In the eighteenth century, foreigner travelers like Montesquieu found Italy a magnificent but dusty museum. Yet in the general conception of European men of letters, especially in the second half of the century, the peninsula also became the exotic stage for aberrant passions. “Aberrance”—the word evokes that dération which had enjoyed its moment of glory in the courts of the Renaissance, and which was dear not only to Stendhal, but to Gothic novelists, to Elizabethan dramatists, to Shakespeare, and to Meissner, Tieck, and Schlegel.

The Marquis de Sade was in Italy from 1775 to 1776, and described it as a marvelous country (“le plus beaux pays de l'univers”), but one inhabited by the most decadent race (“habité par l'espèce la plus abrutie”). This latter fact so delighted him that he chose the area between Turin and Naples as the site for the journey of debauchery which constitutes more than half of Juliette's interminable adventures. Casanova's Mémoires, although scarcely a reliable source, corroborate the Marquis' observations. And it was precisely the historical reality of this darker world which fueled the imagination of Stendhal in his Chroniques italiennes. His tales of Accoramboni and the Borgias, of Pier Luigi sodomizing the bishop of Fano, and of Francesco Cenci raping his own daughter are all well-documented historical facts.