ABSTRACT
The strictly literary issues involved in the Italian debates over Romanticism took their cue from Madame de Stael-Holstein programmatic essay. Already in 1816, the year of her article, three of them, Ludovico di Breme, Pietro Borsieri, and Giovanni Berchet, published independently at Milan pamphlets that have come to be considered the chief manifestos of Italian Romanticism. Romanticism itself was understood by many of the classici as an unwarranted importation of foreign styles and genres. In fact, substantive references of any kind to opera were rare in the early literature of Italian Romanticism—strikingly rare, given the many long discussions of spoken drama in the writings. Gioacchino Rossini never left us any account of his views of early Italian Romanticism, but it is safe to assume that he was not unaware of the polemical writings on the subject. The Romanticism of Italian opera came of age in the works, Romanticism in its second, Giuseppe Mazzinian incarnation.
