The essay reconstructs the reactions in Florence provoked by the publication of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Le dernier chant du pelerinage d’Harold (1825), inspired by Lord Byron’s unfinished work. The portrait of absolute decadence of contemporary Italy, with the definition of its inhabitants as “polvere d’uomini”, outraged the intellectuals, who would have liked to respond in Vieusseux’s Anthology, the most important periodical of the time. Pietro Giordani also intended to reply to Lamartine by publishing an essay about Operette Morali of the young (and still unknown) Giacomo Leopardi, portrayed as a great and living Italian. Censorship prevented this and other responses, but not a harsh reference contained in a booklet by the Neapolitan exile Gabriele Pepe. His pride wounded, Lamartine (at the time in charge of the French embassy in Florence) challenged Pepe to a duel.
Pepe’s victory sparked a great enthusiasm in Florence and throughout Italy. The theme of offended honor (the symbolic kind, of the Italian homeland and of its Sons) and avenged with a Proof of Value became a constant and was imitated many other times, in reality and in literature, feeding the imagination of several generations.