The Settecento in Italy was characterised by certain trends apparent in varying degrees throughout the peninsula and influenced by events beyond the Alps. There was, for example, a slow but steady increase in population (from thirteen to nearly eighteen million in the course of the century); an upturn in the economy both industrial and commercial; and a further development of the principal urban centres, Naples and Palermo, Rome and Turin, Milan and Florence. These demographic and economic advances are linked to the new political situation brought about in Italy by the so-called Wars of Succession – the Spanish after the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty in Madrid (1700–14), the Polish, and the Austrian caused by Maria Teresa's succession to the Imperial throne following the death of her father Charles VI (1740–8).

After 1715 Spanish hegemony in Italy was replaced by that of Austria, which gained absolute control of Lombardy, now enlarged by the Duchy of Mantua, and then, following the death of the last of the Medici family, Gian Gastone, in 1737, indirectly acquired control of Tuscany via Maria Teresa's husband, Francesco Stefano of Lorraine. Of the earlier states the Venetian republic, the Papal States and the Duchy of Modena under the Estensi remained more or less unchanged, while the House of Savoy, which briefly gained possession of Sicily from 1714 to 1718, was strengthened by the accession of Victor Amedeus II as King of Sardinia in 1720. The Kingdom of Naples, initially annexed to Austria (1707–34) was then given along with Sicily to Philip of Spain's son, Charles VII, and later, when Charles became King of Spain in 1759, to his son Ferdinand.

Poetry

Many people in Italy lived the 1970s as an anticlimax, in some respects a frightening one as economic recession and political violence crept up the agenda. It was seen as a period of ‘riflusso’, both of reaction and of withdrawal, on the part of many intellectuals, from the social and above all political activism of the late 1960s. It was a period of widespread cynicism about politics in general and revolutionary politics(including cultural politics) in particular, and one in which it became necessary, if not inevitable, that priority should be given to private rather than public concerns, individual rather than historical issues.

There are indeed a number of symptoms of such a trend in the poetry written and published during the decade. It is not only in relation to poetry, however, that it is probably more accurate to speak of a redefinition of the relationship between the personal and the political, the individual and the historical, and of each one of these terms, rather than to imagine a cut-and-dried antithesis between predetermined entities. In many cases, indeed, there is a politicisation of the (hitherto) personal domain.

Petrarch, the most committed of the great trecentisti to the revitalisation of a Latin literary culture in Italy, was at the same time the most decisive of them for the development of the vernacular tradition. Dante, it is true, had his followers – not least among them Boccaccio in the Amorosa visione and Petrarch himself in the Trionfi – in respect of a certain kind of visionary literature in the vernacular, and Boccaccio was to remain for generations a point of reference in respect of the novella tradition in Italian. But neither was as decisive for the development of literary good taste in Europe, in and beyond the Renaissance period, as the Petrarch of the Rime. And here there is an irony, for of all the great trecentisti, Petrarch, a poet of well-nigh unerring tact in the management of form, is psychologically the least settled of them, the least at one with himself in respect of the conflicting forces of personality and of moral sensibility. At every point in the Canzoniere (the traditional title of his collected Rime), the technical assurance flowing from his extraordinarily developed sense of formal propriety contrasts with – even as it gives expression to – a sustained sense of spiritual uncertainty, a state of mind characterised at every turn by a sense of restlessness and irresolution.

Life

The formal circumstances of Petrarch's life, with its endless oscillation between the courtly patronage of popes, priests and princes and the stillness of his country retreats, are themselves a metaphor of his spiritual existence. Born in Arezzo in 1304 of a Florentine lawyer exiled (like Dante) from his native city as a White Guelf, his early years were spent in Pisa, in Avignon (where his father came to work in 1312) and at Carpentras in Provence, where he was schooled in grammar and rhetoric by another exiled spirit, Convenevole da Prato. In 1316, in Montpellier, he began his legal studies, which for a time, though with less than complete commitment, he continued in Bologna.

Like ‘1945’, the emblematic date of ‘1956’ is seen as heralding the start of a new period in Italian literary history, and for broadly similar non-literary reasons. But it would be some time before the true extent of the broad cultural changes which began to be felt in the mid-1950s could be gauged. It is true that the political events of 1956 itself in Eastern Europe did register promptly with an influential portion of the Italian intelligentsia. Khruschev's partially leaked denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet military intervention in Hungary and Poland in the same year delivered a profound shock to the intellectual left, caused many sympathisers among the educated classes to abandon their support for the Italian Communist Party, and initiated a period of reassessment of the relations between literature and politics. But this was less important in the long run than the very rapid expansion of the Italian economy in the ‘boom years’ (1958–63), the new levels of prosperity and choice offered by the triumph of consumerism from the 1960s onwards, and the effect which these had on the social and material conditions of literature, both at the point of production and at that of consumption. At this broad level, the period under consideration in this chapter is distinguished from its predecessors by three factors in particular: the extension of educational and cultural opportunities to a greatly increased number of people; an unprecedented degree of commercial concentration and rationalisation in the production of the printed word; and the insertion of publishing in a complex web of ‘cultural industries’, amongst which there are media and technologies which seem to present a direct challenge to literature.

