but the overflowing of thine everlasting energies?

Under the label "Dark Romanticism", Poe has been associated with Ugo Foscolo. In

the Southern Literary Messenger, January 1836, he reviews some translations fromFoscolo's poems and quotes On Sepulchres: "The aspiring soul is fired to lofty deeds\ Bygreat men's monuments". In 1837 he writes a sonnet To Zante – included in the collectionPoems of Manhood – , which is consonant with that To Zacinto, dedicated by Foscolo to hisbirth-isle (the last verse of Poe's poem is in Italian, language not unknown by the author).Perhaps the portrait drawn by Poe in The Assignation has something of the noble figure ofthe Venetian adoptive poet and novelist, who had died as an exile in London, such asdepicted in a biography issued in 1835 by Mary Shelley.

Anyway, rarely an Italian or the town of Venice itself were so romanticallycommended. Have we to deduce, Poe's concept is contradictory? Or, rather, is it a dialecticone? In his poem The Coliseum (1833), we may find a similar contrast. This time, it is set inRome and historicized. The imaginary voice is that of the ancient ruins. By evoking thepast, it echoes like that of the Italian contemporary "Risorgimento". For all a disenchantedcontraposition of true speculative individuals and "thoughts of the multitude", we listen topoet's sympathy with this liberal and patriotic struggle (not less than in the precedent ChildeHarold's Pilgrimage, the poem by Byron). In particular the last verse, "a robe of more thanglory", has a disconcerting force:

We rule the hearts of mightiest men: – we ruleWith a despotic sway all giant minds.We are not desolate – we pallid stones;Not all our power is gone; not all our Fame;Not all the magic of our high renown;Not all the wonder that encircles us;Not all the mysteries that in us lie;Not all the memories that hang upon,And cling around about us now and ever,And clothe us in a robe of more than glory. In The Oval Portrait, an explicit mention sounds like an acknowledgment to "the

fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe". Actually, Poe developed not few elements from the English writerand from her Gothic literary fashion, included some aversion to "Romish" obscurantism. Inhis tale The Pit and the Pendulum, a condemnation of old crimes committed by the "HolyInquisition" is transparent. Nevertheless, and not less than Hawthorne or their commonprecursor Charles Brockden Brown, the American writer was aware that religiousintolerance is a general danger.

Still in 1834 at Charlestown in the U. S. A., a Protestant fanatic mob had burneddown a convent of Catholic nuns. Anti-Catholic tendentious novels as The Nun by Mary

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Sherwood, issued in 1833 and cited by Poe himself, did not help much in resolving theproblem. A review of a translation from The Betrothed Lovers, Italian novel by AlessandroManzoni, (in The Southern Literary Messenger, May 1835) offers an indirect chance to dealwith the ticklish matter.

As a critic, Poe looks quite more militant than an alleged forerunner of the "art forart's sake". Correctly, he starts by individuating Walter Scott's historical novel as an influentnarrative pattern, in the Romantic realistic fiction of Manzoni. Subsequently, he focuses oncongenial Gothic like cores, in the narration of The Betrothed Lovers: the story of the Nunof Monza, a dark tale inside the novel; the description "of the horrors of the plague, as itraged in Milan in the year 1628"; the funereal scene of Cecilia's mother and the "monatti",in the middle of that pestilence. Yet, the descendant from Irish immigrants in North-America does not omit making a comparison between political realities and expressing asharp judgment on Manzoni's modern Christian feelings:

With the civil wars of England we are all familiar; and our hearts have glowed, and

our tears have fallen, in contemplating the virtues and the sufferings of those who acted inthose scenes; but, if we may credit the traditions imbodied in this book, a contemporaryhistory of the Italian Republics would display characters yet more worthy of our admirationand our sympathy. [...] We might suspect that something of a zeal for the honor of theRomish Church had mingled itself in the rich coloring of this picture. But Manzoni was asmuch alive, as Luther himself, to the abuses of that church.

Fantastic, nay Realistic... Of course, the second meaning of a definition as "Italian Gothic" refers to a writing

influenced by Gothic fiction. Certainly that is a minority trend in Italy, but it subsists withits own characteristics. Gothic influences may be found in the main stream literature, inManzoni himself or in the Operette Morali by Giacomo Leopardi, in particular the parodyDialogue of Federico Ruisch and his Mummies. So, also in minor historical novelists ortale-writers as Diodata Saluzzo (a poetess too, who sang the pathos of ruins before Poe) andlater Domenico F. Guerrazzi, who openly cites Hoffmann, Arnim, Dickens, Poe, even if hisopinion is very cautious about (nor English Romantic poets as Wordsworth and Keats hadbeen more indulgent to the Gothic mode).

E. A. Poe's works will be translated into Italian, in 1857 and in 1869. But the firstthough incomplete Italian Gothic novel may be considered Saint Ida's Hermitage (1816), bythe Turinese Ludovico di Breme. He was well acquainted with English contemporaryliterature and wrote about George G. Byron. Fond of the novels of terror, he personally metMatthew G. Lewis, author of The Monk. Yet he was a patriot too. Some civil or politicalengagement is transparent in his production, so that it was censored by the authorities of theAustrian government in Lombardy. The contemporary author of The Vampire, John W.Polidori, was an English son of an Italian expatriate.

Anyhow, the first Italian literary movement we may define Gothic is theScapigliatura, so called from the title of a novel by Cletto Arrighi (anagram of CarloRighetti, 1862). It flourished in Milan and Piedmont, soon after the political unification ofItaly. These "dishevelled ones" were bohemian writers, poets and artists, undeceived by the

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partial compromise which had made possible an independent Italian State. Prevalently theirexpression was joined with democratic or progressive ideas, with a social criticism of thebourgeois way of life, with some pessimism too. Hyperbolically, they were against thatManzoni so appreciated by Poe. Indeed they inherited more than petty elements from Italianwriters and poets of the Romantic age as Foscolo, Leopardi and Manzoni.

A fantastic style, they deemed, could be a better mirror of their reality than realismitself, though or thanks to a deforming effect. They searched abroad for fresh sources ofinspiration, such as Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Heine, Jean Paul, E. T. A.Hoffmann, above all E. A. Poe revalued and translated by Charles Baudelaire in France. Yetthis research is marked with a residual shunning supernatural, macabre or exotic, excesses.At the best, theirs may be regarded as a psychological Gothic, aiming to a realism of theconscience and a symbolism of the unconscious.

After Cletto Arrighi, the main exponents of the Scapigliatura were Iginio U.Tarchetti, the Boito brothers, Emilio Praga, Carlo Dossi, Giovanni Camerana. Few of themdied suicidal or alcoholic, for their maudit way of life. Others reached further experiences.They influenced a realistic prose as well as a Decadent verse. In Naples, we will havefanciful stories by Matilde Serao and Salvatore Di Giacomo; in Milan, dark novels byEmilio De Marchi; in Florence, popular novels by Carolina Invernizio. In Sicily we willmeet with occasional Gothic fiction writers, as Giovanni Verga with The Stories of Trezza'sCastle and Luigi Capuana with his noir tales. Poe's influences plus a sense of life absurditystill pervade La boutique del mistero, tales by Dino Buzzati (1968).

The Worm and the Butterfly Among the Scapigliati, both Camillo Boito and Tarchetti are also known for later

movies drawn from their respective works Senso: New Vain Stories (1883) and Fosca(1869). Set in Vienna by the former, the story A Body (1876) sounds like written by the penof Poe himself; at once, it deals with a contrast between body and corps, art and science.The latter – whose additional name Ugo was an homage to Ugo Foscolo – has deserved theappellative "Italian E. A. Poe", for the hard cut of his Fantastic Tales and a stricter adhesionto the Gothic tradition. Perennial tension between Eros and Thanatos is an inner topic in themajor novel Fosca. Issued in 1879 in the posthumous collection Disjecta, his poemMemento gives us a "radiographic" impression of visionary realism:

If I kiss these your scented lips,oh, my dear girl, I cannot ignorethe pale skull hidden underneath.When I hold your fair body tightthen I cannot forget, my dear girl,the skeleton which hides here inside.So haunted by such a horrible vision,wherever I touch, kiss or lay my hand,feel cold bones of the dead sticking out.

