Upper-class Europeans and North Americans have always ranked Italy at the top of their cultural register. Believing that Italy was a font of inspiration, American artists and writers from the period before 1900 also traveled and lived in Italy for extended periods of time. In his Italian Journey Goethe was among Italy’s most ardent supporters. Stendahl is famously known for promoting what has become known as the “Stendahl Syndrome,” that moment in Florence when he became faint at the very thought of the vast accumulation of art and history that surrounded him in the northern city. Likewise, beginning in the eighteenth century and extending into the nineteenth, Italy was the educational capstone of the Grand Tour traveler in Europe. As a result of their education, upper-class English men and women had constructed an idealized image of Classical and Renaissance Italy whose sites they avidly pursued in their tour. However, their confrontation with contemporary Rome and Naples was another matter. Nevertheless, the idealization of Italian society remains steadfast in the foreigner’s imagination. At a gathering recently, I overheard someone say, “What’s there not to like about Italy.” Well, that depends.
Navigating a foreign culture’s habits is never easy, a fact that could at times tarnish the travelers’ experience. As Chloe Chard documents in Tristes Plaisirs: A Critical Reader of the Romantic Grand Tour (2014), the traveler had to negotiate the language barrier, a foreign cuisine, physical discomfort, and even over-tourism. With the development of steamship travel and the rise of the middle-class, Italy’s plaisirs had become available to many, and to some degree, a plague to others. Henry James kept extensive diaries on his travels collected in Italian Hours. In the 1890s he visited his beloved Venice often, where he was a guest at the Palazzo Barbaro, owned by the expatriate Bostonian family, Daniel and Ariana Curtis. But the tide began to change for James. In June of 1894 he wrote to a friend that after a three-month stay in Venice he was leaving, and complains, “I am not even sure I shall ever be here again. Venice, to tell the truth, has been simply blighted, and made a proper little hell (I mean what I say!) by ‘people’! They have flocked here, these many weeks, in their thousands, and life has been a burden in consequence.” (Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro). What would James say about Venice today, from cruise ships, hordes of people, high water, and the Mechanical Moses?
The English Grand Tour traveler, like James, though well-schooled in historical Italy, was ill- prepared to deal with contemporary Italy. James explained in the American Scene, that Italy was best viewed from a distance, preferably through the window of a comfortable carriage. It was a different story when the upper-class English traveler had to descend from the carriage and begin walking Rome’s and Naples’ neighborhoods, in their estimation, overrun by friars, pickpockets, prostitutes, and beggars. Their diaries present yet another image of Italy, seldom if ever represented in those painterly nineteenth-century Romanic landscapes of il bel paese, with their romantic, vine-draped Roman ruins, and quaint, diminutive images of peasants tending their livestock, wandering contentedly in a meadow. What’s there not to like about such scenes?
Lurking behind such romanticized views of Italy was the negative reaction that those upper-class English Grand Tour travelers had upon their confrontation with Southern Italian culture, beginning with Rome. The English were not alone. As Edward Chaney tells us in The Evolution of the Grand Tour (1998), by the eighteen century one of Italy’s French critics wrote, “L’Europe finit à Naples:… La Calabre, La Sicile, tout le reste est de L’Afrique.” The contemporary Italian right-wing would upgrade the racist motto by declaring that Africa, in fact, begins with Rome. Descending from carriages, English travelers suddenly came face to face with papal Rome and Southern Catholic ritual and culture, which their High Church upbringing and English anti-Catholicism had prepared them to disparage. In his Orientalism (1978), Edward Said wrote that idealized views of other cultures can be harmless. However, Said explained, the trouble begins when a dominant, patrician class in a self-congratulatory manner disparages the perceived faults of the “other” culture.
Venice in winter. Photo courtesy of Dario Cusmano.
