The ideal of romantic love in post-unification Italy

The spread of the ideal of romantic love from the mid-eighteenth century represented an epochal change for contemporary European societies, contributing to revolutionising both the ways in which emotional relationships between individuals were understood and conceptions of family ties, child earing and, last but not least, sexuality itself (Coontz Reference Coontz2006). At the time, the arrangements underlying marital bonds were dictated mainly by social and economic factors, largely responding to the logic of arranged marriages. While in the less wealthy social strata this logic mostly satisfied labour organisation needs, among the elite it was often family ties and lineage obligations that dictated the choice of a spouse. In addition, this system was based on a particularly dense network of social relations, guaranteed by the existence of a multiplicity of ties that also involved persons outside the married couple, such as wet nurses.

The ideal of romantic love spread through a narrative that stood in opposition to this custom, advancing the idea that the only valid reason for contracting marriage was the existence of a close erotic and emotional bond between a man and a woman. Love stopped being seen exclusively as a devastating and destabilising force – the so-called love-passion – and began, on the contrary, to be viewed as an element of stability and balance in marital dynamics. Based on the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, individualism and autonomy, subsequently reworked by Romanticism, this new emotional paradigm brought with it some important innovations that had a revolutionary impact on Western social and emotional relations, especially in the long run. By treating marriage as a concrete outcome of a deeply held feeling, the ideal of romantic love dictated that it should necessarily be the result of a decision freely taken by both partners; men and women – at least from a theoretical point of view – had the same right (and duty) to choose their partner. This implied not only that the two spouses were seen – again on a theoretical level – as ‘equal’ within the marriage, but also that families and surrounding social networks were excluded from the decision-making process. On the contrary, thanks to the reciprocity of the feelings shared between potential partners, it was the latter, as individuals, who bore responsibility for the decision to marry. In essence, as Giddens argues, with the diffusion of the ideal of romantic love, ‘husbands and wives increasingly became seen as collaborators in a joint emotional enterprise’ (Giddens Reference Giddens1992, 26). As social bonds were severed, the couple was increasingly perceived as a separate entity, created by the fusion of two people. Within this framework, a space of intimacy and emotional closeness developed between the two partners within which it became possible to attribute a positive meaning to sexuality (including non-reproductive sexuality).

Certainly, affirming that the ideal of romantic love made its way into Western imaginations during the nineteenth century does not mean that marriage for love became customary within a few decades. As an ideal, its concrete application was slow, and arranged marriages remained a widespread reality in many parts of the Peninsula until well into the twentieth century. Moreover, it is reductive to speak of two rigidly opposed models: for a long time, mixed strategies continued to be adopted, based both on the mutual interests of those involved and on the socio-economic dynamics of the context from which they came (Rizzo Reference Rizzo2004, 29). And yet, already during the first half of the nineteenth century, in the climate of contestation that prevailed during the Risorgimento in places such as Turin, more and more young people – coming from widely varying social backgrounds – decided to make a definitive breach with their parents’ generation by refusing arranged marriages. During this time, young couples increasingly resorted to the courts to solve disputes about marriage with their parents; the courts often valued the free choice of potential spouses above the patrimonial and family-based arguments put forward by parents (Borgione Reference Borgione2022, 99).

Indeed, the spread of the ideal of romantic love in the Italian Peninsula was strongly favoured by the fact that this ideal was adopted by many of the exponents of the national patriotic movement. It is no coincidence that the narrative vehicles that put these discourses into circulation were in fact the same as those used for ideals of nationalism: treatises, paintings, plays and, above all, novels – a literary genre that began to spread in the mid-eighteenth century – conveyed love stories in which the protagonists, both male and female, clashed with their families and society regarding the impossibility of realising their dream of love. Stories such as Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) and Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) became incredibly widespread in Europe and played a crucial role in shaping a collective imagination. Basing their works on this same narrative, intellectuals in the Peninsula contributed to spreading the idea that arranged marriages were immoral and to rendering romantic love as the affective ideal to which more and more people decided to conform their existence (Banti Reference Banti2005, 38–44; Ginsborg and Banti Reference Ginsborg and Banti2007).

Conceiving of the family as a link in a wider chain of kinship ties, Risorgimento elites felt the need to secure the stability of the society of the newborn Italian state and to strongly reaffirm the centrality of the institution of marriage, which according to them had to be based on love (Tasca Reference Tasca and Wanrooij2004, 300). Marital love represented, in fact, the cornerstone upon which Italian men and women were to develop their ability to love their homeland. The crucial importance assigned to marriage was, therefore, also due to the fact that it was entrusted with the destiny of the nation: it was the institution that was to generate future Italian citizens.

Mantegazza was also a member of the bourgeois elites of the Peninsula who engaged in the Risorgimento struggle. His adherence to national-patriotic ideals stemmed mainly from the influence that his mother, Laura Solera (1813–73), had on him as a young boy (Millefiorini Reference Millefiorini, Chiarito and Betri2002), through her pedagogical actions and her commitment as a philanthropist and fundraiser who financed Risorgimento enterprises (Tafuro Reference Tafuro2021). Despite a posthumous glorification of his participation in the uprisings of 1848 (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1900), Mantegazza’s national patriotism took place mostly on the level of his political-scientific commitment. He was convinced, by his own admission, ‘of being more useful to the fatherland with his mind than with his arm’ (Millefiorini Reference Millefiorini2000, 372).

Fully embodying the prototype of the post-unification scientist, committed through his work to contributing to the process of nation building by tracing the lines of a new post-unification society regenerated from a cultural and social viewpoint, Mantegazza’s desire to combine science and politics articulated itself in various ways. His participation in the government of the Kingdom of Italy, first as a deputy and then as a senator, represented only one aspect, and probably not even the most significant, of his political commitment to the new state. In addition to his academic work as an anthropologist, which he began in the early 1870s, he was intensively involved in the dissemination of medical-scientific precepts, with a focus on the sphere of private hygiene – a scientific discipline aiming to give people everyday advice about health, including sexual health (Turbil Reference Turbil2022).

Despite the fact that, in his early career, he had approached the study of human sexuality from this point of view of private hygiene, Mantegazza later became convinced that it was something to be studied anthropologically, as he believed that the task of anthropologists was to study every aspect of the human condition, including sexuality. Through a series of publications addressed to different audiences – such as, for example, Fisiologia del piacere (1854), Elementi di igiene (1864), Igiene dell’amore (1877), Gli amori degli uomini (1886) and Igiene del nido (1877) from the series Almanacco igienico popolare (1866–1905) – Mantegazza aimed to impart advice to couples in the newborn Italian state on how to live their emotional and sexual lives to the fullest, not only as future parents but also as individuals united by a bond of love. These works can be considered part of the medical-literary genre of marital sexual guides, which were very popular at the time in several European countries (Chaperon Reference Chaperon2007, 17–62). The genre’s main aim was to give advice, not just on purely medical-hygienic matters such as genital conformation, the mechanics of sexual intercourse and fertilisation, pregnancy and breastfeeding; also, with the spread of romantic love, topics such as puberty, seduction, falling in love and the marriage relationship increasingly found their way into these works. Fisiologia dell’amore was one of the texts that Mantegazza wrote in this vein, although, as mentioned earlier, the book was, despite its title, a sort of philosophical-psychological treatise aimed at explaining the fundamental characteristics of ‘true love’.

The ‘perfect love’: a unity of senses, feelings and thoughts

The methodology adopted by Mantegazza in his study of human beings was very ambitious. Starting from a conception of reality as a kind of ‘labyrinth’ with infinite ramifications, the anthropologist gave himself the arduous task of mapping every aspect of the human experience, including sexuality and the emotional and affective spheres. Fisiologia dell’amore was one of the first works he wrote after obtaining, in 1869, what is considered to be the first chair of anthropology in Italy at the Istituto di studi superiori in Florence (Landucci Reference Landucci1977, 113). From the beginning of his career as an anthropologist, Mantegazza considered psychology to be an integral part of the study of human beings. Published in 1872, Fisiologia constituted the first volume of the so-called Trilogy of Love, in which, together with Igiene dell’amore and Gli amori degli uomini, Mantegazza intended to pursue an all-encompassing scientific investigation of human sexuality. At the same time, however, Fisiologia was also part of a broader project on the physiology of emotions – or, to use Mantegazza’s words, a ‘sentimental and sensitive cosmogony’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1889, 3)Footnote ¹ – through which he sought to carry out a scientific analysis of pleasure, pain, hate and, of course, love.