Francis of Assisi

None of the documents mentioned so far indicates conscious cultural accumulation or progressive literary development, and this unsophisticated localised production was to carry on for centuries in its geographical and linguistic isolation, long after literary standards had been established. Piety and humour were to be its staples, and genre and metrical forms were to remain closely linked to the oral humus from which it spontaneously germinated. This hidden dimension (hidden, that is, from the history of ‘high’ literature) could occasionally throw surprises, such as the impressive religious outpourings of Umbria, starting with St Francis (1182–1226) himself. The saint, whose very name indicates how fashionable French culture was, and who sang in French when jolly, who liked to name his companions after the characters in the Round Table, and whose followers were nicknamed ioculatores domini (minstrels of the Lord), was able, even in the discomfort of his last illness (c.1225), to compose a hymn of astounding freshness and innocence. The Laudes Creaturarum, also known as the Cantico delle creature (‘Praise of God's Creation’), starts by singing the praises of God for creating the sun, moon and stars, then, after thanking Him for the four elements, concludes in gratitude for patience in suffering and for Death itself.

Metastasio and melodrama

Metastasio's melodrama is a remarkable expression of some of the main aspirations of the Settecento: the ideal of theatre as a social rite and a vehicle of moral instruction; the nostalgia of scholars for classical tragedy following the French precedent; the hedonism of a courtly society devoted to music. Pietro Trapassi was born in Rome in 1698 of humble parents and died in Vienna in 1782. From childhood he showed an extraordinary talent for improvisation, and he was adopted by Gravina, who oversaw his literary and philosophical education and changed his name from the prosaic Trapassi to the poetic Metastasio. After Gravina's death he moved to Naples, capital of the Austrian Viceroyalty, and was initiated into the musical life of the city by the singer Marianna Bulgarelli (la Romanina) and the composer Niccolò Porpora. He was soon producing compositions for the court, for weddings, birthdays and other occasions, including some dramatic pieces which were very successful. The fashionable mythological idyll was well suited to his liking for the cantabile and sensual poetry of Tasso and Marino, a taste which the severely classical education given him by Gravina had refined but not obliterated.

In his first melodrama, Didone abbandonata, performed in Naples in 1724 (with music by Domenico Sarro), the Virgilian encounter between the Carthaginian Queen and the destined founder of Rome becomes a clash between Dido's unbridled passion and readiness to sacrifice throne and life for the man she loves and Aeneas' anguish as he is torn between love and duty.

From Boiardo to Ariosto

Narrative poetry in the Cinquecento essentially builds on the impressive initiatives of Pulci and Boiardo in the late fifteenth century. The truncation of the Innamorato in 1494 (see above, pp. 172–5) left dozens of Boiardo's fascinating narrative inventions unresolved and a host of fabulous creatures in a state of suspended animation. To take only the prime players, how, if at all, was the impossible love of Orlando for Angelica to be concluded? What was to be the course of the courtship of Ruggiero and Bradamante, separated as soon as they met, and separated as well by their adherence to different and warring religions? What was to be the result of Agramante's expedition into France? By what means was Charlemagne's empire to be delivered from peril? Lesser characters too had vanished into the unknown: what fate had befallen the always improvident Astolfo, tricked by Alcina? Boiardo's death in the year of invasion deprived his readers of answers, but the intense magnetism of the mystery provoked others to attempt a conclusion. Ariosto was not the only poet to resume the matieère provided by the Innamorato. In 1505, 1514 and 1521 the Venetian Niccolò degli Agostini provided a fourth, fifth and sixth book of continuations to Boiardo's remnant. Raffaele da Verona, known as Valcieco, in 1514 added a fifth book of his own, and in 1518 Pierfrancesco de' Conti da Camerino wrote yet another, sixth book, tracing the life of Ruggiero's and Bradamante's son, Rugino.

Revolution: ‘Junges Deutschland’ and ‘Vormärz’

The nineteenth century was a time of enormous change in Europe, and nowhere was this truer than in Germany. Emerging from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a confederation of dozens of small states, Germany at last achieved nationhood in 1871. Similarly, the nineteenth century saw Germany move from a largely feudal, agrarian economy to capitalist means of production in a steadily more industrialised society. The middle class gradually emerged as a dominant force, first in conflict with the declining feudal nobility and then in tension with the rising proletariat.

