Bowen’s letters, novels, and short stories all attest to her love of Italy, a country that she visited often and one where she experienced excitement, love, grief, sorrow, and occasionally boredom. The country provided the location for significant events in her life: the breaking off of an engagement; the shared experiences of a country providing solace when she and her lover, Charles Ritchie, were apart; facing both the potential and actual loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court; or mourning the deaths of Humphry House, her former lover, and her husband, Alan Cameron. Like many of her characters in her novels and short stories, Bowen’s response to, and relationship with, Italy is multi-layered and nuanced, the result of her experiences, both physical and emotional, over many years. This chapter draws on those experiences in Italy, placing Bowen’s writing – in letters, essays, selected early short stories, novels, and her ‘travelogue’, A Time in Rome – within their biographical, bibliographical, and geographical contexts.

This article traces the career trajectories, publishing strategies, and intertwining networks of Barbara Strozzi and two of her Venetian contemporaries: the Jewish salonniére and poet Sara Copia Sulam (1592?–1641) and the forced nun and polemicist Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). All three figures were connected to the influential Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a libertine circle of writers, critics, and opera librettists with interests including literature and music. Each woman pursued a career as a public intellectual in an early modern world that often chafed at women’s voices, and each broadcast their ideas by publishing on prominent presses. The experience of Copia Sulam, who was prominent as the Incogniti academy was beginning to coalesce and was forced from the public eye after meeting with a vicious backlash for her intellectual activities, could in the coming decades serve as a cautionary tale to Strozzi and Tarabotti, who had long and prolific careers that were nevertheless beset by controversy. Though the trajectories of these three women varied in significant ways, their shared literary networks and their use of the presses to craft a commanding public persona illuminate the editorial environment for women in seventeenth-century Venice.

This chapter examines the life, movement, and works of Margherita Costa, a professional singer and one of Italy’s most prolific women writers. With Barbara Strozzi, Costa shared an occasional city (Venice), a prominent dedicatee (Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), and several poetic themes, including that of the bella donna, a trope of Baroque Marinist verse. Found primarily in her first poetry collection, La chitarra (1638), Costa’s bella donna is not simply a physically alluring woman who articulates and pursues her own desires—already an innovation—but is also a singer. The chapter concludes by considering three examples of musically centered poems in the volume: erotically charged verse to a Venetian noblewoman, complaints to a negligent lover who demands her song, and humorous poems regarding the gift of an ugly, out-of-tune harpsichord.

This essay looks at the artistic patronage of the Strozzis and Widmanns, who were connected not only through commerce and culture, but also through the relationship between Giovanni Paolo Widmann and Barbara Strozzi. Both Giulio and Barbara, as well as various members of the Widmann family, were painted by the leading artists active in Venice at that time, such as Tiberio Tinelli, Bernardo Strozzi (well known as Il Prete Genovese) and Nicolas Régnier. Through the surviving documents and works of art, the dense intertwining of painting, music and poetry emerges, fostered by the Accademia degli Incogniti, the most famous literary circle flourishing in Venice in the seventeenth century, and to which Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the abovementioned artists were connected. Furthermore,the essay sheds new light on the genre of the and the role it plays in celebrating the individual’s features and perpetuating personal memory.

In the early seventeenth century, female singers were novelties, objects of obsession to be admired, collected, and displayed. Heard only seldom in opera (until the establishment of Venetian public opera) and forbidden from singing in church, they performed primarily in private and semiprivate settings, inspiring their male admirers to write poems and discourses that variously praised and condemned their alluring voices and bodies. A comparison of Barbara Strozzi’s performances with the Venetian Accademia degli Unisoni with those of her antecedents and contemporaries (such as Adriana Basile or Leonora Baroni) in Papal Rome reveals fundamental differences in attitudes towards virtuose: the political structure in Venice that limited public roles for noblewomen created an environment discouraged the development of conversazioni and veglie – many of which were sponsored by female patrons – that the Roman women enjoyed. Giulio Strozzi’s founding of the Accademia degli Unisoni may well have been inspired by his experiences hearing female singers during his time in Rome.

This chapter examines the construction of Casulana’s persona in the late 1560s. It draws on three sources that simultaneously conveyed antagonistic images of Casulana in the public arena: the Dilettevoli madrigali by her student Antonio Molino (1568); “L’Ava di Magagnò,” a poem in Vicenza dialect by Giovanni Battista Maganza (1569); and “A caso un giorno,” a madrigal that Casulana published in her Primo libro a4 (1568). While Molino constructs a poetic and musical image of a morally and intellectually exemplary woman, borrowing his rhetorical strategies from philogynist discourses, Maganza presents Casulana as a hypersexualized body freely available to male desire, implicitly equating her to a courtesan. Casulana, for her part, seizes the semiotic opacity of the music, and perhaps also the sexual freedom that she may have experienced at the time, to offer us one of the rarest representations of female carnal jouissance conceived by a woman in sixteenth-century Italy.

When Shelley resolved to leave England for Italy with his family, he conceived his expatriation as a voluntary exile. Yet, for several months after their arrival, the Shelleys criss-crossed the peninsula like the Grand Tourists of old, visiting all its major cities and a few minor destinations, which Shelley described at length in his correspondence and often evoked in his poetry. A peculiarity of Shelley’s travel letters is his ambivalent attitude towards Italy, revealed by his constant juxtaposition of the magnificent beauty of its art and nature and the equally striking spectacle of the Italians’ degradation. However, as the first independence movements raised the promise of the country’s political and cultural resurgence, Shelley started to develop a greater appreciation of its inhabitants. At the same time, having finally settled, he turned his attention away from the wonders and contrasts of Italy to celebrate the simple life of his exile community.

The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.

Wagner’s relation to Italy and Italian culture has been explored numerous times in relation to his criticisms of Italian opera, where potential reinterpretations of this starkly negative assessment sit alongside analytical readings of Italianate style in certain works. This chapter moves past that tradition, situating biographical and familial contexts for Wagner’s stated dislike of Rossinian opera alongside his deep attachment to Venice, and the progressive importance his works acquired within Italy, evidenced by commercial interests that paired locomotive travel with tours of Lohengrin, Rienzi, and the Ring and the Wagnerian characters that formed advertising emblems for the Liebig meat company.

Fearing shortage of culturally significant fish, medieval societies reacted in several ways. In a culture of markets, scarce supply motivates sellers to demand and/or buyers to offer more for the commodity: anecdotes from the twelfth century and serial prices from the thirteenth indicate fish prices rising even past 1350. Ownership of the productive resource itself could capture some of those sellers’ gains, not to mention the prestige and power medieval society associated with landownership: elite acquisition of fishing rights had begun with early creation of private lordships, but by and after the twelfth century it also promised income from direct exploitation or from leasing operations to artisans (depriving local subsistence fishers). In contrast, relict and then emergent claimants to public authority could gain by regulating resource exploitation ‘for the public good’. From the 1200s onwards kings, territorial princes, and self-governing communes asserted control over fishing rights and activities, first on acknowledged public waters (large rivers, coastal waters) and eventually over practices and uses of private natural waters. The chapter explores grounds for regulating fisheries as a ‘public’ resource to allocate their value, settle disputes, ensure consumer safety, and occasionally to encourage what might now be called ‘sustainable’ uses within recognizable limits. Like the artisanal fisheries toward which they were directed, these cultural measures retained close ties between local natural ecosystems and consumers of fish.

Artisan fishers broke the early medieval pattern of subsistence fishing. Participants in Europe’s medieval ‘Commercial Revolution’, artisans made their living by catching fish to sell on a local market. Evidence of such people appears around 1000 CE in commercially precocious northern Italy but also in England, France, the Rhineland, and elsewhere. Commonly they arose at or near emerging towns, where skilled subsistence fishers might offer a surplus catch to other non-agricultural specialists. The chapter examines the social position of these household-based fishers, their traditional small-scale technologies, and the collective organizations (guilds) used to manage their human and environmental relations. It then turns to the urban markets where these men and their wives provided fresh fish from nearby waters. In larger towns professional fishmongers consolidated catches from various regional habitats, while communal concern for a safe and abundant supply caused municipal authorities to regulate market dealings. By the late twelfth century the interplay of seasonal demand (Lent) and supply (runs of migratory fish) coupled with cultural criteria of taste and quality shaped fish prices. Whether in great cities like Venice or Paris or small towns on the Castilian plateau or English coast, local markets offered consumers the regional fish they ate.

Commemorations brought authors and their works to wide public attention, partly through reports in the newspaper and magazine press, and, when such occasions were marked by the erection of public statues, by a continuing visible presence. They were unavoidable reminders of a particular and selected past. There were, however, further remains and archival strata that invited investigation. In these archival survivals lay the explanation, rationale and often the justification for modern religious, political and other aspects of social organisation.