Englishman Samuel Sharp was among Italy’s most strident critics. In his Letters from Italy: Describing the Customs and Manners of that Country (1765), he wrote approvingly about northern Italian cities, from Venice to Florence. But when he arrived in Rome, he complained about its gloomy Medieval narrow streets, armies of beggars, and prodigious number of monks. His education had prepared him to appreciate the city’s art-filled churches. However, in that prototypical Protestant assault, he chided the Church for its shameless display of wealth, while there were so many poor in the streets of Rome. Of course, the subtext is that the Roman hierarchy, above all the pope, enjoyed the fruits of their exploitation of their devotees. He complained that, in spite of Rome’s “antique grandeur,” ultimately “the spirit of Modern Rome seems to prevail.” While he noted that he saw few “public women” on Rome’s streets, he condemned the pope for licensing whore houses. Sharp wrote, “Protestants, I mean the very good ones, who take all occasions to abuse the Pope, laugh frequently, that his Holiness, in his holy city, should (sic) license brothels.” The whores, he hastened to add, were poor Neapolitan women who, when they died, were buried in unconsecrated ground with dogs and heretics. In other passages Sharp cleverly attempted to downplay his attack upon the pope. But as “a very good” Protestant he knew that he had struck just the right notes for his High Church Anglican readership back home. He did not want to be accused of snuggling up to his Holiness.
English travelers’ ridicule of Italian culture was not lost upon at least one Italian, Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789), a well-known Turin-born Italian literary critic living in London at the time. After reading several English travel works, he launched a strident defense of his homeland in a two-volume work entitled An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, With Observations on the Mistakes of Some Travellers, With Regard to that Country ….. In Answer to Samuel Sharp (1769). It is a thoroughly entertaining and even humorous read. To summarize his more than 700-pages, he began in Volume 1 with a review of the accomplishments of Italian culture, literature, music, and politics. In Volume 2, he defended the practice of educating Italian women in convents in the face of Sharp’s view that all Italian women were consigned to convents until married, or, if they never married, they were forced to “take the veil.” He then turned his attention to defending the Italian character, from Genoa and Florence to Rome and finally Naples. He attacked Sharp in his slander of the Neapolitan character. He even championed the quality of Neapolitan horses in the face of Sharp’s criticism of the low quality of equines he was forced to rent in Naples. He also defended Italian cuisine against the complaints from the tea and crumpet English palate.
He was especially offended by the English traveler’s criticism of Catholicism. He defended those traveling friars begging for alms to support their itinerate, purportedly religious mission. He wrote, “The friars have been often stigmatized by ultramontane writers as very loo(s)e (sic) and debauched: but the accusation is surely ill-grounded and calumnious.” A hard sell, for sure. He especially defended Romans and their relationship with the pope. He cited several English travel writers by name, Sharp included, who were “perfectly convinced that the conformity (in many external practices) between papery and paganism is very great.” But Baretti asked, “But what does conformity prove? Nothing else, in my opinion…” Baretti concluded, “I thought it my duty to say something … and make for once an example of the travel-mongers who, running hastily from Susa (sic?) to Naples and back again the same road, make it a constant rule to prove that they not turn papists at Rome, by abusing all the Italians on the most shocking manner their malignity can suggest.” An astute critic, he discerned accurately English travelers’ efforts to distinguish themselves from papal Rome.
But Baretti’s defense of his culture would fall on deaf ears. Ultimately, Italophile Johann Goethe’s glowing account of Naples in his widely read Italian Journey (1816) would be drowned out by the din of the ever-growing Anglo-Protestant, anti-Catholic accounts of Roman and Neapolitan life and religious practices. Even Henry James, making a play on that old adage, See Naples and Die, wrote to a friend, “I have seen Naples and survived.” But what James did not realize, unlike his once beloved Venice, that Naples, while chaotic, would never change or be overrun by the tourism he loathed. Naples, like James, would survive.
Title page of Letters from Italy: Describing the Customs and Manners of that Country by Samuel Sharp (1765) and An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy by Joseph Baretti (1769). Photos courtesy of the author.