The most volatile decades of this period were those between 1830 and 1850, when ‘revolution’ was a catchword of the day. The temper of the times is reflected in German literature, philosophy, music and art, which testify to at least four major kinds of revolutions: socio-political, sexual, religious and aesthetic. Regarding the first of these, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were of paramount influence. Although Germany did not bring about a revolutionary upheaval in 1830, the 1830 ‘July Revolution’ in France, which replaced the Bourbon Charles X with the ‘Citizen King’ Louis Philippe and significantly strengthened the economic and political power of the bourgeoisie, added impetus to the German opposition to absolutist rule. Absolutism was personified in Klemens Metternich (1773–1859), the Austrian statesman who arbitrated the Congress of Vienna and, as prince, oversaw the so-called Holy Alliance, formed in 1815 between Russia, Austria and Prussia. Metternich’s name still symbolises the forces of reaction, since his regime functioned through a rigid system of censorship, espionage, imprisonment and exile that touched virtually all liberal-minded intellectuals.

Introduction

The forty-five years from the collapse of National Socialist Germany in 1945 to the unification of the two German states in 1990 might seem to be an era with a self-evident beginning and end, for how could events of such magnitude and with such profound social and cultural consequences fail to exert epochal influences on literature? This led, after 1945, to the widespread expectation and assertion of a new beginning, a ‘Stunde Null’ or ‘Zero Hour’. Equally, the end of the era was announced as early as 2 October 1990, one day before unification, in the critic Frank Schirrmacher’s essay ‘Abschied von der Literatur der Bundesrepublik’ (‘Farewell to the literature of the Federal Republic’) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

But the continuities of German literature across the supposed divide of 1945 are as numerous as the discontinuities; and the apparent end of duality in 1990 made manifest continued divergencies, unsurprising after forty years of ideological division and cultural separation. Literature is not immune to social and political processes; but the rethinking provoked by major upheavals in society may take many years to be reflected in the themes and forms of literature. In this sense, the literature ‘of’ the Federal Republic is still to be written.

Schirrmacher’s purpose was in any case not a balanced retrospective but a new campaign in a controversy which had accompanied West German literature through most of its history as part of the perennial German question of the relationship of ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’ (‘spirit’ and ‘power’): is literature’s importance to be measured by its role as a socially and morally responsible force within a society, whether affirmative or critical of that society?

The beginnings of opera

With the production of Guarini's Pastor fido (see above, p. 297) at Mantua in 1598 we reach one of the most momentous periods in the history of the Italian theatre. The same year also saw the staging, in Jacopo Corsi's Florence home, of what is generally accepted as the first ‘real’ opera, the Dafne of Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621), set to music by Jacopo Peri (1561–1633). In 1600 Rinuccini and Peri collaborated on a more ambitious work, Euridice, which was staged in the Pitti Palace during the celebrations for the wedding of Maria de' Medici and Henry IV of France. A few years later, in Mantua, the first two operas of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) were produced. One, Arianna (1608), though it seems to have created the deeper impression on his contemporaries, is lost, except for various versions of its great lament ‘Lasciatemi morire’; the other, Orfeo (1607), thanks to the fact that it was published, is preserved in a relatively unproblematic state, and is admired (and regularly performed) as the first classic in the 300-year tradition of Italian opera.

Monteverdi's mastery of so complex a medium would not have been possible if opera had simply been ‘invented’ ten years earlier by Rinuccini and Peri. In fact all three men drew on an accumulated wealth of practical experience relating to the combination of music and dramatic poetry, and – perhaps even more important – on a wealth of ideals and imaginative visions, inherited from humanist scholars and poets, which suggested to them what further and greater things might still be possible in this field.

The innovations of the poets of the late Cinquecento (Tasso, Strozzi, Guarini, Rinaldi and others) provide evidence of a culture prone to experimentalism in polemic – more or less openly declared – with the Bembist variety of Renaissance classicism. The novelty is immediately perceived on the formal level: the poetic discourse relies not so much on a system of thematic correlations as on tropes, on the quality of single words (rare, polysemic), similes and metaphors, a new emphasis which will ultimately lead to concettismo. And musicality becomes a pre-eminent feature – which explains why the madrigal becomes a favourite poetical form. On the thematic level, we see that the canzone, and lyric poetry in general, move away from ‘high’ themes – considered more appropriate for epic and tragedy – in favour of ‘occasional’ themes of middling level, including daily and vulgar subjects. On the other hand, new ‘high’ themes acquire a new and sustained role, above all patriotic, moral and religious themes which were practically unknown to the lyric poems of the previous generations who sang primarily of love. Each of the main trends in the seventeenth-century lyric – the light or ‘melic’, the extreme Baroque, the moderate and the classicist – can be seen as emphatic forms of features present in poetry at the turn of the century. We will consider them in turn.

