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Eustace here points out what is an evident flaw in contemporaryaccounts of Italy that offered themselves as reliable sources of knowledge onthis country and its culture. At the same time, however, the factual vistasof travel writing begin to shift towards the imaginary domain of fiction andItaly becomes the country depicted in countless Gothic narratives. Thus theClassical Tour confirms to what extent the Italy of the Gothic was acrucially active component in the sociological and anthropological discoursesunderpinning Romantic-period travel writing in Britain. Eustace's attackis levelled both at this discursive practice and its ostensibly factualvalues and the fabrications of fictional literature. Indeed, his wordsvindicate the Catholic Church from age-old accusations by pointing anaccusing finger at the popular tales which, by reproducing and diffusingthese notions, 'have at length biassed public opinion, and excited adistrust and an antipathy towards the Italian nation'. (2)
Illuminating Gothic fiction as a multiple structure pervaded by,and infiltrating a variety of signifying practices, Eustace makes plain thedangers implicit in dismissive imaginative geographies of Italy and theconcurrent need for correctives. In particular, he stresses the importance ofa greater ethical responsibility on the part of the writers: 'Theauthors of these Tales of Terror ought to recollect, that in amusing theimagination they are not allowed to pervert the judgment'. (3) Yet theterm 'tales' is aptly ambiguous in this call for moral improvement.It may refer to the horror stories purveyed by travel writings, as well asthe products of the Gothic imagination--a kind of protean discursive materialwith a variety of narrative applications and capable of conditioningapparently reliable interpretations of Italy.
Nonetheless, this combination of disparaging images of Italy wasnot exclusively formulated on the basis of British anti-Catholic feelings,cultural hostility and other assorted suspicions. Often this imaginaryoriginated from Italian documentary sources and, particularly, from Italianliterature which was the object of increasingly assiduous and analyticalstudies in Romantic-period Britain. (6) Since, as in the past, the literatureof Italy represented an inexhaustible source of narrative materials, thetales of terror mentioned by Eustace could thus also be drawn from Italiansources which constituted an archive of potential Gothic plots, in evidentcontrast with the widely held critical notion that Gothic texts wereessentially based on British or Germanantecedents--'she-tragedies', mid-eighteenth-century sentimentalliterature, terrifying ballads such as Burger's 'Lenore',plots based on the Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal, Schauerromane and worksfrom the Sturm und Drang tradition. (7) And, indeed, Coleridge'sacrimonious critique of Maturin's Bertram, then reworked as Chapter 23of Biographia Literaria (1817), insists on the Germanic provenance of Gothicfiction. In the conclusion to his disquisition on the 'German'drama, and especially the productions of Schiller and Kotzebue, Coleridgeasserts that 'The so-called German Drama ... is English in its origin,English in its materials, and English by re-adoption'. (8) In hispowerful polemic against the 'modern Jacobinical drama', hehighlights the intrinsically ethnic nature of the Gothic, ultimately wrestingit away from the Germans, though still firmly defining it as a Northerncultural phenomenon. But, in point of fact, the Gothic was not an exclusivelyNorthern preserve, and Italian literature contributed plots and narrativematerials to a number of Gothic (or 'Gothic-inflected') textsemerging in the late Romantic period, a phase generally overlooked byliterary histories which lose interest in a mode now allegedly dispersinginto a variety of genres and intersecting with countless other developments.
