Abstract
During the long era of Italian philhellenism, interest in modern Greece was more than just political and ideological. In particular, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the philhellenism of the Risorgimento period was animated by an interest in the culture of modern Greece and by the wish to investigate the character and most significant aspects of the civilisation and literary production of modern Greece. In the context of literate and pluralistic Italian editorial opinion, the magazine Nuova Antologia exhibited a sincerity of interest in modern Greece in the years when Italy and Greece were still engaged in the process of national resolution and finding their places within the European political and cultural scene.
Keywords: Italy, modern Greece, Italian press, modern Greek studies, Italian philhellenism, Nuova Antologia
Sympathy for the Greek Revolution was an expression of solidarity not limited to the Italian political and cultural scene, but shared also by the rest of Europe. In the context of this philhellenism, which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, Italy participated more tortuously and deeply for reasons of history, geographical position and political reality. Attesting to this is the fact that, while philhellenism, together with the general exhaustion of Romanticism, had already weakened in Central Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century, it lasted longer and was more intense in Italy.
Attention to the revolutionary cause of modern Greece showed no signs of diminishing after the recognition of Greece as an independent state in 1830. The long tradition of relations between Italian and Greek revolutionaries, which started before 1821, was renewed in the most significant moments marking the path towards national resolution in the two countries. On the eve of Italian unification, this feeling of brotherhood between the two countries revived in a compelling fashion. The new period of philhellenism, beginning in 1859, was destined to last for the remainder of the nineteenth century, with significant milestones marked by Garibaldi's foray into Greek territory during the Cretan insurrections of 1866 and 1896, the latter of which resulted in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Nonetheless, ‘the great hopes of the early 1860s […] were also favoured by projects no longer concerning the brotherhood among peoples in search of their national freedom, but dictated by desire for territorial expansion and for the increase of dynastic prestige’.