When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.

The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Göttingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travelers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, traveling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Naval officers off ships of the Mediterranean squadron visited Cairo to see the pyramids. Two groups went on business, one importing steam-powered rice and cotton mills from New York, the other exporting giraffes from the Kalahari Desert for wild animal shows in New York. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travelers themselves.

It is almost impossible to imagine the United States without making reference to Italy. There is scarcely any aspect of American culture untouched by Italy—its history, art, architecture, fashion, film, music, the mafia, or even more viscerally its food. Italy occupies a space of near mythical proportion in the American imagination. When many Americans think of, or dream about and imagine, the good life, how and where they would like to live, they think most often of Italy; the beauty, the life-style, the romance, the excitement and sense of adventure that Italy offers. By looking at the fluid and multi-dimensional imaginative interactions Americans have with Italian culture and society, this comprehensive and robust volume offers a new and novel way of exploring the influence of Italy upon the United States. University of New South Wales historian Ian James Bickerton argues that if we wish to understand the United States, and how Americans define themselves and their nation, it is vital to examine how they imagine themselves, and he demonstrates that throughout U.S. history one of the most powerful stimulants shaping the imaginary world of Americans has been Italy.

This is a study of the effect of their travels in Italy on thirteen American writers, among them Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W. D. Howells, and Henry James. Nathalia Wright's thesis is that Italy was a major influence on the American writers of fiction who visited that country. Some of these writers went to Italy for reasons of health. others because they were dissatisfied with the status of artists in the United States and wished the pleasure and adventure of living in a country permeated with artistic sensibility. They all had in common a love for the Italian countryside, even if their opinions of the Italian personality varied. American Novelists in Italy is concerned with those writers who wrote between 1804 and 1870 or had begun to write by 1870. It deals with their travels in Italy and discusses in detail the treatment of Italian material in their subsequent writing. From their Italian experience issued such diverse novels as Cooper's The Water-Witch, the most lighthearted and imaginative of all Cooper's novels, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and James's The Golden Bowl. In addition, Dr. Wright views in detail numerous works by lesser-known authors. Illustrated with works of nineteenth-century artists who also travelled in Italy, this book should be of interest to all students of American literature, especially since it is the first book to deal in depth with the influence of Italy on the American novel.

America in Italy examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Axel Körner shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but he focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home. Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American "domestic manners" were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire. Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, America in Italy is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought.

American Authors Reinventing Italy: The Writings of Exceptional Nineteenth-Century Women is a collection of scholarly papers that examine Italy in the writings of such American women as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Edith Wharton. The introduction provides a general picture of the British and American female authors in Italy, in particular Florence, and discusses the works of such writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ouida, Violet Paget, Kate Field, and Francesca Alexander. In the essay that forms Chapter One, Debra Bernardi (Carroll College, Montana) examines sexuality in Margaret Fuller´s Italian writings; in Chapter Two, Philip J. Kowalski (Wake Forest University, North-Carolina) analyzes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Italian views in her travel texts and her novel set in Italy; Sirpa Salenius (University of New Haven in Florence, Italy), in Chapter Three, looks at the way Constance Fenimore Woolson uses Italian tropes in her discussion of contemporary issues; and in Chapter Four, Virginia Ricard (University of Bordeaux, France) discusses themes, settings, and characters in Edith Wharton’s fiction and non-fiction writing that deals with Italy.

Annotation. Sixteen essays examine aspects of American art that owe a debt to Italy and Italian artists. A central theme is the tension between perceptions of Italy as a mythic presence, the visual incarnation of spirit, and a contrasting ambivalence felt by many Americans about the cultural ties binding them to Europe despite their political independence. With some 200 illustrations, 36 in color. Not indexed. Pre-publication price, $49.95, until 12-31-90. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).