The Brooklyn Rail

When I was eight years old, I told my mother in no uncertain terms that Italy was my favorite country. I couldn’t really tell you why—not then, not now. Something about the boot shape, I think. Something about my mom having traveled to Italy when she was eight.

So my mom bought me a book, two in fact. One called The Wonders of Italy, a big, vertical coffee table book with intensely saturated pictures, with cypress trees on the front. In addition, she gave me a book of Giotto’s pictures, telling me she loved Giotto when she was my age. The Fra Angelico book came a bit later. I found out that when my mom was five she made her own Fra Angelico angel after being gifted a similar book by a family friend.

Italy—or at least the fantasy of Italy—became part of my early life. It is now part of my scholarly life: I am writing a book tracing how the English Pre-Raphaelite artists routed questions of race, and Blackness more particularly, through the art of early modern Venice. It seems that we—non-Italians, even Italo-Americans (north and south)—always come to Italy belatedly; our relationship to it is nearly always elegiac, if not downright hazily nostalgic, not for what we have had, but for an idea of that which never existed. But still, we wish to claim it. In his early poem, “Sonnet on Approaching Italy,” Oscar Wilde sighs, quoting Petrarch, “Italia, my Italia” (line 2), seeing “the land for which my life had yearned” (line 4).¹ We see this sense of nostalgia employed and derided to comedic effect in Mike White’s second season of The White Lotus; “you can’t go home again,”² opines Sicilian-American Bert Di Grasso after being pelted with vegetables as he is driven off the property of his supposed Sicilian relatives. I have no Italian relatives. On what grounds can I claim Italy? What in fact am I claiming when I do so?

Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, three-quarters Italian, had every reason to claim Italy, and so he did in ways complicated and contradictory. His father, political exile and writer Gabriele Rossetti, according to Dante Gabriel’s brother William Michael, “always spoke Italian at home” but also “could readily throw himself back, when he liked, into the Neapolitan dialect, or the Abruzzese, which is not a little provincial.” Despite his occasional use of his regional language, Gabriele Rossetti “always advocated the unity of Italy, long before that aspiration was considered a very practical one.”³ Provincial on command, giving him an air of rustic authenticity, Gabriele Rossetti was thoroughly modern in his political vision. William Michael and his brother Dante Gabriel—the latter of whom never in fact traveled to Italy—needed to imagine a unified country, an Italy to support their artistic ambitions, characterized by an ardent reach into a mythological past. Though nascent, Italy also signified earliness, a foundation on which to build a new, modern art.

If Wilde and the Rossettis constructed a fantasy of Italy, in today’s Italy, new fantasies, assemblages of a past to serve a political present (whose, precisely?), are also being constructed. The strangest manifestation to come out of right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Italy—at least in the realm of art—was an exhibition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work at La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. While one might laugh at Meloni turning to the Shire to prop up a political vision in which clear forces of good and evil battle, the museum’s (and Meloni’s) invocation of a mythic, fictional past might be politically and culturally useful, for is strangely reflective of what Italy is and has been for outside artists since the nineteenth century.

This Critics Page reopens questions of timeliness and belatedness, early and late, influence and rejection, and Italianness (Italianità, a racialized term, has reemerged as the contested term of right-wing politicians) and cosmopolitanism. Italy is at once defined as hyper-local (seen perhaps most clearly in the stubborn and miraculous persistence of local language traditions) and as global, as has been recently made manifest in the international adoption/adaptation of the protest song “Bella Ciao,” from Iran to Ukraine. How can we account for campanilismo and the global circulation of Italian art, culture, products, and ideas? Italians of African and Asian ancestry have pushed back against the invocation of Italianità. The writer Djarah Kan, Italian of Ghanaian descent, explains, “They are trying to invent out of whole cloth a model of Italianità that doesn’t match the reality of the country. … And every time we hear talk of Italianità or “Made in Italy” and of who has the right to be considered Italian or not, we laugh, but it also makes us sick to our stomachs.”⁴ At the same time, the racial categorization of Italians as white Europeans has, historically, been contested. Art historian and critic John Ruskin wrote to his father in 1858, “The Italian ladies seem to me to be falling off in two curious ways: on one side, the thin ones are beginning to have a strange touch of the negro in their features—and on the other side—the fat ones have a touch of the worst sort of English countenance.”⁵ English and African, European and decidedly un-European, categorizing Italy and Italians has always left outsiders flummoxed.

As the essays here will attest, the presence of so-called outsiders has always been central to Italian identity. Venice’s status as a trading port has rendered it multicultural since pre-modern times (one of the reasons, I think, it was such a fruitful locale through which the Pre-Raphaelites could think through questions of race). Twentieth-century Italian literature and art was in no small part defined by Jewish voices, from Amedeo Modigliani to Italo Svevo to Giorgio Bassani, whose work is also imbued with a queer sensibility. What constitutes the self of a place defined by otherness?

In naming this Critics Page, “Early/Modern/Italy,” I do not mean solely to evoke the Italy of Fra Angelico. Or the Italy of the Futurists, Modern with a capital M. Or even Meloni’s Italy, if it can be said to be hers. The writers, curators, and thinkers whose work is assembled here take those words in aggregate at times but also usefully disaggregate them to consider topics as varied as a Korean translation of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists to anti-fascist resistance in the very art forms fascists claim left outsiders flummoxed and aroused impulses toward overdetermined racial taxonomies.