But if Johann Goethe was among Naples’ most famous supporters, then the renowned Charles Dickens must be considered among Rome’s and Naples’ most famous detractors. By 1846 Dickens had published six novels and was famous. In his travel account, Pictures from Italy (1846), he collected a series of letters that he wrote for the Daily News while traveling in Italy the year before. Pictures would have a long life. After his letters appeared in the newspaper, Pictures came out in a limited first edition with wood cuts. It was bound up with subsequent editions of Hard Times (1854) and enjoyed a wide readership along with the sales of the novel. In 1865 he published a cheap edition for mass distribution. In 1893 Pictures was combined with Dickens’ other travel account, American Notes, under the title American Notes and Pictures from Italy, published by Macmillan.
Dickens’ Pictures must rank among the very best travel writing of the period. His passages run from conventional picturesque descriptions to eviscerating outrage, from satire and irony to humor. He is especially funny when he unerringly captured the dialect and the ham-fisted behavior of the semi-educated, middle-class English tourist that he met along the way, the same traveler that James disparaged.
In his descriptions of Italian Catholic ritual, he joined his Grand Tour countrymen in adding yet another chapter on what is indeed wrong with Italy. He had little sympathy for Catholic religious orders, and inexplicably expressed his disdain for beggars, including Naples’ lazzaroni. He should have known better. In Bleak House (1853) he would soon create the fictional Tom-All-Alone’s slum to represent London’s slums that housed the city’s countless homeless poor begging in its streets.
Dickens prepared his reader well for his entrance into Italy. While in Avignon, he visited the Cathèdrale Notre-Dame des Doms d’Avignon and the Palais des Papes. In the Cathedral, he described the votive offerings in the Cathedral’s many chapels as “very roughly and comically got up.” Echoing Sharpe, he called the churches “pagan temples” and decried the compromise that early Christianity made between what he labeled “the false religion and the true.” When he visited the Palace of the Popes, he focused on the ghoulish history of the Chamber of Torture. He called it “an impregnable fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the Inquisition; at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood.” For Dickens, the Chamber was an index of the popes’ gruesome quest for power and indulgent life-style, all at the expense of their obsequious subjects.
Upon his entrance to Genoa, he wasted no time in attacking those itinerant religious orders that had abandoned their monastic ideals and vows of poverty. From Italian folk tales to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and beyond, monks and friars were identified as a pesky blight upon the holy image of the Church. Dickens wrote, “there is pretty sure to be at least one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be found among these gentry… greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor could hardly be observed among any class of men in the world.” He observed, as well, in the streets the much hated and conspiratorial Jesuits: they “go slinking noiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats.” His imagery was crafty: no doubt received by his readers back home with smirks and nodding heads.
With his introduction to Italy, he departs Genoa. He treated Italy’s northern towns with faint praise, including Florence, whose streets he described as “magnificently stern and somber,” and, with a satiric nod to the picturesque, a town surrounded by “cheerful Tuscany.” He rattled off a long list of the city’s artists, Michelangelo and Da Vinci among them. However, he experienced no lightheadedness or shortness of breath.
Dickens entered Rome on the 30th of January. Although he did acknowledge the appeal of Rome’s imposing architectural facades, his complimentary passages were nearly always followed by a subtle and sometimes not so subtle disclaimer. He reported that he found Rome’s neighborhoods charming. Presumably, he was referring to what is now Piazza Venezia where Rome’s Medieval quarter once stood. As for Rome’s ancient ruins, Dickens painted a conventional word picture for his London readers that was reminiscent of those idealized paintings of Italian landscapes of the period. He knew that his readers’ romantic notion of Italy would not override their anti-Catholicism. He mentioned familiar sites such as the “arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone”: images of the “ghost of old Rome … in its full and awful grandeur.” But he hastened to add that it is, “God be thanked: a ruin.”
Castel Sant’Angelo, also known as the Mausoleum of Hadrian, completed in 139 AD, sits on the right bank of the Tiber River. © Accenti Photo Archive.
