Americans in Italy

...As a matter of fact, the Italy of Virgil, Horace...

...Dante and Petrarch had been part and parcel of our intellectual baggage even before the first American visitor to the peninsula, the painter Benjamin West, arrived in Rome in 1760 to study the arts...

...Arturo Toscanini...

...and the Mazzinian vision was obscured by the Mussolinian cult of bald violence, it was the turn of Italian artists, intellectuals, critics and historians to cross the Atlantic...

...The ties that bind cultural America to Italy are deep and strong...

...Fortunately, happier times have re-established the flow of American visitors to Italy...

...Carlo Sforza...

...From that time on, artists, sculptors, poets, critics, historians and scholars succeeded one another in an unbroken procession for what Thomas Jefferson called "a peep at Elysium...

...A notable group of politically-minded Americans that included James Fenimore Cooper, the sculptors Horatio Greenough and Thomas Crawford...

...G. A. Borgese and many others came to America where they found a second spiritual home...

...landmarks, even the people themselves seem oddly familiar...

...Thus did the wheel turn the full cycle...

...the incredible Margaret Fuller...

...The pivotal force of this group was extraordinary William Wetmore Story who lived in the splendor of the Palazzo Barberini for 45 years, a willing victim of the "Rome sickness" that drew his friends back again and again to the Eternal City...

...Brooks' beguiling and enlightening book comes a propos to point out how much of Italy's changeless past still remains to be enjoyed and cherished in the age-old way...

...But there is more to it than that...

...This eager fraternity met in the crowded, smoke-filled rooms of the still extant Caffe Greco to discuss art, pictures and statues, irresistibly attracted, despite their Calvinistic background, by a pagan-Catholic civilization that found its expression in art forms they admired above all else...

...Plutarch...

...As the century waned, there was no interesting Italian city that did not have its American "old-time victim of Italy.'' Mark Twain lived and worked at San Gimignano: James Whistler had capitulated to Venice: F. Marion Crawford had a permanent home in Sorrento: Edith Wharton was exploring the little known villas of Genoa...

...George Ticknor and Henry Wads-worth Longfellow, Henry Adams and Henry James all succumbed to the spell that had enthralled the great Europeans before them...

...Charles Eliot Norton (whose mother had translated Silvio Pellico's My Prisons, just as his father had translated Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi), Catherine Sedgwick and Julia Ward Howe, were deeply concerned over the cause of Italian independence and, like the Brownings...

...this time westward...

...As one recognizes the streets down which our 19th-century writers and artists strolled, the houses in which they dwelled, the monuments they admired, the landmarks they visited, it becomes easy to understand what Longfellow meant when he said: "Say what ill of it you may...

...Refusing to he stampeded into silence or subservience...

...Steeped in Roman history, in a day when Latin was the basis of the sound, classical education imparted in American schools, these cultivated men and women were as familiar with the marble busts in the Vatican and Capitol as with the portraits of their own statesmen...

...When Fascism changed the climate of Italy...

...Not all, however, considered Italy merely as a storehouse of antiquity...

...gifted Americans who fled their ever-changing homeland in quest of the past in the timeless Arcadia that was 19th-century Italy...

...The phenomenon is usually ascribed to residual memories of Piranesi etchings in old-fashioned parlors or of fading photographs of classical Rome that once hung on the walls of high-school classrooms...

...By the middle of the 19th century...

...Many lived in the Via Margutta-Piazza di Spagna section, near the house that Keats and Shelley had taken at the foot of the Spanish Steps...

...an Arcadia of fallen grandeur...

...others to recover and study the past in what was then considered its traditional home...

...works of art, monuments...

...Landscapes...

...Livy...

...specialist in modern European literature WHEN AMERICAN TOURISTS visit Italy they cannot help feeling that they are reliving an experience lost in some far distant past...

...Rome had become the refuge of American expatriates that Paris was to become a generation later...

...Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne...

...How genuine they are is the substance of Van Wyck Brooks' admirable study on the 19th-century American travellers to Italy, particularly those who went there to work and live between the French Revolution and World War I. It is a rich and fascinating book, filled with heretofore little exploited information about the enriching experiences of the scholarly...

...Gaetano Salvemini...

...Lombardy and Venice: and by 1900...

...Bernard Berenson had settled in Settignano...

...Some came in search of the magnificence of the Italian scene...

...were drawn into the great drama of Italy's Risorgimento...

...Nothing looks completely strange, nothing seems altogether unknown...

...Italy] still remains to the poet the land of his predilection, to the artist the land of his necessity, and to all the land of dreams and visions of delight...