In the 1870s, psychology was still a new discipline that was taking its first steps towards a more accomplished institutionalisation in Europe. Mostly coming from the medical field, scholars approached the study of psychology with the aim of detaching it from the realm of philosophy and metaphysics and turning it into an experimental science. In the psychological study of emotions, Mantegazza was strongly influenced not only by the reflections of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), author of The Principles of Psychology (1855), but also, and above all, by the theories of Charles Darwin (1809–82). It is no coincidence, in fact, that Fisiologia was published in the same year as Darwin’s famous work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). From the pages of Mantegazza’s private diary, we learn that reading Darwin’s work provided a decisive stimulus for the writing of Fisiologia dell’amore.Footnote ² In fact, similar to the English scientist, Mantegazza was convinced that complex emotions were the result of a long evolutionary process, which explained both why their elementary expressions could be found in animals, and also why their most evolved forms could be found in European civilisation, considered at the time the most advanced in the world. Therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, romantic love was to be regarded as the pinnacle of emotionality in living beings. Following Darwin’s theory of the emotions, in the pages of Fisiologia dell’amore, Mantegazza carried out a detailed ‘psychological analysis’ of what he called the ‘prince of the affections’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, viii).

In Fisiologia dell’amore, Mantegazza ventured to describe a profound and all-embracing feeling that had all the characteristics of romantic love. As the apex of human emotionality, in order to be defined as ‘perfect’, love had to involve, in a progressive order, all three of the faculties that were traditionally believed to form the psyche of each individual: the senses, feelings and the intellect (Dixon Reference Dixon2003, 139). First of all, according to Mantegazza, the origin of amorous feelings had to be sought in the physiology of the body and in particular in the motions of the senses. What he called ‘the natural manifestations of a true and great love’ were in fact described as ‘drops that slowly seep from the depths of our bowels, and in the bowels themselves they come together and make little streams and rivulets, which in turn collect in … our veins, until they flow out in the single hot and quivering wave of sympathy’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 62). Stimulated by the senses, sympathy – or ‘feeling together, laughing and crying together’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 62) – was the basic element from which love could arise. Not at all a platonic feeling, the sympathy between two individuals was characterised by a profound erotic charge: it was a ‘spark that is ignited by the contact of two desires’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 63), a ‘violent jolt’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 67) that surged forth from the admiration of the aesthetic beauty of the person in question.

However, physical attraction and erotic desire could not suffice to create a romantic feeling: ‘naked love, without the splendid garments of the imagination and the heart’ was in fact reduced to mere ‘lust’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 75). Hence, the second essential element that had to characterise love was feelings. The ‘agreement of hearts’ – or, in other words, the strong emotional harmony two lovers had to reach, according to Mantegazza – was the fundamental consequence of ‘always having the same opinions in matters of feeling and understanding, and seeking the same ideals’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza and Rodler2008 [1892-1893], 205). While there were many feelings contrary to love – selfishness, jealousy, revenge, lust, vanity in primis – it was crucial for the initial interest to be moved by mutual esteem, the only sentiment necessary for its development. On the last rung of amorous harmony, finally, was intellectual understanding. Considered as the missing piece for a love that could be defined as well rounded, the ‘concord of thoughts’ was the highest – and hardest to attain – point that love could reach. This constituted, in Mantegazza’s eyes, a true ‘paradise on earth’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza and Rodler2008 [1892-1893], 205). What in everyday life became ‘loving the same books, the same paintings, having the same intellectual preferences’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza and Rodler2008 [1892-1893], 205), would lead two individuals, bound in a relationship, to influence and modify each other, until they would start thinking ‘as a pair’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 205). Mantegazza, in essence, described a feeling that, while generated spontaneously by desire, was constructed via an engagement and intertwining of every aspect of the two individuals involved. When faced with the co-presence of all three affinities – the deep engagement of the senses, of feeling and of thought – love became a ‘passion’: the ‘strongest, most human, richest’ passion (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 16).

