“And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.” W. Somerset Maugham.
After a few hundred years, it’s probably too late to quibble over credits. But what if Italy was invented as much by the English as the Italians?
The thought occurred to me a few weeks ago, as I was hurrying down a sodden Heath Hurst Road in North London, in that grey half-light that makes midday in England seem like late afternoon anyplace else. It would make sense that the English created Italy. Who needed it more?
Admittedly, my theory is not historically accurate. The Romans were digging pools in Bath and beyond long before the Brits showed up in Italy complaining about sunburns or the Pope.
But truth is not always literal. Sometimes it’s literary. After all, words can be as enduring as stones and mortar in establishing the nature of a place.
What group of Anglo-influencers could entice even a couple of hardened New Yorkers to build a dream around a crumbling farmhouse a continent away? Blame it on an unbridled band of 19th century English poets. They’re the ones who created Italy as a destination—portraying it not as it was, but as they desired it to be.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” John Keats
Only the dogs barking in the nearby woods of Hampstead Heath disturb the placid peace of the neighborhood that was once the home of John Keats, poster boy of the Romantic poets. Along with his cohorts Percy and Mary Shelley, Keats remains inextricably tied to Italy, though he spent merely a few months in Rome and Naples, and wrote almost nothing about it.
The white Georgian villa where he rented a room sits next to a public library, shadowed by a sagging tree under which Keats is said to have written “Ode to a Nightingale”. Now dedicated to its one-time boarder, the house is a museum, recreating a little too well the stolid and stifling world in which the 23 year old medical student decided to devote his life to flights of wild imagination.
Here, behind heavy drapes, ashes smoldering in the fireplace, Keats would sit beneath his print of William Shakespeare and write passionately of nature, beauty, ecstasy and escape. He would also fall desperately in love with eighteen year-old Fanny Brawne, who lived with her widowed mother in another room of the house. Such is the stuff poetry is made of.
By that time, most of Keats’ compatriots in the Romantic movement had already set off for Italy. They found Utopia there—a golden, guilt-free paradise, a land of antiquity and idylls, where bodies were bronzed and the air smelled of lemons and freedom. Like an Easy Jet holiday for college kids studying abroad.
Keat’s literary frenemy Lord Byron, banished from England for poor behavior, was cavorting like Harry Styles through Venice, where he gave the Ponte Dei Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs) its name. Meanwhile, Percy and Mary Shelley had settled in Liguria, having scandalously run away together despite the fact that he was already married with two children. Together, the three of them, along with subsequent English writers taking the same path from Northern mists to Mediterranean light, would create the Italy brand concept that’s been packing ‘em in for centuries now.
It was too beautiful a place and it did not seem of this land. The remoteness of any trace of civilization, the sea at our feet, its incessant murmuring, everything invited my mind to meditate on strange thoughts…Some kind of spell surrounded us. Mary Shelley
Never mind that the real Italy of the late 1800’s bore little resemblance to the Bel Paese of the poet’s pen. While it still held its treasures from ancient Rome, even much of that had been chipped away. Impoverished, mired in an agrarian economy and a rigidly parochial society, most 19th century Italians saw their country not as an escape but as a place to escape from.
It’s been a pattern ever since. Foreigners flock in to soak up the sensual splendor of the Grand Tour highlights, while young Italians, on the hunt for jobs and greater social diversity head the other direction, often to England or America. The language of Romanticism has never been a natural one for Italians describing their own country. The astringent black & white photos of Neo-Realism or the comic complexities of Fellini are what Italians see when they look in the mirror. A gauzy Merchant-Ivory take on an E.M. Forster story is an entirely English view of somebody else’s room.
Nevertheless, the Romantic postcard photo of Italy has not only stood the test of time, but become the siren song that beckons tourists, writers and dreamy ex-pats from all over the world. Every Mediterranean cruise, Venetian honeymoon, or restored villa in the hills of Tuscany and Umbria is seeking after the same spell that seduced Byron and the Shelleys, and plenty of poets, authors and movie-makers to follow. Frances Mayes didn’t t create the idea of “Under the Tuscan Sun”. She inherited it, and reimagined it for a new generation.
In 2001, Elizabeth Minchilli, who writes the wonderful Elizabeth’s Newsletter from Italy here at Substack, wrote a book called “Restoring a Home in Italy”. C & I first found the book while on vacation, in a small bookstore in Florence. A few months later, I gave it to her as a part of her 40th birthday gift. When we walked into the office of our real estate agent on the first day of our Italian house-hunt, it showed up again, conveniently placed in the center of the table.
Years after finishing the restoration of our farmhouse in Le Marche, we were looking through the book and reminiscing. As we flipped through the well-worn pages, we were surprised to see that we had unconsciously recreated some of the photographed interiors in our own home, right down to the paint colors and the pottery. All of the market finds we’d purchased so impulsively were virtual replicas of things we’d seen in the book.
It turns out that the vision for our Italian country house was not entirely our own. It never is. We’re all living a dream storyboarded by someone else.
Oh Rome, My country! City of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee… (Lord Byron)
John Keats went to Italy for the first and only time when he was 25. He had contracted tuberculosis and according to his physician, his sole hope for survival rested on an escape from the English winter and the resuscitating powers of the Southern Italian sun.
Convinced he was doomed to obscurity as a poet and devastated to leave his fiancé Fanny Brawne behind, Keats endured a torturous journey but ultimately settled in an apartment in Rome at the foot of the Spanish Steps. He died there three months later. It took six weeks for the news to reach Fanny, still living with her mother in the white house on Heath Hurst Road.
The building in Piazza di Spagna where Keats died is now the Keats-Shelley House, dedicated also to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley died when his sailing boat was destroyed in a storm off the Tuscan coast of Viareggio, the same area where the Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground in 2012. He was not yet 30 years old.
The house displays manuscripts and memorabilia from both writers, as well as other English authors with close ties to Italy, like William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Oscar Wilde. On the other side of the steps is Babington’s, a vintage English tearoom where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton arranged illicit meetings during the filming of “Cleopatra”.
“Open my heart, and you will see Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’” Robert Browning
Of course, the English Romantics didn’t invent Italy. It was there all the time. But like jazz musicians interpreting a dusty pop song from a forgotten Broadway show, they reinvented it—finding in the tune a beauty that had been lost, or maybe never recognized at all.
The act of reinvention, of seeing more than is there, can be sentimental and even a little delusional. But it’s also an act of deep affection.
What more could we want in a soulmate than someone who sees in us something we never even knew was there? It is the very nature of love.
Wishing you all a very happy, and Romantic, Valentine’s Day!
Romantic indeed - especially the last photo!
Thanks so much. I realized that last photo was from a time far enough back that there was no digital copy-- had to take a photo of a phot. Crazy how a couple of decades slip away!