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• Foscolo and the friends of the Conciliatore

  31-46

  Sebastiano Italia

  Views:

  76

  The first issue of Conciliatore was published in September 1818; its history includes heated discussions. Silvio Pellico, who was its most consistent proponent, felt himself to be part of a hegemonic intellectual elite. There is a Foscolian mark to the works
  of these young intellectuals of the new generation. It is the crisis of a generation that comes to attack the very idea of literature that sees the passage from the certainties of the Enlightenment to the Romantic disquiet. The querelle des anciens et des modernes brought to light the unbridgeable hiatus that put Foscolo in a position of contrast with his friends and pupils. The position assumed by the exile risked placing him against his dearest friends, the Romantics, and bringing him closer to his detractors, the Classicists. Foscolo does not manage to see any possibility of experimenting a valid mediation. A clear symptom of his peremptory closure.

• Pepe-Lamartine A literary controversy and a duel for the Risorgimento

  64-79

  Gabriele Paolini

  Views:

  277

  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.