Mantegazza, therefore, placed eros and desire as the driving forces behind what, like others, he considered to be the most evolved form of human affectivity. This applied – at least on a theoretical level – to both men and women. In Fisiologia dell’amore, therefore, we find an exaltation of the fusional ideal advanced by Romantic rhetoric. Mantegazza was not describing two individuals united by a purely emotional bond: the ecstasy described was indeed divine but also, as we have seen, very earthly. The sexual union of the two lovers thus became, for the author of Fisiologia, the moment in which two beings, split in two, experienced a symbolic reunification. ‘Whole love,’ Mantegazza wrote, ‘true love, the naked but innocent love of nature, is not all feeling or thought but is also a function of reproductive life, it is also a necessity of the senses … Every mutilation of love is a disgrace’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 280). The desire and voluptuousness that accompanied the generative act were thus expressions of the laws of nature that, when in co-presence with feeling, acquired their noblest and at the same time most ‘hygienic’ form.

In fact, Mantegazza considered sexual pleasure to be a natural corollary of human sexuality, for both women and men (Campani Reference Campani2023). At the time, many scientists – including Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), the father of criminal anthropology and Mantegazza’s friend and colleague – believed that the normal condition for a woman was to be frigid (Ross Reference Ross, Benadusi, Bernardini and Bianco2017, 51). The authors of volumes on sexual hygiene were often non-specialised physicians whose thinking was only slowly influenced by the medical discoveries of the age. Despite the definitive discovery in the 1840s of spontaneous ovulation, many of these writers were still influenced by the ancient Hippocratic–Galenic theory of the double semen, according to which pleasure was functional to conception as orgasms corresponded to the emission of semen by both partners (Chaperon Reference Chaperon2007, 55). Mantegazza, on the other hand, was an internationally renowned academic, and well aware of recent scientific discoveries. However, although he no longer attributed an active role to women in conception during sexual acts, he continued to think that pleasure was a useful stratagem provided by nature to bring men and women together, and that it also played a central role in the economy of the emotional bond underlying the romantic couple, by helping to strengthen it. Within the framework of romantic love, therefore, sexual pleasure was considered more than legitimate. ‘With love,’ Mantegazza wrote, ‘lust is also a virtue, and the studied records of theologians are more impudent than the most ardent kiss that ever was shared by two lovers educated by the wisdom of protracted intercourse’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 122). Within Fisiologia dell’amore we thus find the most explicit description of a pleasure divorced from reproductive imperatives, but not alien to them. In fact, even within certain boundaries dictated by hygienic precepts, Mantegazza’s invitation to couples was clear: it was necessary to fully enjoy the privilege that nature had bestowed on its favourite animal. ‘Do not lie, do not betray; do not seek your love in the mud, but in the sky,’ he wrote, and continued:

What emerged therefore from Mantegazza’s words was, in substance, a conviction not only that pleasure could legitimately be experienced as it was given by nature, but that desire was also a legitimate part of the human experience. And this applied not only to men but, following specific rules, also to women.

A new ‘emotional community’ is born

Fisiologia dell’amore described a feeling that completely engaged both the thoughts and the feelings of individuals, leaving room for a deep erotic bond. In contrast to what might be expected, the way this emotional paradigm was described did not particularly shock Mantegazza’s female readers. On the contrary, they seemed to welcome the scientist’s dedication of the volume to them – ‘to the daughters of Eve’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, v) – and wrote enthusiastic letters to Mantegazza, establishing a privileged dialogue with him, not only because of his medical-hygienic knowledge, but also because of his expertise on matters related to ‘love’. Among these letters are numerous testimonies from women who wrote to him to express their esteem and admiration, and who often referred to Fisiologia dell’amore. It is difficult to put together a prosopography of these women. Many of them were women from middle-class backgrounds and living in northern Italy. Some of them were acquaintances of Mantegazza. However, letters also came from ordinary female readers who, following a common practice at the time, wrote to Mantegazza as they would have to other doctors (Oosterhuis Reference Oosterhuis2000), because of his popularity.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, romantic love as an ideal had made its way into the hearts of many people, as evidenced by the fact that the publishing scene of the time was awash with publications on the subject. From philosophical works such as De l’amour (1858)Footnote ³ by Jules Michelet (1798–1874), to popular writings such as the so-called ‘Segretari galanti’ (Wanrooij Reference Wanrooij1992) – phrasebooks for writing love letters – the socio-cultural climate in post-unification Italy testified to how many people wished to understand, learn and be moved by reading, writing and talking about love. The success of Fisiologia was also a part of this publishing trend.Footnote ⁴

