To examine the effect of, and the reaction to, radical Anglo-Italian literature in the public mind, it is necessary to consider British ideas of Italians and Italy in the generation before Waterloo. To Britons at the time, Italy signified two very different things: the historical Italy – the setting for Republican and Imperial Rome and the cradle of the Renaissance – and the modern Italy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The former was enjoying something of a resurgence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, caused in no small part by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) and Miscellaneous Works (1796). In the revolutionary decade there was heightened demand for Renaissance Italian history, spurred on by its republican politics, which was met by the publication of William Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795), a work that claims not only to be concerned with ‘mere historical events’ but also with ‘the progress of letters and arts’.