ABSTRACT
One hot Tuscan summer, a group of Anglo-Italian friends was enjoying writing occasional verse together and translating Dante Alighieri. Their leader was a handsome English radical poet, whose fortune had been dissipated in the London gambling hells. The British translated Dante experimented with Italian form and metres: the sonnet, terza rima, ottava rima and courtly love lyrics. These aristocrats escaping creditors, bohemian artists and patriot literati from the professional classes believed that an Anglicized revival of Italian poetry was one way of resisting Austrian cultural imperialism. Della Cruscanism had appealed to Lord Byron with its theatrical pose of aristocratic libertarianism. In the Italian context, however, it can be seen as sentimentally conservative in its resistance to modernization. The Baronne de Staël-Holstein and her young friend and sparring partner Byron rewrote aristocratic Romanticism. Both rebutted Edmund Burke’s lament for the age of chivalry: they mingled with the bourgeoisie in salons and publishers’ premises.