As for the Coliseum, he pulled no punches. He described it as a “remnant of the old mythology and old butchery of Rome.” His knives were out: he even went so far as to say that the Italian face changed as the traveler approached Rome and “its beauty becomes devilish.” He opined that the modern Roman would be “at home and happy in a renovated Colosseum tomorrow,” watching the spectacle of the old butchery in the arena organized by emperors for their and their subjects’ entertainment. However, unlike those English Grand Tour travelers, he was not on the hunt for those enchanting classical ruins. He quickly dismissed them to get to his real objective: contemporary Rome and the popes.
Arriving before the start of Rome’s pre-Lent Carnival, he described in detail many of the Carnival’s rituals, especially the “innocence” and “vivacity” of the chaotic Carnival scene along the Corso. However, mindful of his Victorian readers, he was careful to explain that the street scenes were “free from any taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be.” He made it clear that he would not be seduced by decadent Rome.
As for Rome’s treasures, he was appreciative at times, but was careful to separate the art from the Catholic culture that inspired it. Upon entering St. Peter’s, he damned it with faint praise. He was impressed with “the expansive majesty and glory” of the nave. But he hastened to add, “I felt no very strong emotion.” Harping on a familiar theme, he wrote that the altar was reminiscent of a “goldsmith’s shop,” an obvious reference to the pope’s wealth. He says nothing about Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Although High Church iconography was changing at the time, Dickens knew that there was no room on the empty Protestant cross for the bloody agony of its victim and the sorrow of His mother.
In his second visit to St. Peter’s, he pounced: “It is not religiously impressive or affecting.” Its art treasures are “incompatible with the place itself.” It has no value as a holy site. It would serve better as “a Parthenon, a Senate House, or a great architectural trophy, having no other object than an architectural triumph.” He describes the apse as “gaudy” and the color scheme of the marble floor as a “stupendous Bonbon.” He mocked the practice of “good Catholics” who kiss the toe of St. Peter’s statue. In fact, he reported that he found greater enjoyment in small churches in English and in London’s English cathedrals, a remark no doubt intended to please his Victorian readership.
He ridiculed what he called the clownish images of saints in Rome’s other churches. In his visit to Santa Maria in Aracoeli he described the Infant Savior as “a little wooden doll” with “a face very like General Tom Thumb, the American Dwarf.” Worshipers kissed the foot of the bejeweled Bambino, exquisitely dressed with the “costly offerings of the Faithful.” Relentlessly, he continued, “The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible. The same monotonous, heartless, drowsy chanting, always going on, the same dark building; …the self-same people kneeling here.” On a rite that Dickens knew well his readers loathed, he derided the practice of indulgences at shrines where worshipers could give money to free the poor souls in Purgatory or shorten their own stay there. Reminiscent of a scene that so many of his Grand Tour compatriots described, Dickens complained that on the steps of all of Rome’s churches, “There are the same dirty beggars stopping in their muttered prayers to beg; the same miserable cripples exhibiting their deformity at the doors; the same blind men rattling little pots, like kitchen pepper-castors: their depositories for alms.” With a wink and a nod, Dickens needed only to describe Rome’s poor stationed outside the pope’s richly adorned holy sites for what he knew was the sneering disapproval of his English reading audience.
In another familiar Protestant grievance, he complained about Catholic worshipers’ irreverence, what he called “that same odd mixture of respect and indecorum, faith and phlegm: kneeing on the stones, and spitting on them, loudly; getting up from prayers to beg a little…” He was personally offended by a woman who was praying one minute in a church and in the next offered him her card for music lessons. There was an irksome man who stopped his devotion “to belabour his dog who was growling at another dog: and whose yelps and howls resounded through the church…” Dickens knew well that these well-worn scenes in English travel books were the stuff of both Protestant condemnation and even entertainment.
He found the sculptures in both the Capitoline Museum and the Vatican impressive, “beyond the reach of words.” However, losing his patience, it must have been a long, arduous day of touring, he found the works of Bernini and his school, the Baroque, “the most detestable class of productions in the wide world.” He snarled that he would rather view Chinese art than “the best of these breezy maniacs.” When he settled down, he opined that he preferred the “exquisite grace and beauty of Canova’s statues.” If she were alive, Paulina Borghese would have certainly been pleased with Dicken’s assessment.
