Writers and cultural policy

In January 1816 the Milan journal Biblioteca italiana published an article Sulla maniera e l'utilà delle traduzioni ('On the manner and usefulness of translations'), suggesting that Italian writers would benefit from a knowledge of foreign literature. This apparently unexceptional proposition triggered off a fiery debate which raged on and off for a long time, eventually outliving its own usefulness,and is emblematic of the whole period this chapter attempts to survey. Napoleon's invasion of Italy in 1796 and his eventual conquest of the peninsula had led to the establishment of a Kingdom of Italy in the north of the country which was seen by many patriots as a first step towards national unity and independence. With the collapse of the Kingdom in 1814 Milan, the capital of Lombardy, had returned under Austrian domination. It was without doubt the most advanced city in the most developed area of a woefully underdeveloped country. The Austrian plenipotentiary, Count Josef Heinrich von Bellegarde, soon realised that, besides the old aristocracy, traditional supporters of the Habsburgs who had ennobled their ancestors, he might also enlist the support of many radical intellectuals sorely disappointed by Napoleonic totalitarianism, who therefore would not appear as stooges of the new government. Among these were the doyen of Italian poets, Vincenzo Monti, then aged sixty-three; Pietro Giordani (1774–1848), who had become well known eight years earlier for his Panegirico di Napoleone legislatore (‘Panegyric of Napoleon the Law-giver’), and the geologist Scipione Breislak (1750–1826).