The fact that more and more individuals embraced the ideal of romantic love at the time emerges clearly from the letters that Mantegazza received from his readers, as well as from the many love letters preserved in archives across the Peninsula.Footnote ⁵ The use of recurrent terms and the frequent references to the topoi that, as we have seen, characterised the new emotional paradigm lead us to hypothesise that there existed at the time an imagery – shared by the scientist and by his public, particularly women –about love and its specific features. This imagery appears clearly in a letter written in 1890 by Erminia Marzola from Portomaggiore (Ferrara), in which she communicates to Mantegazza that her husband was going to visit him in the hope of finding a remedy for their difficulty in having children. In narrating her ‘painful story’, Erminia closely intertwines her desire to become a mother with the psycho-affective universe she has built with her husband. ‘We are almost the same age,’ she confesses:

Similarly, in another letter, we find the testimony of a young woman, Erica Picco, who asks Mantegazza to come to Tolmezzo (Udine) for a secret visit with the goal of ascertaining her fertility. ‘The other signs of puberty have manifested [themselves],’ Erica writes, ‘my health seems decent; but to improve I should eat very little, and almost no meat and flour; milk and eggs; at most, a little roast meat. I have very restless nights and don’t stay in bed more than 7 or 8 hours. Finally, I get very deep dark bags under my eyes.’Footnote ⁷ Guided by popular knowledge, or perhaps by reading some guides on genital hygiene, Erica knows of the changes that a young woman’s body experiences at the time of puberty and is convinced that her nutrition could be affecting her sexual health. She also knows that her problem needs to be diagnosed by a doctor, and not just by any doctor. She wants a potential consultation to take place in great secrecy, at night, to ‘avoid the slightest suspicion’, and she is willing to pay any amount of money for an appointment with ‘a celebrity’ like Mantegazza. Even more relevant, however, are the reasons that prompted her to expose herself in such a way. Erica, in fact, quickly confesses:

As was the case for Erminia Marzola, Erica Picco’s desire for motherhood is based on the emotional bond she has built together with her beloved. Furthermore, just like Erminia, Erica also feels the need to emphasise the high degree of passion in the feeling that binds her to her partner, a feeling that has all the characteristics of romantic love, and that she is confident Mantegazza, her interlocutor, will understand.

Testimonies like these tend to confirm what the enormous success of Fisiologia dell’amore suggests: it seems that the shared imagery highlighted above set the boundaries of what we could call an ‘emotional community’ (Rosenwein Reference Rosenwein2006, 24–27), based on the ideal of romantic love. Adhering to these ideals, more and more people began to share the same emotional regime, which included common ways of feeling and expressing love, and which combined a desire for planning and parenthood with a closeness of feelings and above all an intense involvement of the senses. This is evident in a series of letters from Mantegazza’s female readers that make explicit references to Fisiologia dell’amore. In these letters, women display their adherence to every single aspect of this model of love, without distancing themselves from more passionate tones. For example, an anonymous woman writes, in 1873:

Another example comes from Stephanie Etzerodt (1839–1917), the wife of Giovanni Omboni (1829–1910), Mantegazza’s best friend. Etzerodt, who was active in Padua as a philanthropist and educational theorist (Bortoli Reference Bortoli and Bortoli2013), wrote a letter that Mantegazza published as a foreword to the second edition of Fisiologia (1875). In the text, in addition to some predictable praise for the book, Etzerodt makes an interesting comparison between Fisiologia and Michelet’s De l’amour, laced with some very harsh criticism of the French historian’s volume. Michelet, she writes, treats love ‘in a way that revolts me’. She proceeds to describe De l’amour as a volume full of ‘pathological, unhealthy and mischievous lucubrations’. She sees Fisiologia, in contrast, as a work of ‘robust sincerity’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1875, xiii–xiv).