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If Poe and Hoffmann are the main referents in the production of Tarchetti, traces ofPoe's model are even easier to be detected in the works of Arrigo Boito, future librettist ofthe composer Giuseppe Verdi. Peculiarly in a parodic poem or weird farce, King Orso(1865), an analogy with Ligeia by Poe is evident. Nay an obsessing refrain in Boito's fable,the restless march of an horrid worm, looks like a grotesque continuation of the sad songcentral in Poe's tale, which has as hero the same "Conqueror Worm". Yet here the contrast isneither between love and death, nor between beauty and corruption. It is between the cruelpower of a tyrant and his inexorable end and punishment. So, a "democratic" vanitasvanitatum turns back the tragedy into a sarcastic play.

Indeed, such an ambiguous image of the worm recurs not only in Poe and Boito, butin Emilio Praga's verse too, so as collected in the volume Penombre ("Penumbrae", 1864). Itis like an esoteric symbol, which grows migrating from an author to another and varying itsown symbolism. Just in Praga's poem Spes unica, we may discover that this filthy grubmight turn into a pale chrysalis; and this chrysalis, as it is foreseeable, into a bright butterfly.Even more than in any aesthetic or metaphysical sense, the metaphor can be reliablyinterpreted as a political allusion or a social protest (actually in 1878 Carlo Dossi will writea "dishevelled" utopia, the short novel The Happy Colony, whose vague anarchic imprintwill be later disavowed by the author himself):

Our law and shape and geniusis changing over the centuries:now as magnanimous giants,other times as wood puppets.I myself have been an angel,early will be a sleeping worm,just only a prey to the nothing,none but a guy who was raving.Yet enough of the spite! Maybethis our age is like a chrysalis;the seat of tyrants is crumblingand their masks are dropping.At last maybe at the horizonthe great dawn is flickering,early out of this deep ponda butterfly going to be born. The Other and the Alien In the narrative of A. Boito, an ethic and political background is confirmed by the

realistic tale The Black Bishop (1867). This is the story of a murder for hidden raceprejudices. It is set in Switzerland, at last in New York, mostly around a chess-board. Onone side, we have a white North-American gentleman. On the opposite one is not sitting anautomaton, as Maelzel's Chess-Player in the so titled quasi-tale by E. A. Poe. The antagonistand fated victim is a rich, English speaking, black entrepreneur: more similar toShakespeare's Othello indeed, than to an ex-slave such as he is (actually, Boito will turn the

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drama Othello into the libretto for a famous Verdi's opera). Irrational fear and civilizedreason play this fatal game, moving their black or white pawns.

Between Boito and Poe, another analogy is worth being noticed. In both The BlackBishop and The Cask of Amontillado, the victims are killed by their success itself, whichgives rise to social envy and grudge, as well as by cultural stereotypes or worse prejudices.These common places and hostile feelings are always in peril to turn into insane affections.We might presume, such tragic eventualities were diffused especially in the past. At present,that is in our civilized countries and enlightened times, they are limited to morbidindividualities or dislocated elsewhere. But E. A. Poe seems to have been sceptical about (solong before Psycho or American Gothic by Robert Bloch...).

At the beginning of The Pit and the Pendulum, a Latin epigraph is reported. Itreminds of the slaughters during the period of the Terror in the French Revolution, to whichthe protagonist of the story has to be indirectly grateful for his salvation (he was rescued byNapoleonic invaders in Spain, from the clutches of the "Holy Inquisition"). The sense of thematching is quite clear: times and forms look changed for the better; yet, early, newideological aberrations substituted religious ones as pretexts for old errors and horrors.Some historical pessimism links Poe with the Scapigliati.

Finally, we can draw a moral from the Gothic literature. What – nay, who – is the"Gothic"? For the ancient Romans, a Goth was a contemned dangerous barbarian. In AnnRadcliffe's provocation, his supply is a "Romish", passionate but obscurantist Italian. ForArrigo Boito, a black second "Othello". For the far-sighted Poe, he might be a "Turk" (sic)automaton. As to Carolina Invernizio, the title itself of her novel Hate by an Arab woman(1912) is eloquent. Rather than a vampire, Golem or Frankenstein's "creature", often he is anhuman being. Even more than with the uncanny, we deal with a projection of the other andan exorcism of the alien, deep interfering inside our selves. Let us conclude with few versesfrom Dualism, a poem by A. Boito (1863):

I am light and shade, angelicbutterfly and filthy worm too.I am a fallen cherub damnedto roam about this world,or an ascending demonwho strains his wingsto reach a far heaven.[...]Indeed we are frail creatures,but with an all-powerful gift.Or we are that homunculus,forged by a mad alchemist.Maybe a dark god made us,and he mixed mud with firejust to play an idle game. Selected Bibliography

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Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, and Howard, Douglas L. (edited by). The Gothic Other:Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland,2004.

Blasone, P. (edited by). Polemiche letterarie nel secolo dei Lumi: Baretti, Bettinelli,Gozzi, Firenze: Ponte alle Grazie, 1992 (an anthology of Pre-Romantic literary criticism, inthe Italian 18th century).

Boito, Arrigo. Opere, edited by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Garzanti, 1979.Boito, Arrigo. Opere letterarie, edited by Angela Ida Villa, Milan: Edizioni

Otto/Novecento, 2001.Boito, Camillo. Senso, Storielle Vane, edited by Raffaella Bertazzoli, Milan:

Garzanti, 1990.Boito, Camillo. Senso (and Other Stories), introduced by Roderick Conway Morris

and translated by Christine Donougher, New York: Hippocrene Books, 1999 (the novellaSenso was the subject of an Italian filmic adaptation with the same title, by LuchinoVisconti in 1954).

Castle, Terry. The Spectralization of the Other in "The Mysteries of Udolpho", in TheNew Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaumand Laura Brown, London: Methuen, 1987; pp. 231-253.

Del Principe, David. Rebellion, Death and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons ofScapigliatura, Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Ferraris, Angiola. Ludovico di Breme. Le avventure dell'utopia, Firenze: Olschki,1981.

Finzi, Gilberto (edited by). Racconti neri della scapigliatura, an anthology of tales,Milan: A. Mondadori, 1980.

Ghidetti, Enrico (edited by). Notturno italiano, an anthology of tales, Rome: EditoriRiuniti, 1984.

Jackson, David Kelly. Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger, New York: HaskellHouse, reprint in 1970.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (edited by). The Handbook to Gothic Literature, New York:New York University Press, 1998.

Melani, Costanza. Effetto Poe. Influssi dello scrittore americano sulla letteraturaitaliana, Florence: Firenze University Press, 2006.

O'Grady, Deirdre. Piave, Boito, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism, Lewiston/New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.

O'Grady, Deirdre. Deformity and Dualism: Arrigo Boito and the Crisis of ItalianRomanticism, in Cultural Memory: Essays on European Literature and History, edited byEdric Caldicott and Anne Fuchs, Bern/Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003; pp. 277-291.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas OlliveMabbott; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Burton R.Pollin, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Praga, Emilio. Poesie. Tavolozza, Penombre, Fiabe e leggende, Trasparenze,collections of poems edited by Mario Petrucciani, Bari: Laterza, 1969.

Reim, Riccardo (edited by). Da uno spiraglio. Racconti neri e fantasticidell'Ottocento italiano, an anthology of tales, Rome: Newton Compton, 1992.

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Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo. Fantastic Tales, edited and translated by Lawrence Venuti,San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992.

Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo. Passion: A Novel, edited and translated by Lawrence Venuti,San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994 (originally published as Fosca, the novel was thesubject of an Italian filmic adaptation with the title Passione d'amore, by Ettore Scola in1981).

Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo. Tutte le opere, edited by Enrico Ghidetti, Bologna: Cappelli,1967.