But more important than his taste in art, he dedicated several pages to the grotesque and horrifying spectacle of a public beheading of a criminal just before Holy Week. He described the beheading in detail: the cut of the blade, the pallor of the severed head, the vacant eyes, and the amount of blood. He concluded, “It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle.” He hastened to point out that while standing in the crowd of spectators, “My empty pockets were tried several times.” Without comment, he simply allowed his readers to draw their own but obvious conclusions: Holy Week’s solemn rites were trumped by the bloody, inhumane execution in decadent Rome.
During Holy Week. The Sistine Chapel was overflowing with pilgrims. He described one Holy Week service he attended as “very monotonous and dreary.” In fact, he described Holy Week services, from Good Friday to Easter Monday, in a mocking tone while focusing more on the general chaos and irreverence of Italian Catholic worship rather than on its holiness. He was outraged over the Good Friday ritual of penitents climbing the Scala Santa on their knees. Expressing more outrage over this ancient ritual than he did at the public execution, he wrote that he never saw anything so “ridiculous” and “unpleasant in its senseless and unmeaning degradation.” His impatience with Catholic worship had reached its peak. On Easter Sunday St Peter’s square was filled with over a hundred thousand, from “sulky Romans” to “sight-seeing foreigners,” crushed together “like so many insects.”
Mount Vesuvius, © Horacioselva | Dreamstime
After the Easter festivities, Dickens headed for Naples. Before reaching Naples, he entered the town of Fondi, a place that represented “all that was wretched and beggarly.” He complained about the plethora of beggars, naked children, and stray dogs in Fondi’s “miserable streets” overflowing with refuse. Upon his entrance into Naples, in an observation reminiscent of his best novels, he recorded the disgraceful contrast between the number of lazzaroni lying asleep in doorways and the gaily dressed gentry riding past in their elegant carriages or strolling in the public gardens. Otherwise, his opinion of Naples only reinforced the observations of his Grand Tour kinsmen. He saw what Goethe did not see or, at least, refused to report. Dickens described the beggars who, as he passed them in the streets, rapped their chins with their right hand as a sign for hunger. Otherwise, he was amused at the other expressive hand signs that Neapolitans made while conversing, a cultural trait not found among his taciturn compatriots.
“All of this,” Dickens wrote, “and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and maccaroni-eating (sic) at sunset, and flower-selling all day long and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the Bay sparkle merrily.” Never far from biting satire in anything he wrote, Dickens simply could not resist twisting the knife in the backside of those romantically inclined writers and painters of the era. In the next sentence, he hastened to add, “But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated.” He felt that it was his “duty” not to obscure Naples’ poverty with picturesque “painting and poetizing.” In fact, he concluded, there is more hope in man’s destiny “among the ice and snow of the North Pole, than in the sun and bloom of Naples.” Dickens’ cultural intolerance burst. It had been a long tour. He visited a favorite tourist destination at the time, Vesuvius, before returning to Naples and then heading north.
Rome has continued to evolve as a modern city. Today, bereft of noticeable prostitution and those pesky friars, street culture in the center is all but dominated by a sanitized tourism. Of course, so has modern Naples changed. The vendors of the maccheroni swilled by the lazzaroni is no longer consumed on the street. Maccheroni made its way up the social ladder. Its modern equivalence, pasta, is now served in Italy’s finest restaurants. Garibaldi was right when he proclaimed that maccheroni would unite Italy. However, in spite of its upper-class neighborhoods such as Vomero, poverty remains a hallmark of the modern city. Unfortunately, driven by its historic poverty, there is that something in Naples that will never change. Recently, a friend of mine visited Naples, and upon checking into his hotel the concierge informed him that his cognome was common in the city. He asked if when he met someone with his same cognome, should he identify himself. The concierge paused then responded, “Well, that depends.” So, I must add in response to those upper-class Grand Tour travelers, Dickens included, Naples’ allure today remains its complex mix of modernity, chaos, and immutability, for good or for ill. That depends.
Ken Scambray’s most recent book is Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870-1940 (University of Nevada Press)