In fact, the two books had many things in common, including the use of a highly poetic language, a conception of gender roles as clearly separated, the crucial importance they assigned to the free choice of spouse (both for men and for women) and the idea of love as a profound ‘unity of heart’ (Michelet Reference Michelet1877, 58). However, Michelet and Mantegazza approached one theme very differently: the question of pleasure and desire. In his work, Michelet described love as a feeling devoid of any sexual element, not even with regard to reproduction, thus openly denying that women could be interested in sex:

It is hard to know whether Etzerodt based her firm criticism specifically on Michelet’s denial of women’s interest in sex. However, her own ideals undoubtedly followed the characteristics of the love described by Mantegazza – namely, a feeling that combined the ‘material, moral and intellectual aspects, whose union constitutes complete love, the only one that can give true and lasting happiness’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1875, xiv, emphasis added).

Sometimes it even seems that the enthusiasm expressed by women for Mantegazza’s work stemmed precisely from the emphasis he placed on the senses. This appears to be the case in Ludmilla Assing’s (1821–80) passionate letters. Assing was a German-born publicist and overt supporter of Risorgimento ideals, to the point of becoming Mazzini’s official translator (Casalena Reference Casalena2002). ‘With great impatience,’ she confesses to Mantegazza:

This tone of great enthusiasm is repeated in a later letter in which Assing, in an even more ambiguous tone, reveals an ill-concealed erotic tension between herself and Mantegazza. ‘Sure we must talk at length about your book,’ she writes, ‘I would love to read every page with you, but it takes great courage.’Footnote ¹¹

An alternative model of femininity

Since it considered the bond of love to be the conditio sine qua non of every good marriage, the ideal of romantic love, as it spread, had the fundamental consequence of placing sexuality and its pleasures at the centre of conjugal relationships. The major implications of this process, called the sexualisation of marriage, undoubtedly included the progressive linking of sexuality to the private sphere. Once family bonds and the obligations that came with them were loosened, a new space opened up within the couple in which it became possible to develop deep intimacy and to ‘attach an emotional and positive meaning to sexuality as an essential constituent of the emotional bond’ (Oosterhuis Reference Oosterhuis2000, 234). However, for intimacy to develop, a certain level of emotional communication had to take place between partners (Giddens Reference Giddens1992, 45). Therefore, by foregrounding the sphere of feelings and encouraging the emotional investigation of everyone’s psyche, the ideal of romantic love provided individuals with unprecedented possibilities for introspection. However, if women were seen as the ones in charge of managing intimacy, as they were considered ‘specialists of the heart’(Giddens Reference Giddens1992, 44) in the private sphere, men remained somewhat excluded from these dynamics.

From this perspective, it is therefore easy to understand the success that Fisiologia dell’amore enjoyed. Addressed primarily to the broad audience of the post-unification bourgeoisie, the book not only sought to describe the feeling of love but also tried to be a sort of guide aimed at stimulating internal dialogue in its readers, and especially in the women among them. Mantegazza, in fact, invited readers to ‘explore … [their] heart’ by paying attention to the ‘intimate phenomena of your feelings’, with the aim of ‘distinguishing true love from false love’ in others (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 80). By working their way through the pages of Fisiologia, readers thus engaged in a sort of psychological journey, during which they became equipped with the necessary tools to explore their inner self and learn how to recognise ‘true love’. In this sense, then, Fisiologia dell’amore represented a sort of manifesto, in which Mantegazza intended to give a scientific legitimation to marriage for love.

Narrated through the pages of books, in fact, the new emotional paradigm represented ‘a promise of warm happiness … the dream of a rich, passionate, intense emotional life … drawn in such seductive colours by the novels of so many … authors that to many women and men it ended up seeming … absolutely irresistible’ (Banti Reference Banti2009, 237). Many people, therefore, were seduced by the possibility of creating for themselves a window of happiness in their future lives and avoiding situations of domestic suffering. However, it is easy to imagine that, in the real world, unlike in the period’s popular novels, men, but above all women, faced a reality that did not follow these romantic narratives, and were forced to realise that the intense passions that featured in books were not reproducible in everyday life. Undoubtedly, in its concrete application, the egalitarian component inherent in the ideal of romantic love was at the time largely disregarded.