The literary and ideological quarrels of this period were disputed in numerous reviews and literary magazines. By far the most important of these was La critica (1903–44), edited and directed by Benedetto Croce. In its pages, Croce carried forward his struggle against positivism and empiricism, establishing his reputation as Italy's greatest modern philosopher and as the intellectual and moral rallying point for anti-Fascist intellectuals. In spite of La critica's vast influence, however, Crocian neo-idealism, with its foundation of reason and hierarchy and its staunch defence of liberal democracy, did not satisfy the needs of younger intellectuals, who, removed as they were from the sources of political power, sought more radical answers. Leonardo (1903–7) and La Voce (1908–16), the reviews which best reflect the climate of turbulent intellectual upheaval that characterised Italian society in the period prior to the Great War, provided a forum for the dissemination of several varieties of European irrationalism. The Triestine Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) was one of the contributors to La Voce whose idealism cost him his life at the front. From the pages of La Ronda (1919–23), Riccardo Bacchelli (1891–1985), called for a return to classical ideals in literature and art, in opposition to the vanguardism of Lacerba (1913–15); while Piero Gobetti's Energie nove (1918–20) and La rivoluzione liberale (1922–5) championed a working-class revolution based on liberal-democratic principles, and L'ordine nuovo (1919–25), founded by Antonio Gramsci, appealed to Marxist notions of class struggle in an attempt to unite intellectuals and proletariat in the battle against capitalism.

Looking back from the beginning of the Trecento, Dante surveyed the relative literary achievements of French, Provençal and Italian vernaculars up to his day:

What is striking about this summary is that both French and Provençal have well-defined traditions behind them: the examples Dante cites go back generations (Peire d'Alvernhe wrote between 1150 and 1180; Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas, authors of the most important French romances, were writing around 1170). Significantly, Dante extends the references to French and Provençal writers by mentioning unspecified ‘plures’ and ‘alii’ (numerous others). For Italian, however, the examples could hardly be more solitary or recent: Cino da Pistoia was in his early thirties and his friend – Dante is referring to himself – was nearing forty: no other ‘vulgares eloquentes’ are mentioned.

Calvino explores the interface between the two sides of writing – the shared referential domain of lived life and the discursive artefact of the writing on the page. His fiction progresses from the first towards the second, converging with Italy's literary transformation during the 1960S. The hermetic generation of poets, dominant since the 1930S (see above, pp. 502ff.), were concerned with the metaphysics of absence, of a barely apprehensible ‘I’ and ‘thou’, and the metaphysics of language, rather than the contingency of things or events. The pressure of history – the events of the 1940S – did not immediately reverse this abstentionist stance.

Formidably austere, but also disarmingly quotidian, Eugenio Montale's wartime and post-war poems collected in the symbolically titled La bufera (‘The Storm’, 1956; see also above, p. 507) metaphysically confront the cataclysm of the Second World War. Epiphanic glimpses or ‘flashes’, they embrace the Western world from the road to Damascus as far as New England while remaining firmly anchored in Montale's war-time home, Florence, and tied to his parental Liguria. The poet's consternation links personal fates, lost loved ones, with the general fate, connecting or conflating life, death and possible after-lives or other lives. La bufera is dominated by the presences and absences of female figures, loved at once humanly and transcendentally: Clizia in the major fifth section, ‘Silvae’, and Volpe (Fox) in the sixth, ‘Madrigali privati’. These are visiting angels, apparent victims, but also stilnovo or even Christo-logical redeemers, as in ‘L'ombra della magnolia’ and in ‘Iride’ (‘Rainbow’).

Compared to poetry, the Italian novel of the early twentieth century appears relatively underdeveloped. This weakness can be attributed mainly to the relative absence in modern Italian history of a strong middle-class culture within which the novel, as in France and England, could have evolved. The work of Italy's greatest nineteenth-century novelists, Manzoni and Verga, was affected to a notable degree by foreign writers (Scott and Zola respectively) and, with very few exceptions (Svevo and Gadda), the same is true throughout the first half of the twentieth century: Italian novelists are significantly influenced by imported fiction, particularly British and American.

The most important direction which the modern Italian novel took after Verga was toward greater subjectivity. The total social world of the naturalist perspective was replaced, in the best novelistic production of the time, by the totality of the individual subject. In Pirandello's novels (see above, pp. 481–3) a single commonplace event enclosed a lifetime's experience, while with D'Annunzio (above, pp. 473–6) the life encapsulated in an object or set of memories harboured the spiritual substance of mysterious essences. For both these writers, the individual stood at odds with an external reality of anarchic forces, taking refuge beyond the borders of reason in some rarefied ontological space. By means of literature, D'Annunzio transformed life into art and spectacle; whereas Pirandello demonstrated that true life was realisable outside the self, either in nature or in madness.