The late-Romantic metrical tale, in particular, provides severalinstances of texts inspired by Italian literature, above all Dante'sDivina Commedia and Boccaccio's Decameron. Interest in these authors andtheir output had never entirely waned in Britain, although their fame andpopularity benefited from late eighteenth-hand early nineteenth-centuryphenomena such as the intensification of literary-historical research,medievalizing antiquarianism and the reconstruction of national literarytraditions. (9) Two of the greatest writers and intellectuals in medievalculture, Dante and Boccaccio were widely studied, translated and discussed.Dante's Commedia in particular was translated, debated and glossed in aperiod which saw the emergence of a Dantean fashion among the literati andconnoisseurs climaxing around the years 1819-20. (10) In the development ofGothic fiction, the works of these medieval (and therefore'Gothic') authors became archives of narrative materials that wereeventually re-elaborated in Gothic or Gothic-influenced tales. (11)
The late eighteenth century has been recognised as the beginningof a systematic re-evaluation of Dante, who is perhaps the most obviouscandidate for the reconstruction of a thread of Italianate Gothic narrativesin British Romanticism. The Inferno, in particular, became fashionable againthanks to the reaction against cultural 'Augustanism', andcontributed to transforming Dante from a 'Gothic' (medieval) writerto a Gothic author dealing with gloomy, sublime and terrifying subjects. (12)Gothic overtones were found in the most popular narratives in the Inferno,and especially in a classic such as the tale of Paolo and Francesca (Canto V,88-142). The story of the ill-fated lovers of Rimini presents severaltypically Gothic features, such as patriarchal oppression (the tyrannicalhusband and persecuted female), a young lover, a quasi-incestuous situation,a castle where the heroine is imprisoned, and the violent murder of bothlovers. The tale inspired Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini (1816) whichbecame notorious among detractors of his political and literary activitiesand was pointed out as a major instance of the pernicious vacuity andideological subversion of 'Cockney-School' verse. Another textshowing obvious similarities with this plot was Byron's Parisina (1816),a Renaissance tale of (near) incest and horror inspired by EdwardGibbon's tale of the Marquis of Este's bastard son who had beenbeheaded after cuckolding his father. This metrical tale recalls the Paoloand Francesca plot because it features a young lover and an older husband, asituation of (de jure) incest linking the three characters, and the brutalpunishment inflicted on the lovers by the husband and father. (13)
Before this tale of persecuted love became one of favouriteepisodes from the Commedia, for most artists and writers the most intenselyGothic narrative in Dante's frightening canon was that of Count Ugolino(Inferno, Canto XXXIII, 1-90). Count Ugolino della Gherardesca had been apowerful political figure in thirteenth-century Pisa, yet, owing to intriguesfor power in the Tuscan city-state, he was imprisoned in the tower of theGualandi in 1288 with two sons and two grandsons (Dante collectively callsthem his children) and was left there to die of hunger. This tale held greatfascination for late eighteenth-century British authors and artists and, inValeria Tinkler-Villani's words, it was an easily decodable narrativebecause 'the sentimental, the Gothic, and pathetic tragedy all provideways of approaching this episode', and also because, more specifically,'Dante's Ugolino has all the features of the Gothic as we have cometo know it'. (14) Sir Joshua Reynolds's Classical Ugolino,exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, was generally credited with havingmade Dante popular again. Also Heinrich Ftissli depicted the Count in apainting shown at the Royal Academy in 1806 and so savagely criticised bycertain reviewers that William Blake felt obliged to defend his friendpublicly. (15) By 1800 Blake himself had read and annotated a copy of HenryBoyd's Inferno (1785) and around 1800-3 painted a portrait of Dante forhis patron William Hayley in which the poet's head is accompanied by asmaller scene representing Ugolino and his sons. Later, between 1824 and hisdeath in 1827, Blake worked on an unfinished series of illustrations to theCommedia and, in about 1826, created a pen, ink and tempera version of CountUgolino and His Sons in Prison'. (16) And, in 1804, Benjamin RobertHaydon had indicated Ugolino as a suitable theme in a list of suggestedtopics for paintings. (17) In the field of literature, among the youngergeneration of writers, both Byron and Shelley were deeply fascinated byDante's narrative universe and, as recorded by Thomas Medwin, on oneoccasion they discussed the Ugolino episode and the possibility ofcannibalism. (18) Medwin, Shelley's cousin and biographer, produced atranslation of 11.22-75 from the Ugolino episode in 1821, later corrected andrevised by the poet and published in Medwin's Life of Shelley (1847).And Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock had mentioned Ugolino in hissurvey of the theme of melancholy in the arts in The Philosophy of Melancholy(1812). Not so much a terrifying or horrifying tale, Ugolino for the youngPeacock was to be approached with a profoundly sympathetic attitude:'Deep pity dwells, with fear-suspended breath, / On Pisa's tower,and Ugolino's death'. (19)
Edward Wilmot's Ugolino; or, the Tower of Famine (1828) isperhaps the most extensive Romantic-period treatment of this material, herecouched in the mode of the 1820s metrical tale and enriched with deep Gothicovertones. The 'advertisement' to the poem describes the text as anexercise in historical accuracy, for the author provides an overview of hissources mostly bypassing Dante in favour of Giovanni Villani's morefactually reliable chronicles. The other tutelary auctoritas in the poem isLord Byron, whose Prisoner of Chilian (1816), resonant with echoes andintimations of Dante's Ugolino episode, is indicated as the model of thecontemporary 'prison poem'. (20) Simultaneously, however, Wilmotcarefully states that his poem is not a slavish imitation of this importantprecedent, especially not its metrical structure. The advertisement closeswith an expression of captatio benevolentiae aimed at the reviewers, as theauthor remarks that this work is a first poetical attempt, a statement thatcuriously jars with its apparent historical and literary ambitions. Thelatter are finally highlighted in Wilmot's abundant endnotes to the poemwhich refer the reader to Henry F. Cary's translation of Dante'spoem (The Vision of Dante, 1814, 1819), Geoffrey Chaucer's version ofthe Ugolino plot in 'The Monk's Tale', and several othersources or precedents.
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