As previously mentioned, the process of Italian unification was accompanied by a rigid codification of gender roles and a consequent division of society into separate spheres that undermined many of the egalitarian ambitions involved in the ideal of romantic love (Wanrooij Reference Wanrooij1990; Banti Reference Banti2005; Porciani Reference Porciani2006). Conceiving of the family as a link to a wider chain of parental ties, Risorgimento elites felt the need to secure the stability of the newborn Italian society and to strongly reaffirm the centrality of the institution of marriage. They did this by rejecting divorce and women’s right to register the paternity of children born out of wedlock, while at the same time extending to the whole Peninsula the institution of marital authorisation – that is, the obligation for a woman to ask her husband’s permission to administer her own property and money (Schettini Reference Schettini2011, 152). At the same time, national-patriotic rhetoric continued to insist on the idea that a good marriage had to be based on a strong bond of love, which was seen as the foundation on which to build marital stability. Indeed, marital love represented the cornerstone of Italian citizens’ ability to love their homeland.

From this point of view, Mantegazza adopted a position that was in some ways singular but in fact not at all contradictory. By urging the new Italian society to adopt a clear division into separate spheres according to gender roles, Mantegazza aimed to redefine these roles in ways that were based on an adoption of the ideal of romantic love. As we have seen, the new sentimental paradigm embodied a relational structure in which marital bonds, being based – theoretically – on mutual choice, were seen as less asymmetrical than they were in arranged marriage practices. Therefore, taking the intrinsic meaning of the division of society into separate spheres to its extreme, Mantegazza hoped that women would have full freedom and awareness not only in the choice of their life partner but also in the entire private sphere. ‘To man the sceptre, to woman the crown,’ Mantegazza wrote, ‘but sovereigns, both of them, sharing with equal rights the empire of two worlds. None first, none second; the one king of the intellect, the other queen of feeling: to the one the northern hemisphere, to the other the southern hemisphere’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1854, 346). A concrete example can be found in the Dizionario di igiene per le famiglie (Reference Mantegazza and Neera1881), written collaboratively by Mantegazza and the writer Neera – a pseudonym of Anna Maria Zuccari (1846–1918) – whose introduction emphasised how men and women, having ‘a different way of seeing and feeling’, could work together to attain more accurate visions of reality, born of a combination of their two different perspectives, like ‘the stereoscopy of a landscape seen from two different points on the horizon’ (Mantegazza and Neera Reference Mantegazza and Neera1881, vii).

Despite his collaboration with Neera, Mantegazza was convinced that women should remain largely excluded from the public sphere, not only because they did not possess the qualities to be part of it, but also since they excelled in the private sphere, as their capacities to master inner life and the private sphere far surpassed those of men (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 204). In essence, they were seen as ‘specialists’ in the field of feelings, since, unlike their male counterparts, they were able to experience a so-called ‘perfect love’. Women, therefore, surpassed men ‘in psychic evolution’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 204), just as they surpassed them intellectually.

Yet, according to Mantegazza, the social hypocrisy of the time kept women in total ignorance, not only intellectually and culturally, but also in terms of their hygiene and morality. Instead, to better fulfil their role and to be able to make decisions independently, Mantegazza believed they needed to have a ‘free and wise education’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 332), intellectual autonomy and a certain level of self-awareness: ‘How can one choose without distinguishing, and how can one distinguish without knowing?’ he asked rhetorically (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 332).

In addition, from Mantegazza’s point of view, women were to be given the same power as men in family disputes as well as the right to administer their own dowries (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 330) and to have the paternity of their children recognised by the state (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1873, 308). However, and this is perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of Mantegazza’s theorising, they were also to be instructed in matters of private hygiene. In this way, they would gain full control over their bodies and their sexuality, including their fertility. ‘[T]he woman of the future,’ Mantegazza wrote, ‘will be wisely Malthusian and in the boat of love she will have the compass and the rudder’ (Mantegazza Reference Mantegazza1893, 314).