Internet References Blasone, P. L'io, l'altro, l'alieno ("The Ego, the Other, the Alien"), in Delos Science

Fiction, at the Web address http://www.intercom.publinet.it/2000/alieno1.htmDel Principe, David. Scalpels and Paint Brushes: Art, Death, and "Decadence" in

Camillo Boito, Ugo Tarchetti, and SCAPIGLIATURA, in Romance Languages Annual, at the Web address http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/RLA-Archive/1994/Italian-html/DelPrincipe,David.htm

Gaudenzi, Cosetta. Women and Colonial Propaganda in Italy: Carolina Invernizio's "Odio di Araba", in Romance Languages Annual, at the Web address http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/RLA-Archive/1998/italian-html/Gaudenzi,%20Cosetta.htm

2 - Otranto, from Horace Walpole to Maria Corti The Castle, the Dungeons, the Passage Surely, exoticism was an important ingredient in the Gothic narrative, since the birth

of this literary genre. Considering the early Gothic novels, it may be noticed all of themwere by British authors; few are set in England, as The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve(1777). Such an exoticism made the setting of the stories not only foreign or strange, butpreferably extreme too. As to The History of Caliph Vathek, an Arabian Tale, from anUnpublished Manuscript, by William Thomas Beckford (1786-1787), the subtitle itselfsuggests it is a pertinent example. Indeed the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto byHorace Walpole, is set in Italy; an Italian setting will prevail in the subsequent productionsby Gothic novelists. From a temporal viewpoint, the term "Gothic" will lose most of itsoriginal reference to an approximate Middle Ages. Indeed, in the Gothic art a tensionupward to the light had been predominant, while the new Gothic prefers the descent downinto the darkness.

In particular, here let us wonder how and why Otranto. This southern andMediterranean city is not only extreme as to Italy, looking eastward. For a long and troubledperiod it was also a border-place of the whole Christian area and of the Europeancivilization, where some of its peculiarities could be perceived in a stronger, evencontradictory way. It was like an "Ultima Thule", though set not in a fabulous North but inthe deep South and in front of a pervasive Orient. At present, such an old "Door of Orient"

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is quite different from that evoked by Walpole as a background of his story. It is a nicesmall seaport and a mass-tourism attractive centre. Nevertheless, as at the days of Walpoleas still today, a visit to Otranto might be suggestive in order to better understand in whichtraumatic way modern Europe was born and took its first steps.

A well known precedent is the setting of W. Shakespeare's dramas in some Italiantowns. "That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied": so Walpole, inthe foreword to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto. Yet rather let us think ofHamlet, cited by Walpole himself and set in Elsinore. It is a symmetrical setting, as farnorthern it was, as regards medieval Europe. Still today he who would visit that pacificDanish city, and the Kronborg Castle where Shakespeare's tragedy takes place, maybe couldbetter approve of such a parallelism. On their opposite extremes, both Otranto and Helsingørface a strait or a canal, which was a boundary of European Christendom during a period.Both of them were theatre of plots and war vicissitudes, in the dark ages and later.

Like other young English gentlemen of his time, in 1739 Horace Walpole went on aGrand Tour over Europe, together with the poet Thomas Gray. He visited France and Italy,yet does not seem to have pushed further down than Naples, before in 1741 political taskscalled him back home. In 1764, Walpole issues his famous The Castle of Otranto, a Story.In the second edition of 1765 the subtitle turns into A Gothic Story, giving an official startto the so called literary genre and fashion. The novel is set in the Middle Ages, around theperiod of the crusades. The original manuscript is presented as written in Italian by"Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto" and printed in 1529 atNaples, currently translated into English by one William Marshal. Already in the secondedition of the modern "romance", the initials signing an accompanying sonnet reveal its realauthorship.

Far later Lady Elizabeth Craven sent Walpole a drawing of Otranto's Castle, she hadvisited during a journey. In a reply, 27 November 1786, the author admits he had just onlyimagined the setting for his novel (elsewhere, he declared the whole originated by a dream,in his Neo-Gothic residence at Strawberry Hill): "I give your ladyship a million of thanksfor the drawing, which was really a very valuable gift to me. I did not even know that therewas a Castle of Otranto. When the story was finished, I looked into the map of the kingdomof Naples for a well-sounding name, and that of Otranto was very sonorous. Nay, but thedrawing is so satisfactory, that there are two small windows, one over another, and lookinginto the country, that suit exactly to the small chambers from one of which Matilda heardthe young peasant singing beneath her. Judge how welcome this must be to the author; andthence judge, Madam, how much you must have obliged him".

Of course, the unlucky Matilda above mentioned is one of the main female charactersin the novel. Moreover, we have not to take too seriously that master of fiction Walpolewas, when asserting he had "not even know that there was a Castle of Otranto". Once moresuch an assertion sounds like aiming to disconcert the reader, this time in an epistolaryliterary form, rather than to reflect any banal reality. Actually, even if really Walpole neverreached the "sonorous" named Otranto, some descriptive details suggest he had welldocumented himself about. In part at least, a recent archaeology confirms this opinion.Restoration works have discovered Norman, Byzantine, even Roman structures under theRenaissance period castle. So important in the plot of the story, the dungeons actually exist.

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Adjoining the walls, a subterranean passage leads out to the country, in the direction of theruined Abbey St. Nicholas of Casole, an ancient centre of high studies...

Yet the dissimulating opinion fostered by Walpole himself, that of an author mainlyrelying on his sensitiveness, has been so long impressive as to have influenced the literarycriticism. In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, still in 1936 Howard P. Lovecraftblamed some Walpole's naïveté as well as his "convention of high-sounding foreign names,mostly Italian". Probably the Anglo-American weird tales writer undervalued Walpole'ssense of humour, that is a parody of strict historicism or of pedant philology, not less thanhis antiquarian culture and wide rage learning. Certainly such a paradoxical wit is shared bythis outcome, winking in the preface by the "translator" to the first edition of Walpole'snovel: "Our language falls far short of the charms of the Italian, both for variety andharmony. The latter is peculiarly excellent for simple narrative".

Attested in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762-1771) and elsewhere,Walpole's admiration of Italian painters was not alien to his inspiration, with a preferencefor Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Piranesi'setchings, representing fancy dungeons and Roman ruins, contributed to the artistic rise of aNeoclassic style as well as of the Gothic Revival in Great Britain. ForthcomingRomanticism was also influenced by Rosa's Baroque views and allegoric paintings, as theHuman Frailty – originally in Latin, Humana Fragilitas – at the Fitzwilliam Museum inCambridge. There few words depict his melancholy: "Conception is Sinful; Birth, aPunishment; Life, Hard Labour; Death, Inevitable". But maybe that is a sarcasm towards the"Holy Inquisition", which had persecuted the Neapolitan painter and poet. Better aware ormore explicit, when a new laic Terror had tried to eclipse the old religious one in Europe, in1799 the visionary Spanish painter Francisco Goya will claim: "The sleep of reasonproduces monsters".

The Abbey, the Crypt, the Cave Just as for the Scottish novelist Walter Scott in his Lives of the Novelists of 1821,

chapter on Horace Walpole, or in an introduction to The Castle of Otranto, edition of 1811,there is no valid reason to disregard what Walpole himself proclaimed in a foreword to thesecond edition of his work. There, we can listen to a forerunner of the Romanticism: "It wasan attempt to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern. In the former, allwas imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, andsometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the greatresources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. [...] Theauthor of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds".

Though shunning any false supernatural, the Italian Romantic novelist AlessandroManzoni – who developed not few elements from W. Scott and Walpole – will beginclearing the real is not always and necessarily true. Often, this is an higher or deeper level ofwhat looks real, reasonable, even obvious. But let us ask again, why Otranto, why Italy?Indeed, the Italy Walpole had in mind is not so much a medieval one. Rather it is that of theRenaissance, when the fictional manuscript would have been written and where ourmodernity was born, before migrating and growing elsewhere, beaten in its fatherland by a

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religious and cultural Counter-Reformation. This historical catastrophe casts its shade backas far as a private one, in the quasi-allegory narrated by Walpole.

In the first edition preface to his novel, the author in fact observes: "Letters were thenin the most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, atthat time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest mightendeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilitiesas an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was hisview, he has certainly acted with signal address. Such a work as the following wouldenslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been writtenfrom the days of Luther to the present hour".

"Catastrophe" is a word recurring in Walpole's prefaces, as well as "terror". Though"often contrasted by pity", it was "the author's principal engine". Such a terror is not entirelycathartic or gratuitous, in the whole production of our author. Modernity itself is fated tokeep most of its original traumatic contradictions, despite or because of its rational dress.Walpole's irony is a bitter one, as his large epistolary shows more than once. A well knownquotation from a letter to Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory, dated 16 August 1776, is but theabstract of what Walpole had written to Sir Horace Mann on 31 December 1769: "I haveoften said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy tothose that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept". Even morethan Gothic or Romantic, it is nearly a Postmodern thought!

