(translated by Daniel Donnelly)

1 Budden, Julian, The Operas of Verdi (London, 1981), I, 246Google Scholar .

2 I Copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio (Milan, 1913), 432–41.

3 Attila in Aquileia, also drawn from Werner's play, was composed by Giuseppe Persiani in 1827, while in the 1830s and 1840s a number of barbarian subjects (Alboini, Rosmunde, Ildegonde) were taken up as tragedies or melodramas on the Italian stage.

4 I refer in particular to the recent work of Ian Wood, who has attempted to connect the two areas of study by proposing a very convincing picture of the use of the Migration Period (AD c. 300–800) in the political discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Wood, Ian, ‘The Use and Abuse of the Early Middle Ages, 1750–2000’, in The Making of the Middle Ages, ed. Costambeys, Marios, Hamer, Andrew and Heale, Martin (Liverpool, 2007), 36–53Google Scholar .

5 On the interaction of the careers of Alessandro Manzoni, Augustin Thierry and Walter Scott with regard to the ethno-racial conflict between invading barbarians and autochthonous peoples, see Banti, A. M., ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini delle nazioni’, in Immagini della nazione nell'Italia del Risorgimento, ed. Banti, A. M. and Bizzocchi, R. (Rome, 2002), 21–44Google Scholar .

6 Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, ed. Bertani, Mauro and Fontana, Alessandro (New York, 2003), 79Google Scholar .

7 Samuel, Maurice, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth Century France (Ithaca, 2004)Google Scholar .

8 For Machiavelli, the Lombards ‘retained nothing foreign save their name’. Falco, G., ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia italiana’, in Atti del I Congresso internazionale di studi longobardi (Spoleto, 1952), 153–166Google Scholar .

9 Manzoni, Alessandro, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, in Tutte le opere (Florence, 1973), II, 1998Google Scholar .

10 Soldani, Simonetta, ‘Il Medioevo del Risorgimento nello specchio della nazione’, in Arti e storia nel Medioevo, ed. Castelnuovo, Enrico and Sergi, Giuseppe (Turin, 2004), IV, 149–186Google Scholar .

11 Wood, Ian, ‘Barbarians, Historians and the Construction of National Identities', Journal of Late Antiquity, 1 (2008), 81Google Scholar .

12 Isbell, John Claiborne, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël's De l'Allemagne (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

13 Sismondi's great resonance in Italy is particularly tied to his monumental work Storia delle Repubbliche italiane nell'età di mezzo, published in Zurich and Paris between 1807 and 1818 and promptly translated into Italian. Verdi's library at Sant'Agata preserves a complete edition of the work in sixteen volumes (specifically the 1843 Capolago reprint).

14 According to Henning, Ian Allan (L'Allemagne de Madame De Staël et la polémique romantique. Première fortune en France et en Allemagne (1814–1830) [Paris, 1929]Google Scholar ) the book's success, signalled above all by the quantity of reprints and the ample range of translations, was demonstrated more by its sales and popularity than its criticism.

15 See Salvatores, Maria-Gaetana, ‘Madame De Staël e Leopardi’, Studi e testi, 35 (1970), 43–71Google Scholar ; in addition to de Staël's influence, Mazzini would feel an attraction to Zacharias Werner's ‘dominating religious ideal’, to which he dedicated a long essay in 1836. He also planned on beginning a new theatrical library – a collection of translated foreign dramas – in his ‘Ventiquattro Febbraio’, Scritti editi e inediti (Imola, 1915), VIII, 203–56.

16 It has been noted that despite the success of her essays and books and the anticipatory character of her intuition, de Staël would never herself form a part of this Olympic pantheon. See Gutwirth, Madelyn, Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar .

17 See the famous letter ‘Sulla maniera e l’utilità delle traduzioni’, in Enciclopedia italiana, January 1816, in Bellorini, Egidio, Discussioni e polemiche sul Romanticismo (Bari, 1943), I, 3–9Google Scholar , which set off a great polemic between classicists and Romantics in Italy.

18 These are the words used by Madame de Staël in De l'Allemagne (London, 1813), 297.

19 On the richness of this volume, see the introduction by Goldin, D. Folena to Verdi und die deutsche Literatur, ed. Folena, Daniela and Osthoff, Wolfgang (Laaber, 2002)Google Scholar , in addition to Pierluigi Petrobelli's contribution, ‘Verdi e Madame de Staël’ (153–64) to the same collection.

20 See Tonelli, Marta Marri, ‘Andrea Maffei e Giuseppe Verdi’, Il Sommolago, 2 (1985), 5–38Google Scholar .

21 Sismondi, J. C. L. Sismondo, Storia della caduta dell'Impero Romano e della decadenza della civiltà dall'anno 250 al 1000, trans. Cantù, Cesare (Capolago, 1836)Google Scholar .

22 Cesare Balbo, ‘Dell’utilità presente di una storia generale d'Italia’, in Il Regno di Carlo Magno e scritti storici minori (Florence, 1862), 225Google Scholar .

23 The title of Sismondi's first Italian edition was, significantly, Storia del Risorgimento, dè progressi, del decadimento e della rovina della libertà (Lugano, 1833).

24 Soldani, ‘Il Medioevo del Risorgimento nello specchio della nazione’, 179. On Sismondi's success, see Schiera's, Pierangelo introduction to Storie delle repubbliche italiane (Turin, 1996)Google Scholar .

25 Balbo, , ‘Degli studi di storia italiana nel 1847’, in Il Regno di Carlo Magno, 243–247Google Scholar .

26 Balbo, 437.

27 In ‘L’Attila di Zacharias Werner ed il libretto per Verdi', in Verdi und die deutsche Literatur / Verdi e la letteratura tedesca. Tagung im Centro tedesco di studi veneziani Venedig 20.–21. November 1997. Bericht, ed. Daniella Goldin Folena and Wolfgang Osthoff (Laaber, 2002), 85, Rita Unfer Lukoschik argues that Foresto is a legendary hero from the house of Este.

28 See Wood, Ian, ‘“Adelchi” and “Attila”: The Barbarians and the Risorgimento’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 76 (2008), 233–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

29 According to Alberto M. Banti, one can speak in this case of a ‘figural’ conception of history (along the lines of Auerbach) in which single historical episodes ‘acquire the sense of anticipating events that have yet to occur, such as the establishment of a nation’. See La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita (Turin, 2000), 76.

30 Samuel, The Spectacular Past, 111, and Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar .