Romanticism and the Risorgimento

Besides remaining faithful to the Enlightenment tradition, the romantics were closely involved in the ideological and political battle which gave rise to the Italian Risorgimento. This was in fact one of the peculiar characteristics of the cultural battle in which they participated with their manifestoes and polemics. In a letter to his brother in 1819, when Il Conciliatore was subjected to the censorship of the Austrians and then forced to close, Silvio Pellico clarified the terms of that involvement: “Our readers have opened their eyes with regard to us, and now know what we mean by romantic. […] The provocations we received, the publication delays caused by dual censorship, and the constant threat of closure opened the eyes even of the blindest, and romantic was recognized as a synonym for liberal. No longer did people dare call themselves classicists, except for extremists and spies.” Pellico also defined the romantic project as “purely patriotic”, while Borsieri called it a “national enterprise”, and Stendhal saw it as a project for the moral education of Italy. As regards the revitalization of culture and the social role of the writer, the Milanese romantics were undoubtedly continuing the work of the Verri brothers and Beccaria, but the situation of progressive intellectuals at the time of the European Restoration was rather different from the situation at the time of Maria Teresa or Joseph II, namely, of the enlightened Habsburg despots. Through revolutionary experience and the Napoleonic regime, Lombardy had undergone profound transformations in its social structures, institutions and intellectual outlook, taking on the characteristics of a bourgeois State with needs and expectations in terms of economic liberty and political independence. The Milanese romantics’ cultural project included a political vision that was now Risorgimental in nature, foreshadowing the illustrious voices of the major players (including Mazzini, Gioberti and Cattaneo) in a process that was both political and cultural, and was to lead to a unified Italy.