Dislocation and immersion are like a horizontal and a vertical dimensions, inWalpole's narration. Dislocation proceeds as far as Italy and Otranto, in direction of a deepSouth and of an extreme East of the old Europe. Yet it is a preparatory stage. Immersionsinks into a medieval castle ruled by a tyrant, haunted by ghosts, and into its dark dungeons,searching for a subterranean passage leading outward. What in the literary tradition is asearch for the marvellous and mystery, with a view to the attainment of the sublime throughan imaginary trouble. Today it is easy to be interpreted in a psychological way, as ametaphor of the uncanny or of the subconscious. May it be imagined a deeper immersion, asinto the past and the underground, as into our consciences?

That is what happens to Basilio, protagonist of a tale by the Italian writer andphilologist Maria Corti, titled Il silenzio della sirena ("The Silence of the Siren", in thecollection Il canto delle sirene, 1989). He is a young man living at Otranto, in a periodbetween that chosen by Walpole for the setting of his novel and the end of the Middle Ages,which for the little town will coincide with the worst tragedy in its history. Basilio is calledby the abbot of St. Nicholas of Casole, to restore some Byzantine frescoes in a crypt close tothe Abbey and to paint a icon of Saint Sophia, an allegory of the Divine Wisdom. Thisgives him a local success as painter and sculptor. But it is not his only interest. He loves thedaughter of a merchant, a contrasted relation, and likes going by boat on the sea aroundOtranto, where he believes to hear the mysterious voices of ancient Sirens.

Once these imaginary voices call him to a partially submarine passage, leading intothe obscure silence of a profound cave. On its walls he discovers some primitive paintings,far older than any Byzantine or Greek one (the site actually exists; it has been discoveredonly in 1970 and named Grotta dei Cervi, for the figures of deer dating back to theNeolithic Age). The wonder and the charm of such a discovery grow so obsessive to theartist, that he often returns to spend his time in the cave, admiring the pictures and inquiring

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the intimate demand for a new inspiration. Finally he dies wrecked during a sudden storm,carrying his secret with him till the late Modern Age.

Obviously, there is no exoticism or dislocation in the narration by the Italianauthoress. She herself lived her first age in the solar Otranto. Yet there is a concordancebetween descent into subterranean places and immersion into the past, as far as to makesuppose to have discerned a wild, collective or natural substratum. In his epistolary,Walpole had employed the term "wildness" at least twice, referring to his own novel-romance. Unfortunately neither in Walpole nor in Maria Corti such a dislocation orimmersion, such a presumed attained wildness, are ever disjointed from the feeling of animpending or recurrent catastrophe. It is not only a matter of narrative suspense, or theliterary expedient of a marked contrast between a blue-solar frame and a dark colouredpicture.

The Cathedral and the Little Basilica Continuing our imaginary tour around Otranto, after the Castle and the ruins of St.

Nicholas' Abbey, let us enter the Cathedral in the centre of the town. We may indulge inadmiring the Romanesque mosaic floor, where the images of Alexander the Great, of KingArthur and so many others, cohabit in a timeless view. Then, let us hasten to the Baroquechapel on the left of the apse. There, the secret of the terror or the mystery of the catastropheis kept under transparent panes, looking at us through eight hundred double void orbits.Neither Horace Walpole, nor much less Maria Corti, could be unaware about. Even if theformer never mentioned it openly, probably this is not completely alien to the groundswhich made the birth of the Gothic narrative set in Otranto.

In an English translation, the title of Corti's novel L'ora di tutti (1962) has beensimply rendered as Otranto (1993). Exactly, the original meaning is the fatal hour, whichnobody can escape. Yet there are natural ways to reach and face this inevitable goal. That ofthe eight hundred inhabitants of Otranto, whose bones are shown in the Cathedral, was anunnatural one. Often in the Middle Ages the town had been a port, from where crusadershad sailed to the "Holy Land" and to fight the Islamic World. In 1480, a Turk fleetconquered Otranto and it was occupied during a while. The eight hundred "martyrs" are toldto have been killed, for they refused to abjure their faith. Mostly a slaughter of civilians,anyway it has been a long lasting trauma, not only in the memory of survivors.

Corti's imagination makes few survivors and victims narrate the before, the while andthe after of that event. Her pity grants voices to those who could not express theirastonishment and pain, their ignored fear or anonymous heroism, their nostalgia of life. Theauthoress had been a witness to crimes committed by Nazi invaders in North-Italy, duringthe Second World War and the popular resistance against them, this time with no religiouspretext. Her is an occasion of implicit reflection. The conclusion is pessimistic, about thelink between human progress and nature. At last she queries: "How many years since then?Just only the living count it. And has anything really changed?". Walpole's fantasticromance and Corti's historical novel may meet in such a question, though almost two highcivilized centuries elapsed from the former to the latter.

Other Italian novels are specially set in the Cathedral of Otranto, as Nostra Signoradei Turchi by Carmelo Bene (1965) and Otranto by Roberto Cotroneo (1999), or deal with

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the tragic episode revisited by M. Corti, as Lo scriba di Casole by Raffaele Gorgoni (2004).A further short story might be written. Let us end our tour in St. Peter's Basilica, not farfrom the Cathedral. In the small building, we may enjoy Byzantine or later frescoes, withboth Greek and Latin inscriptions. Above the apse, few Arab letters may be discerned, aprobable remainder since when the Turks turned the church into a mosque. One word maybe read, which old restorers forgot or did not dare to erase. It is "Allah": in Arabic, "theGod". Perhaps, he would be the most perplexed survivor...

Indeed this detail reminds of a scene more, described in Corti's novel. Some prisonerslie in the dungeons of the Castle, after having vainly tried to reach a secret passage leadingout of the walls, as a way of escape. At dead of night, they are waiting for a merciless dawn.Instead of a familiar sound of bells, they hear an Arabic sing-song from outside and listen toit, without understanding meaning and sense. They cannot know it is the religious call of amuezzin, and think of a canto of love, wondering for it amid the horrors of a war. Notseldom a terror prevailing on the sublime is due to men's inadequacy, such that it may breeddisillusion: "I pique myself on no philosophy but what a long use and knowledge of theworld had given me – the philosophy of indifference to most persons and events" (H.Walpole, Letter to the Miss Berrys, 10 October 1790).

A last note may concern female figures, in the works here reviewed or mentioned.From Walpole's heroines to Saint Sophia of Maria Corti and to the grotesque Our Lady ofthe Turks by Carmelo Bene, they are pathetic characters or religious abstractions, bothByzantine and Catholic, mainly conceived by masculine minds. In Corti's L'ora di tutti, thebeautiful Idrusa alone is real, nay a "true" one. Like Matilda of Walpole (a model of Lucia,in the novel The Betrothed Lovers by Manzoni), finally she is a victim. Yet, just before theviolent exit, her popular strength and Mediterranean splendour illuminate the whole story,only outshining her executioners sunk into the dark depth of history. Truly, murderers haveneither religion or ideology, nor even nationality.

Selected Bibliography Bene, Carmelo. Nostra Signora dei Turchi, Milan: Bompiani, 2005.Corti, Maria. Otranto, New York: Italica Press, 1993; introduced and translated by

Jessie Bright from L'ora di tutti, Milan: Bompiani, 1962 and 2006.Corti, Maria. Il canto delle sirene, Milan: Bompiani, 1989.Cotroneo, Roberto. Otranto, Milan: A. Mondadori, 1999.Gorgoni, Raffaele. Lo Scriba di Càsole. Il segreto di Otranto, Nardò (Lecce): Besa

Editrice, 2004.Manzoni, Alessandro. Letter on Romanticism, in PMLA ("Publications of the Modern

Language Association of America", Baltimore, U.S.A.) Vol. 119, No. 2, March 2004, pp.299-316; introduced and translated by Joseph Luzzi from Lettera sul romanticismo (1823and 1870).

Massara, Giuseppe. II teatro della mente. Saggio su Horace Walpole, Bari: Adriatica,1984.

Praz, Mario. Introduction to Il castello di Otranto, Italian translation of The Castle ofOtranto by Horace Walpole, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988.

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Scott, Walter. Introduction to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, in Walpole:The Critical Heritage, edited by Peter Sabor, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

Scott, Walter. Lives of Eminent Novelists and Dramatists; Honolulu, Hawaii:University Press of the Pacific, 2002.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, edited by W. S. Lewis andintroduced by E. J. Clery, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Walpole, Horace. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, edited byW. S. Lewis [et al.], New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933-1983; 48 vols.

Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England, New York: Arno Press, 1969; 4vols.

Internet References Christensen, Lars; Hammer Andersen, Carsten; Orbesen Troest, Mads. Analysis of

"The Castle of Otranto", in The Gothic Novel, supervised by Joergen Riber Christensen, 1998, at the Web address http://earth.subetha.dk/~eek/museum/auc/marvin/www/library/uni/projects/gothnov.htm

Jones, Jonathan. Hell on earth, article about the art exhibition "Salvator Rosa: Wild Landscape", in The Guardian, 21 March 2005; at the Web address http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1442311,00.html

Kirschenbaum, Blossom S. Review for Maria Corti, Otranto, English translation of L'ora di tutti, at the Web address http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/modlang/carasi/via/ViaVol5_2Reviews.htm

Koç, Ertugrul. Rebirth of the Gothic in the Metropolitan Legends, in Journal of Arts and Sciences, 6/2006, Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Faculty of Art and Sciences, Çankaya University, Ankara, Turkey; at the Web address http://jas.cankaya.edu.tr/jas6/(08)ErtugrulKoc.pdf

Walpole, Horace. "Works by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford", at Project Gutenberg, Web address http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Horace+Walpole

3 - A Roman Itinerary, in the Victorian Age The Forgetful Water of Lethe Still today in Italy, nice Carnivals are enjoyable at Venice or Viareggio. In the so

called "Romish" times, the most amazing one ought to have been in Rome. The more mostpeople's life was restrained and poor in the usual course of the year, the more that shortmerry season grew wild and even licentious. Several Popes are told to have vainly tried tostem such a licence or to stop the excesses. Probably, a prevailing indulgence was due to theconcept of a winning sinful disposition in mankind or rather to an utilitarian care: an eventlike that could work like a safety valve, preventing the outburst of social and politicaltensions, even then recurrent in a conscious or – more often – unconscious way. Semel inanno licet insanire, "Once in the year insanity is allowed": no definition sounds more

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suitable. It may be surprising to know that a similar Latin maxim early appeared in St.Augustine's De Civitate Dei. Indeed, Augustine quoted Seneca who had in mind a Greekpoet.

Often foreign artists and men of letters felt charmed, sometimes a bit disgusted, bysuch an extraordinary spectacle. Referring to the Carneval of the 1788, in his ItalienischeReise ("Italian Journey") the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goetheannotated the Roman Carnival was "not a festival given for people; rather, one the peoplegive themselves". The government was not charged or involved in organizing it. Nor wasthe happening embellished with fireworks, illuminations and processions, like the religiousfestivals. At a given signal, anyone could act as mad and foolish as he liked. Just only thesuch as brawls and stabbing was forbidden. For a while, differences among social classesseemed to be removed or upset. At least, a general good humour was making up for thediffuse insolence and licence. Goethe concludes: "See the Carnival in Rome, to lose all wishever to see it again". But, he adds, life itself looks like a Roman Carnival: "You could notcomprehend it all at once, nor can wholly enjoy it, full of dangers as it is".

More indulgent, even enthusiastic, is an account of a Roman Carnival in 1840, by theEnglish novelist Charles Dickens in his Pictures from Italy. He describes a parade of festivecarriages, like Goethe had done with the race of rider-less horses, along Corso Street. AlsoDickens feels mainly drawn to the people, becoming the actual protagonists, out of theshade of history where they were usually neglected. And a fully Romantic sensitivenessprompts him with psychological comments, even Goethe had been unable to make, somefifty years before. Telling about the costumes of the masks, he writes: "every wild, quaint,bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as deadforgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that stillremain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their sturdy arches, that morning". As tosuch a sudden metamorphosis, an open question might be whether and how far the mythicalwater of the infernal river makes forget, or rather spurs us to discover, who really we are.

No wonder that Italian Carnivals were a frequent contrasting background, in the talesof terror or dark novellas. In Germany, Friedrich Schiller's Der Geisterseher ("The Ghost-Seer",1786-1788) and Prinzessin Brambilla by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann("Princess Brambilla", 1820) are set in Venice and Rome respectively, both during thecarnival time. The Ghost-Seer is a typical Romantic individuality often "stranger to theworld about him", "wrapped in his own visionary ideas" and able to walk in solitude "in themidst of a tumultuous crowd". But the atmosphere of the Carnival makes him disenchantedabout. Not seldom, an unconscious reality may be different, even harder than a current andexpected one. And the sublime isolation of the Romantic hero may keep him out of theothers, but cannot avoid the masks emerging from the uncanny.

Hoffmann's novella has as subtitle "A Caprice in the style of Jacques Callot". It startswith an homage to the French engraver and to Carlo Gozzi, Venetian author of theatricalfables. Another source of inspiration is Goethe's report of the Carnival. Several Roman sitesrecur in the narration, as the Corso, Navona Square, Piazza di Spagna and the "CaffèGreco", then a cosmopolitan meeting point of intellectuals and particularly of Germanartists. Indeed, the setting is a bit more than a pretext for narrating a grotesque farce, whichis a deforming mirror of the society and culture in a period of transition. Besides a caprice,Princess Brambilla is a parody of Romantic philosophy and of its search for an ideal self

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inside the man. On the other hand Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober, a precedent tale byHoffmann, had been a satire of the enlightened absolutism. Turning over an idealistic view,for the author the world itself is a show of masks, where the irrational and the real areconverging.

An Emerging Identity, from a Grotesque Contrariety Spalatro, from the notes of Fra Giacomo (1843) is by the Irish writer Joseph

Sheridan Le Fanu. In the story, mostly set at Rome, a narrative device reminds of thatemployed by Schiller in The Ghost-Seer. Let us listen to the protagonist: "I rose towardsevening [...] and wandered forth to breathe the fresh air upon the Corso. It was the Carnival– the streets were thronged with masks, jugglers, itinerant gamesters with their variousapparatus for cheating the incautious; mountebanks and empirics holding forth upon theircrazy stages; noble ladies in rich attire walking with their high-born protectors, andshouldered and jostled by countrymen and beggars – all mingled up in the fantastic mazes ofa bewildering and gorgeous dream. Captivated by the never-ending variety of the scenebefore me, hour after hour flew by; and when at length the sun went down, and twilight wassucceeded by the wan splendour of the moon, I still was sauntering among the gay and idlethrong, whose groups crossed and flitted before my eyes in such rich and grotesquecontrariety".

All of a sudden this Spalatro, an "illustrious bandit" of the 17 th century, occurs to beapproached by a mysterious mask, both a devilish Harlequin and a Satanic monk, who willpresage and determine his ill fate. Even more than of diabolic possession, what we are goingto read is a case of dissociation of the personality: "I felt forced to imitate. Into thesehideous grimaces he threw, at times, expressions of demoniac passion so fearfully intense,that hell itself could not have exceeded them: these too, I was forced to follow, and thedreadful passions themselves possessed me in succession, while all the time, independentlyof these malignant inspirations, there remained within me, as it were looking on, a terrifiedself-consciousness. [...] Every word he spoke, I spoke – every movement he made, I madetoo. My motions all corresponded with his, with the simultaneousness and accuracy withwhich shadow follows substance; I felt as if my identity was merging into his".

Spalatro is the story of an ineluctable predestination, that not even a supernaturalbeauty can help to change. According to an ancient Gnostic tradition, even in the worst evilthere is a spark of good. Too often, it is impotent to come out or to prevail. A strikingcharacter is a dead-alive fair lady, who survives her own life by drinking human blood. Inan extraordinary way, this quasi vampire woman grows pitiful on Spalatro. But she does notsucceed in preserving his soul, rescuing him from the perspective of an everlastingdamnation. Nor may the love, returned by Spalatro himself, work such a miracle. TheHarlequin, the monk, the young looking lady and a blaspheme sorcerer seem to be all masksof his lost self. Finally he will be arrested and executed in Venice, during another Carnival,what evidently is a recurring circumstance in his bad fortune.

The Cask of Amontillado was written in 1846 by the American writer Edgar AllanPoe. This tale is likely set in Italy – or, perhaps, in France – in a period that few clues datebetween the 18th and the 19th century. The apparently casual encounter between the murdererand the victim happens "one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season".