The image of femininity conveyed in Mantegazza’s works, therefore, did not adhere to the dichotomy prevailing in the culture of the time, which portrayed women as either candid angels of the hearth or as sensually demonic creatures (Dijkstra Reference Dijkstra1988). Mantegazza tended to support a different model, in which women were to be conceived of as individuals who, although pertaining to the domestic sphere, should also possess not just an education and a certain economic independence, but also an in-depth self-awareness, including of their sexuality. In essence, although he had what was, even for the time, a rather moderate idea of women’s emancipation, the improvements Mantegazza advocated for women would provide them, in some ways, with a set of tools that would help to eventually bring them out of the confines of the private sphere and support them in claiming space in the public sphere. From this point of view, the legitimisation of their desires and pleasures is also an aspect that should not be underestimated.

This model of ‘desiring’ femininity, as promoted by Mantegazza, was different from that traditionally attributed to the nineteenth century because it attempted to reconcile aspects of the female condition that were elsewhere considered irreconcilable and legitimated women’s abilities to experience desire and pleasure. Judging by the letters Mantegazza received, many of his female readers seemed to adhere to this model.

The existence of such a model is further confirmed by some social and cultural historians who have recently highlighted how, in entertainment contexts such as opera, literature and the circus, several literate women found a space to express emotions of love and erotic desire. Among these, Mark Seymour has shown that it was not at all unusual for women in nineteenth-century southern Italy to express, through letters, their love and erotic desire for circus performers (Seymour Reference Seymour2010). Katharine Mitchell has also pointed out that, although the prevailing nineteenth-century rhetoric tended to depict ‘respectable’ women as asexual, in tragic opera and in the French literature that was popular at the time in Italy, the dissemination of different models played an important role in awakening a certain kind of erotic desire in Italian women of different social classes. Many of the protagonists of these narratives were in fact women with a ‘sexually desirous female gaze’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell, Babini, Beccalossi and Riall2015, 127). According to Mitchell, the prevalence of this kind of discourse can be seen as a possible explanation for the presence of highly erotic references within many letters written by the admirers of both actresses and actors (Mitchell Reference Mitchell, Babini, Beccalossi and Riall2015, 132). For sure, most of the stories that see these heroines as protagonists were modelled on the imperatives of the ideal of romantic love that embodied a virtuous but at the same time eroticised model of femininity with which female spectators were keen to identify.

Similar to what was happening in the sphere of entertainment and narrative fiction, the possibility of writing to the authors of popular medical tracts and marriage guides, and especially to authors such as Mantegazza, offered women a chance to engage in epistolary dialogues that acted as a ‘virtual arena’ – as Seymour defines it (Seymour Reference Seymour2020, 78–122) – in which to express their desires more freely. Sometimes the exercise included the expression of their sexual desires and thus allowed them to circumvent the conventions of the time, which prevented them from manifesting erotic feelings in a public context. While being aware of the necessity not to see these letters as ‘transparent windows onto the hearts and minds of the past’ (Seymour Reference Seymour2010, 149), evidence of this kind, however, suggests that historians have too often taken women’s adherence to mainstream gender standards for granted, without taking into account the margin of negotiability that may have been available to them.

These letters, in fact, confirm how it was not entirely uncommon among Italian women, at least in the protected sphere of epistolary exchange, to play ‘an active role in seeking to gratify their desires’ (Seymour Reference Seymour, Babini, Beccalossi and Riall2015, 84), adopting attitudes that were by no means passive, through dialogues that were at times quite explicit. It is likely that the ways in which volumes like Mantegazza’s described female sexual desire as ‘licit’ and a ‘natural’ component of womanhood contributed to creating a sense of identification in female readers, soliciting the expression of their own erotic emotions within the protected confines of letter writing.

Moreover, as we have seen, unlike other narrative forms that were widespread during the nineteenth century, essays such as Fisiologia dell’amore were conceived of as instruments that were intended to actively encourage readers – and especially female readers – to engage in psychological introspection and interior self-analysis, stimulating a profound awareness of their own emotional and affective inner lives. An example of this introspection appears in a letter that a certain Ernesta de Bernardis sent Mantegazza a few months after the publication of Fisiologia. De Bernardis writes: ‘One of Eve’s many daughters is writing to you in order to give you, on behalf of all of us, a thousand and then a thousand more thank yous for the kind thought you have had in dedicating your Physiology of Love to us.’ She continues: