How Tuscany has captivated travelers from around the world ? In a classic book, the historian Luigi Mascilli Migliorini shows how, from the 1760s, the region acquired a positive image and historical density, to the point of making Florence a new Athens.
Twenty years after the publication of L’Italia dell’Italia: coscienza and mito della Toscana from Montesquieu to Berenson (1995), followed by a reissue where the “ tradition » replaced the “ myth » (L’Italia dell’Italia: the Tuscan tradition from Montesquieu to Berenson2006), here is a quality French translation of this work dealing with the essence of Tuscany and its place in the imagination of Italy. Drawing on a few dozen Italian, French, English and German texts, he describes the transition to a favorable image of Tuscany from the 1760s, then the rise of its visibility in the XIXe century on the Italian and international cultural scene, before wondering about its fate in the following century.
Mediation with Antiquity
The investigation into the birth of a tradition » leads the author to recall how travelers from XVIIIe century, despite their interest in the singularity of Florence in relation to Rome, positioned themselves negatively towards Tuscany and its main cities. Faced with Addison, Montesquieu, de Brosses, but also Berkeley and Edward Gibbon, a positive approach to the Tuscan land and Florentine artistic civilization nevertheless emerged through contact with Livorno, then asserted itself from the 1760s with authors guides or travel stories like Cochin, Richard, Coyer or Lalande. From Grosley to Dupaty and A. Young, Florence became the Athens of Italy. Despite the slowness of this process of promotion compared to the south of the peninsula and the taste for Antiquity, as evidenced by Goethe, Florence began with the Life of Lorenzo de Medici de Roscoe (1796) to play a role of mediation with Antiquity which passed through the Renaissance.
However, it was Sismondi who, according to Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, brought about the fruitful encounter between travel and the historical density of Tuscany. Garden of Italy, it collected the fruit of several centuries of a refined civil life and a human presence permeating nature. The industrious towns led to Tuscan civilization, placing the countryside under their domination. And Sismondi exalts the “ small size » of Tuscany, capable of promoting individual freedom and direct confrontation between man and his environment. Florence, source of life and energy but victim of a “ internal loss », allowed Mme de Staël to meditate on the finitude of the individual and the irreducibility of art.
If there was then a “ heritage of romanticism “, it consisted of anchoring the image of a moral Italy in the Tuscan model. With his literary cabinet, Vieusseux made Florence a crossroads of Europe. Its past had symbolic potential to the extent that the city was nourished by its territory. But, unlike Sismondi, he rehabilitated the primacy of the countryside. Attention to the link between man and the earth animated G. Capponi’s Tuscan economics course or G. Montani’s desire to pick up the thread interrupted by the industrial revolution and that of 1789. The sympathy of Europe for Tuscany would thus have been largely nourished by the pleasure of seeing there only a “ corner of the world » peripheral and isolated, despite its insertion in the processes of social and political modernization.
Fight against modernity
The foundations were laid for Ruskin, like Burckhardt, to transform Florence into “ a past for Europe “. Following them, Henry James contrasted the ugliness of modern Italy with the immobile testimonies of a past incapable of creative dialogue with the present. While Livorno was rejected in favor of the “ still softness » of Florence, Symonds looked at the Tuscan Renaissance, finding there less the dawn of a liberal society than the celebration of the cult of the individual and his strength.
By making it, in the 1870s, the almost immobile guardian of the past, a closed place of memory, the myth of the Athens of Italy revealed its powerlessness in the face of the desire for change of a political class which had become in its most illustrious Tuscan representative, Bettino Ricasoli, Baron of Brolio, and who was distraught upon his death in 1880. The dark character of the Brolio castle, built by Ricasoli’s ancestors, was likely to give rise to the motif of a mythical refuge towards a built medieval Tuscany “ on secure moral rules and easily identifiable hierarchies », while Ricasoli was elevated to the rank of modern hero, capable of intervening in historical development.
But Florence struggled to establish itself as an essential protagonist of national life to the extent that, from the 1880s, all of Italy failed to match the more advanced European countries. She then paid the price for her choice to assume the role of mediator of tradition.
As a counterpoint to Maupassant’s disappointment in the face of the noisy crowd which thwarted the emotions produced by the beauty of the place, the last fight against modernity would have been fought at the end of the XIXe century in a whole other Tuscany », Maremma. The writer Fucini saw in it the “ Noon » of Northern Italy and G. Tigri elements contrary to the ideology of progress which the champions of land sanitation and the eradication of poverty, from G. Santi to Vieusseux, had nevertheless wanted to introduce there . Like Verga’s Sicily, the story “ maremmian » of writers and poets, up to Carducci, would testify to the regret both of a rural past and of a social class having lost its link with the historical reasons for its identity. The other Tuscany would also be that of the dead towns that Taine describes from Siena to Pisa.
A certain idea of Italy
Does this amount of stories about Tuscany accumulated over two centuries mean that internationalized Tuscany would only have XXe century that the possibility of struggling in the paradox between “ the real and the irrational » ? This is the hypothesis formulated by Luigi Mascilli Migliorini. Florence’s capacity for symbolic and cultural aggregation reinforced for him an idea of the Tuscan tradition which made it the focus of research on Renaissance civilization. The translation into action of the general principles of freedom that Burckhardt detected there was certainly relayed, in Warburg, by the vision of an interest in abstract forms, detached from morality. The Florence of DH Lawrence was thus a city of the spirit more than of history, a space for the expansion of a primitive vitality of individuals. It was then that Tuscany would have acquired the quality of “ Italy from Italy », concentrating the generic characters of the peninsula in a time when the “ dry disintegration » of modernity threatened it.
While after 1918 the search for still time moved far from Italy, what energies emerged from this declining vision of a Florence placed at the end of history ? Luigi Mascilli Migliorini pleads for a living Tuscany, even if it had disappeared. Drawing from the history of its conflicts a reserve of ethical resources, its development would have been nothing less than “ peaceful », leading Berenson to inventory the dramatic clashes that took place there on the terrain of art. Against his wish for an identical reconstruction of the Florence of yesteryear in 1945, R. Bianchi Bandinelli nevertheless considered it impossible to reassemble an organism which had been alive, bequeathed by the slow process of history. Luigi Mascilli Migliorini likes to recall that the museum city is opposed to tradition, “ culmination of a collective and living historical experience » and not “ inert march of beauty through time “.
The choice to return this brief but demanding book without updating contributes to making it a “ classic “. The observations of literary travelers, writers and historians question the status of Tuscany within the process of constructing an idea of Italy where the natural, human and artistic landscape is marked by an intimate articulation between the city and the campaign. The regional space therefore makes it possible to define an Italianness located at the crossroads between the ancient and the modern.
But this attempt to disentangle the links between identity discourse and historical reality leads to the exclusion of any hypothesis of a stable identity. Against a simplified use of identity linked to tradition, the author convincingly shows how that of Tuscany has been too changeable and protean to be fixed. So he does not really set out in search of the identity of Tuscany and invites us to rethink the very notion of “ tradition “.
Published twenty years after Franco Venturi’s text on “ L’Italia fuori d’Italia » (1973), this book by Luigi Mascilli Migliorini helped to prove the changing position of Tuscany in the hierarchy of Italian travel. This translation timely reminds us that this is less a new book on traveling in Tuscany than a rich and fruitful reflection on the way in which the identity of a region or a city is shaped in the prism of a multiplicity of views, at the same time as it continues to escape us.