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Both of them wear different masks. These foreshadow their forthcoming roles, whichsomewhat invert their persecutory relation in the usual life. The expression "suprememadness of the carnival" recalls the descriptions of the Roman ones, even if the adjective"supreme" here sounds like a sinister addition. Such a madness may also hint at therevengeful monomania of the murderer. Incapacity to forget is his own insanity, that even amask can but confirm, nay contributing to turn the "grotesque contrariety" of the Carnivalinto a tragedy. There is no worst madness than incapacity to accept insanity itself, at leastonce in the year.

Likely, the most equilibrated description of the Roman Carnival may be found in thelater novel The Marble Faun, by the Anglo-American Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is awarethat such an event was a surviving tradition, near the sunset of a whole world with its valuesand faults. So, his account does not lack a deal of melancholy: "It was carnival time. Themerriment of this famous festival was in full progress; and the stately avenue of the Corsowas peopled with hundreds of fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented themirth of ancient times, surviving through all manner of calamity, ever since the days of theRoman Empire. For a few afternoons of early spring, this mouldy gayety strays into thesunshine; all the remainder of the year, it seems to be shut up in the catacombs or someother sepulchral storehouse of the past". Yet the author is also thoughtful of a contradiction,concerning the domain of arts and of poetical inspiration: "there is reason to suspect that apeople are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life becomes fascinating either inthe poet's imagination or the painter's eye".

A Fancy of Religious Conversion The Rome sketched here above is an old one, as etched in the views by Giovanni

Battista Piranesi and Bartolomeo Pinelli, or evoked in the sonnets by the vernacular poetGiuseppe Gioacchino Belli. As such, it exists no more. Yet we can detect its traces. Imagineto have walked the Corso from Piazza del Popolo to Venice Square. Then turn leftward upto Via Nazionale, a street built after the national unification of Italy, during the lateVictorian age. Now, go a good way and turn again, this time to the right. So, you will reachthe basilica St. Maria Maggiore. Though its building is far more ancient, especially theinteriors of this church retain an atmosphere of the Baroque art. If the original Gothiclonged for sunlight, mostly the Baroque style shrinks from it. If the modern Gothic fictionlikes to provoke a sense of terror, the Baroque highly aimed to the marvellous. Indeed, thereis more affinity between the former and the latter, than between the former and the medievalGothic art itself.

Together with the English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, in A Night in Rome(1856), we can enter the basilica in 1830, "during the celebration of the anniversary of theHoly Assumption". Again as in Hoffmann's works, we have a first comparison with "thesketches of Callot". And so on, with an accurate description: "It was a glorious sight to oneunaccustomed to the imposing religious ceremonials of the Romish church, to witness allthe pomp and splendour displayed at this high solemnity. [...] Subdued by the odours, themusic, and the spectacle, I sank into a state of dreamy enthusiasm, during a continuance ofwhich I almost fancied myself a convert to the faith of Rome, and surrendered myself

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unreflectingly to an admiration of its errors". Even more than for a religious one, it soundslike uneasiness for a conversion of one's self, out of his control.

Like the Carnival in Le Fanu's Spalatro or in Poe's The Cask of Amontillado (andwith some resemblance to the prologue of The Italian, novel by Ann Radcliffe), theimpressive atmosphere works as a "sumptuous framework" and introduction to a dark storyof passions as superstition, jealousy, vengeance. Furthermore, it deals with a few characterscoming from the deep south of Italy and with "their hot Calabrian blood", or even "theirwild and picturesque garb". Despite the splendid setting, some excess of artifice andfolklore makes this tale nearly a stereotype. But it is interesting noticing how conventionalingredients are closely connected with a Catholic tradition. What is an old Protestant topic,which in such a writer as Henry James will evolve into a secularist criticism. We have towait for about twenty years, changing the course of events.

The main event regarding Italy was the accomplishment of the so called"Risorgimento", after a long patriotic liberation struggle. That was the unification of thenation, and of the most part of the country, under the liberal monarchy of the PiedmonteseSavoia. At last, in 1870, Rome was conquered too. It became the capital of the new State.English writing intellectuals or simply reading people had largely sympathized with Italianpatriots. The national insurrectional movement in Europe had been the political side of amature Romanticism. Both in Italy and all over the continental Europe, now a double dangerwas on one hand a disillusion of the democratic expectations, on the other one adegeneration of the national feelings into ethnocentric nationalisms. Amid all that, notwrongly the conservative Catholicism looked like a great defeated force of the past.

The centre of the temporal power of the Popes had been Rome. What about thespiritual one? Such a question is transparent in James' considerations, which will be quotedhere below. At the same time, the most worried about possible violations of an externalappearance of the town was Ferdinand Gregorovius. He was a historian, author of theRomische Tagebücher, translated into English as The Roman Journals of F. Gregorovius,1852-74. A curious claim by him may be found in an article issued in 1876, HistoricalNotes on the River Tiber. There, the German scholar polemizes about Giuseppe Garibaldi byreporting the opinion of an Italian mathematician and engineer, Francesco Brioschi: "Itwould be really incomprehensible to deal with Rome, as if it was any new town of the LatinAmerica". Though expressed in an indelicate manner, in this case we have an apparentparadox. A technician was more sensitive to the demands of aesthetics, than a famouspatriot. Obviously Garibaldi, a realistic Romantic hero, is supposed then better concernedwith the material welfare of Roman people.

The Play of a Projecting Imagination In his travel account A Roman Holiday (1873) Henry James, the North-American

author of The Turn of the Screw, observes: "It takes no great attention to let it come to youthat the authority of Italian Catholicism has lapsed not a little in these days; not less alsoperhaps than to feel that, as they stand, these deserted temples were the fruit of a societyleavened through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for ages theconstant background of the human drama. They are, as one may say, the churchiestchurches in Europe – the fullest of gathered memories, of the experience of their office.

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There's not a figure one has read of in old-world annals that isn't to be imagined on properoccasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa MariaMaggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most palpable realities, very muchwhat the play of one's imagination projects there; and I present my remarks simply as areminder that one's constant excursions into these places are not the least interestingepisodes of one's walks in Rome".

Someone might wonder why St. Maria Maggiore instead of St. Peter's, St. John's, St.Paul's or Santa Croce. The last name is an abstract religious symbolism. The other mainbasilicas are dedicated to male saints. Santa Maria Maggiore is the "major" temple devotedto the mother of a God made man. A virginal mother and a human God are thoughtfulparadoxes of the whole Christianity, of its credo quia absurdum for all that and above all,included some absurdity of the life itself. St. Maria Maggiore is a crossing point of suchdogmas and mysteries. It reflects the intimate nostalgia of a female perception of divinity("the idea of divine Womanhood": so Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun). A search for afemale supernatural could start from there, with no disrespectful intention to religiousbeliefs but a mere attention to "what the play of one's imagination projects".

By the way, we may play on a double meaning of such a projecting imagination. Infact, a projection of an inner self outward might prelude the project of a renewed ego,performing in this world. Before that, an immersion into a simulated underworld might be acathartic propitious experience. In order that it may happen, first we need an evocativelandscape, a ground where the emotional heritage of an ancient life lies below our steps. Notso deep that it cannot be reached by our imagination or, even better, by our gaze itself.Actually, modernity is not only a scientific and technological progress. It is a history ofexcavation and restoration too. It began with a horizontal geographic discovering, as well aswith a vertical and underground exploration. Archaeology and philology so contributed tothis modern awareness, that we have called it also Renaissance.

From St. Maria Maggiore to St. Giovanni in Laterano, another historical basilica, wemust walk right along Via Merulana. When arrived, we had better get on a vehicle, for along way is before us. That is the "Queen of Roads", Via Appia. Indeed it is the new Appia,running parallel to the residual ancient one and leading southward out of the town, atpresent through large modern quarters. It was not so at the times of the Anglo-Americanwriter Ann Crawford von Rabe, scarcely known with the pseudonym Von Degen. She was asister of the better known Francis Marion Crawford. Both of them had a liking for stories ofvampirism. In particular, Ann issued the tale A Mystery of the Campagna in 1887."Campagna" is the level country around Rome, then a favourite subject for landscapists. Outfrom Baroque interiors or from Carnival "fantastic mazes of a bewildering and gorgeousdream", there we can descend into catacombs and hypogea, a hidden labyrinth waiting forus.

Down into a Labyrinth of Darkness An archaeological taste had been introduced into American literature by Hawthorne,

in his last novel The Marble Faun (1860). Incredibly he is the same one, who in 1858claimed in his French and Italian Note-Books: "Whatever beauty there may be in a Romanruin is the remnant of what was beautiful originally; whereas an English ruin is more

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beautiful often in its decay than even it was in its primal strength. If we ever build suchnoble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins, after two thousandyears, in the United States; but we never can have a Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth". Whatdid he happen, after that? Evidently, writer's soul fell a victim to a so "unreflecting" spell,that the initial negative impressions were concealed or overthrown. Actually, the personwho wrote the Italian Note-Books and the later novelist may look different ones. Anyway, atransition from an English centred Gothic fiction to an international horizon was nowcomplete.

Hawthorne's novel is a compendium of the themes here shortly analysed. Forexample, the cathartic effects of the Carnival in Rome; the temptation of a conversion to theCatholic worship (as for faithful Protestant characters); the descent into Roman catacombsand even a disturbing fear of their darkness. Last but not least, some "grotesque absurdity"of life is stressed by supernatural apparitions, projected by the play of author's imagination.Through the vicissitudes of the story, an Italian protagonist – the Count of Monte Beni –discovers to be not as solar and naively innocent, as he believes or is believed to be. ThreeAmerican artists playing the other main roles, a man and two women, occur to pass throughsimilar crises of their personalities. Not few of their opinions or possible prejudices will beupset, included a presumption to be free from bias.

Let us read how the writer is adapting the Romantic topic of a "sepulchral gloom",for the setting in a Roman catacomb: "The most awful idea connected with the catacombs istheir interminable extent, and the possibility of going astray into this labyrinth of darkness,which broods around the little glimmer of our tapers". Out of the metaphor, this outer mazeis mirroring an inner one, where each one's identity and belonging call for being revised orrisk getting lost. Further on, a supposed "Spectre of the Catacomb" is so described: "He wasclad in a voluminous cloak, that seemed to be made of a buffalo's hide, and a pair of thosegoat-skin breeches, with the hair outward, which are still commonly worn by the peasants ofthe Roman Campagna. In this garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth, the Spectreof the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor of that vanished race, hidinghimself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost life of woods and streams".

Since its beginnings, Gothic fiction had been somewhat "melodramatic". Hawthornehimself refers this adjective to the expedient of his spectre. "In truth", he is the expectedvillain of the story. Yet he will be also the victim of a murder central in the plot. Such ahumour noir drags the other characters into a spiral of dread, connivance or depression,revealing their removed natures. Under a surface of civilized learning, like the mythicalSatyrs or Fauns each of them is "Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being inwhom both races meet on friendly ground". Ambiguously but fortunately, in the narrationthe symbolic image of a "labyrinth of darkness" is balanced with a brighter one: "It was theFountain of Trevi, which draws its precious water from a source far beyond the walls,whence it flows hitherward through old subterranean aqueducts. […] In a Century of theirwild play, Nature had adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for herown".

Hawthorne's irony is self-irony too. While watching the Baroque triumph of thefountain, an American sculptor comes out with a daring comparison. The provocativequestion is: "What would be done with this water power, [...] if we had it in one of ourAmerican cities? Would they employ it to turn the machinery of a cotton mill, I wonder?"

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And this is a joking reply: "The good people would pull down those rampant marble deities,[...] and, possibly, they would give me a commission to carve the one-and-thirty (is that thenumber?) sister States, each pouring a silver stream from a separate can into one vast basin,which should represent the grand reservoir of national prosperity". That is to say, "Art forart's sake" is a famous but not so idle motto, as it might sound. Above all, it was an antidoteand warning against excesses of the utilitarianism or simply of the rhetoric.

Hawthorne wrote his "romance" during the American Civil War. This circumstanceis not to be ignored. Likely, it prompted some author's pessimism about the nature ofmankind. In his Italian Note-Books, telling of the battle of the "Moccoli" feigned in theRoman Carnival, he had written: "We, in our balcony, carried on a civil war against oneanother's torches, as is the custom of human beings, within even the narrowest precincts".Man has never been completely man. What is worst, his historical progress might turn intoan involution, rather than an evolution toward a full realization of his true humancomponent. A disappointment like that was shared by those, who had set noble hopes onearly or later effects of a political renewal: Hawthorne, as to the American Revolution;Hoffmann, as regards the French one in Europe. Not few Italians will clash with similardisillusions, after the "Risorgimento". We dare to add, such a wide critical sense leavenedthe best Gothic fiction.

A Female Archaeological Fear Ours is not only an itinerary through the space. Nearer or farther, it is also a literary

one into the past. What we are driven to visit are not only old streets and buildings, butancient ruins too and – of course – forgotten sepulchres. Yet let us proceed step by step."My first step was to take a long walk out of the Porta San Giovanni, and this I did in theearly morning, tramping along steadily until I came to an iron gate on the right of the road,with 'Vigna Marziali' over it; and then I walked straight on, never stopping until I hadreached a little bushy lane running down towards the Campagna to the right": this is the startof the account by a witness, in A Mystery of the Campagna by Ann Crawford. Both the"porta" and the gate work as preliminary accesses to the territory of the uncanny. Indeed, thedecisive step is "the entrance to some discovered branch of a catacomb".

Here, modern archaeology goes hand in hand with supernatural fiction. Usuallyperceived as a sacred place by the Christian tradition, in this case the catacomb turns into areceptacle of evil and lustful depravation. Since the ancient age its inhabitant is Vespertilia:in Latin, "the evening woman". For centuries, she looks forward to lure rash or melancholyyouth into a dismal love. By drinking their blood, she absorbs their life till they die. Theidea of a vampiress was not new. La morte amoureuse by Théophile Gautier (1836) hadbeen set in Venice. Carmilla by Le Fanu (1871 ) liked girls better than men. NeverthelessVespertilia precedes by ten years the most famous male vampire, Dracula by Bram Stoker,contributing to develop the Romantic Gothic into a Decadent Horror. Ann Crawford herselfsounds aware of her attempt, when she writes of its "becoming psychologically interesting,after all". Unfortunately, such an "after all" made her stop writing too early.

The narration of the authoress, long lived in Italy, does not lack witticisms aboutnational peculiarities, for instance as to the Italian cunning and – at the same time – analleged solar fear of darkness. If referred to literature, in part it is true. Gothic narrative did

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not find in Italy as much favour as in the Anglophone or German countries, both by thepublic and by the writers, with some remarkable exceptions. The male protagonist, MarcelloSouvestre, has French and Italian parents. This mix could give him a touch of attractiveeccentricity, for the contemporary Anglophone readers. Above all he is a composer byprofession and an amateur sculptor, particularly sensitive and vulnerable to an appeal of theoccult, in an age of predominant Positivism (Ann's father himself was an artist, ThomasCrawford, author of important pieces of sculpture in the U. S. A.). In return, the seductiveVespertilia stands out of a funny background of "lean English misses" and "mad Englishtourists".

We have to add, Ann's brother Francis Marion was less mild than her, as to Italianfaults. In his tale For the Blood is the Life (1905), we find another type of vampire woman.She is not a lady but a popular one, expression of a "democratic" vampirism: "a wild, good-looking creature called Cristina, who was more like a gipsy than any girl I ever saw abouthere". The story is set in South-Italy, on the coast between Lucania and Calabria. Anopinion there reported is quite different from those of Ann here above: "It is wonderful whata natural charm there is about murder and sudden death in a romantic country like this.Deeds that would be simply brutal and disgusting anywhere else become dramatic andmysterious because this is Italy". Unfortunately, also in this opinion there is something true.Yet, let us read further on: "this is not a very romantic country".

Probably, such is the problem. Italy was a frequent setting for stories. But it was aRomantic projection and superimposition too. At the same time, often an external gaze canbetter notice aspects that one from inside does not. Looking backward and forward, insideand outside, these are movements of a dynamic self, individual or collective it may be. Anda paradox is that it cannot do the such by itself alone. After all, literature is a privilegedmirror. The Crawford brothers look like having used the theme of a female vampirism, alsofor expressing the impressions of their Italian experiences. However, just as some Italianwriters of his times, in other tales or novels Francis Marion tried a "Veristic" approach, fitterfor a complex reality like that. Actually, there is more than a coincidence between him andsuch writers as especially Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga.

Walking Girls and Racing Horses Likely the character of Vespertilia was inspired by some figures of the Greek tragic

heroine Alcestis, depicted on the walls of hypogea or in the mosaic floors of cemeteriesaround Rome. The authoress alludes to one of these representations, sculptured on thesarcophagus of the vampiress. But Alcestis was a positive symbol of the hope in aresurrection, or of the wish of a regeneration after the experience of death. In order to meet asimilar allegory, we have to travel along the Via Appia as far as Naples and further on. Thatis to reach the excavations of Pompeii, not without having visited the Vatican Museum inRome before. There, we can admire a marble relief representing a young woman singularlywalking, step by step. This detail has brought her the Latin name Gradiva, which is the titleof a novel by the German writer Wilhelm H. Jensen (1903). Gradiva is a kind of newGalatea or a "marble woman", just to reuse an image employed by Hawthorne in his TheMarble Faun.

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Despite a likeness to Arria Marcella, novel issued by Gautier in 1852, the plot isoriginal enough. The subtitle is Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück, "A Pompeian Fancy".In fact, the first source of inspiration is the above mentioned bas-relief. The story, even thedreams of the protagonist are set in the Greek-Roman city, buried by a volcanic eruption ofVesuvius in 79 A. D. The archaeologist Norbert Hanold dreams of Gradiva, while escapingfrom that catastrophe. He gets afraid that she did not succeed in surviving, nay proceedingtowards an awful end. Despite his efforts to resist "irrational impulses", such an absurdanxiety grows so morbid as to push him to the excavations of Pompeii, in search of animprobable answer. At last this arrives, in a transversal way and a transfigured form. Thebeloved shadow of Gradiva makes way for a live woman. Her name is Zoe Bertgang. InGreek, Zoe means "life". In German, Bertgang is almost an equivalent of "gradiva".

Thanks also to a play on words, this time Eros prevailed over Thanatos, against thesense of an impending death. So rare in the tales of terror, this happy end concurred inmaking of Gradiva ("the girl who steps along" or, simply, "she who advances") the inspiringMuse of the Surrealism. Let us think of some paintings by Salvador Dalí, or in particularMetamorphosis of Gradiva by André Masson. Before them, Sigmund Freud had analyzedthe novel in a subtle essay, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (1907). Where doesthe "rediviva" girl walk from? Surely, she gets out from the unconscious, rather than fromthe past or the death. The question where she goes seems to matter even more. No doubt,she crosses the land of metamorphosis. Like for the protagonist of Jensen's work, that is notonly any change within one's self. It is a conversion of his world view.

At least, Norbert Hanold was luckier than the melodramatic Marcello, lover andvictim of Vespertilia. In a psychoanalytic way, the meridian Gradiva and the nocturnalVespertilia are allegories like Eros and Thanatos, the "irrational impulses" dealing with loveand death. Though conflicting one another, maybe they are not as incompatible as they look.Rather, a Nietzschean conceptual contrast between Dionysian and Apollonian elementsseems to be appropriate. According to Jensen, a good feeling of life depends on a rightmixing both of them. Finally, let us return to the Carnival and read the German composerFanny Mendelssohn, sister of the famous Felix. In a long letter (February, 25 – March, 14,1840), she writes to her mother: "You would know me no more, so amused amid this noise.It cannot be compared with the sea loud, nor with howling wild beasts. It is only the din ofthe Roman Corso". Once in the year it crossed the land of metamorphosis, run by rider-lesshorses.

In 1874 an unbridled horse ran over a boy crossing the street, and he died. The royalfamily had attended the scene. Victor Emmanuel II abolished the race. After that, the sotamed Carnival went to fade. A short "Victorian age" had begun in Italy too. A laic kingsucceeded where the Popes had failed. Indeed, he had no intention to put an end to theevent. His decision was merciful and reasonable. Yet he did not value the rider-less horsesrepresented the spirit of it, likely more than masks or adorned carriages. Moreover, the racewas the last living trace of an ancient Rome. Since then, travellers and tourists could onlyvisit important monuments and museums. A rhetorical reception of the classicism prevailed,such as in the "Vittoriano" in Venice Square. Finished in 1911, the monument was theimitation of an exhumed past, and an homage to such men defined by Schiller – a bitungenerously – as "equally courageous to combat an acknowledged prejudice or to die for anew one".

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Selected Bibliography Crawford, Ann (alias Von Degen, Anne). A Mystery of the Campagna, in Uncanny

Tales, an anthology including also For the Blood is the Life by Francis M. Crawford, andintroduced by Richard Dalby; Carlton, North Yorkshire, U.K.: Tartarus Press, 1999.

Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy, edited by Kate Flint, London and New York:Penguin Books, 1998.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey ("Italienische Reise"), edited byThomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, translated by Robert R. Heitner, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1989 and 1994.

Gregorovius, Ferdinand. The Roman Journals of Ferdinand Gregorovius, 1852-1874,translated by Annie and Gustavus Hamilton from Romische Tagebücher (edited byFriedrich Althaus, Stuttgart, 1892), London: G. Bell & Sons, 1907.

Gregorovius, Ferdinand. Notizie storiche sul fiume Tevere (1876), in Passeggiateromane, translated from German into Italian by Ines Badino-Chiriotti, Rome: Edizionidell'Obelisco, 1980.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun, or The Romance of Monte Beni; Rockville,Maryland, U.S.A.: Wildside Press, 2007.

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. Princess Brambilla ("Prinzessin Brambilla"), inThe Golden Pot and Other Tales, translated by Ritchie Robertson, New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000.

Houston, Gail Turley. From Dickens to "Dracula": Gothic, Economics, andVictorian Fiction, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

James, Henry. A Roman Holiday, in Italian Hours; McLean, Virginia, U.S.A.:IndyPublish.com, 2007.

Jensen, Wilhelm. Gradiva, and Freud, Sigmund. Delusion and Dream in WilhelmJensen's Gradiva (2 Books in 1 Volume), translated by Helen M. Downey from Gradiva:Ein pompeianisches Phantasiestück and Der Wahn und die Traüme in W. Jensens"Gradiva", Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1992.

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Spalatro, from the notes of Fra Giacomo, in Spalatro:Two Italian Tales, edited by Miles Stribling; Mountain Ash, Mid Glamorgan, U.K.: SarobPress, 2001.

Melani, Sandro. L'eclissi del consueto. Angeli, demoni e vampiri nell'immaginariovittoriano; Naples, Italy: Liguori, 1996.

Mendelssohn, Fanny. Italienisches Tagebuch, edited by Eva Weissweiler, Frankfurtam Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1982.

Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History'sNightmares, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Milton, R. Stern. Contexts For Hawthorne: "The Marble Faun" and the Politics ofOpenness and Closure in American Literature, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Cask of Amontillado, in The Collected Works of Edgar AllanPoe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott; Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.: The BelknapPress of Harvard University Press, 1978.

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Praz, Mario. The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, London and New York:Oxford University Press, 1956 e 1969. Translated by Angus Davidson, from La crisidell'eroe nel romanzo vittoriano; Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1952.

Internet References Ainsworth, William Harrison, A Night in Rome, at The Literary Gothic, Web address

http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/night_in_rome.htmlCrawford, Ann. A Mystery of the Campagna, at HorrorMasters, Web address

http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0555.pdfCrawford, Francis Marion. For the Blood is the Life, at The Literary Gothic, Web

address http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/blood_is_the_life.htmlDickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy, excerpts at The Rome Art Lover, Web address

http://www.romeartlover.it/Dickens.htmlHawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun, or The Romance of Monte Beni, The

Pennsylvania State University, 2003; a Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication, at the Web addresses www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/hawthorn/Marble-Faun-1.pdf and www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/hawthorn/Marble-Faun-2.pdf

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (edited by Sophia Hawthorne and with an introduction by George Parsons Lathrop, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883), at the Web address http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/pffinb.html

James, Henry. A Roman Holiday, in Italian Hours, at Online Literature, Web Address http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/italian-hours/9

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Spalatro, from the notes of Fra Giacomo, at The Literary Gothic, Web addresses http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/spalatro.html and http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/spalatro2.html

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Cask of Amontillado, at Page by Page Books, Web address http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Edgar_Allan_Poe/The_Cask_of_Amontillado/

Schiller, Friedrich. The Ghost-Seer, or the Apparitionist, and Sport of Destiny ("Der Geisterseher"), at Project Gutenberg, Web address http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6781/6781-h/6781-h.htm

Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2007 (the chapters concerning Edgar A. Poe

have been issued in the Australian journal Calenture 3.1, December 2007)

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