Trans-Adriatic Enlightenments: Maria Petrettini’s Italian Translation of the Turkish Embassy Letters

Abstract

In 1838, Maria Petrettini, a Greco-Venetian aristocrat, published a translation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters from English into Italian. In this paper, taking as a focal point Petrettini’s translation of the Letters, I aim to unravel the story of two parallel texts that challenged religious and political presuppositions. In the work of Petrettini and Montagu, the view of the Turk as a savage is deconstructed through a gendered perspective. The writer and the translator propose that a traveller can know a foreign land only if they are able to penetrate all aspects of public and private life; a feat that only a female scholar can accomplish. Apart from the importance of the Letters and their translation, focusing on a scholar like Maria Petrettini allows us to broaden our gaze to the intellectual possibilities available to high class women in the North-Eastern Mediterranean; the multiple strategies for women’s political representation within an era of Revolutions; the mosaic of religious, political and ethnic affiliations and the ways in which Enlightenment and Romantic ideas merged into each other within the framework of the Greco-Italian intellectual milieu providing us with a transcultural, trans-Adriatic Enlightenment.

Introduction

There is a lot to say about the Corfiot aristocrat Maria Petrettini (1772–1851). Her life spanned two centuries and five different empires. She could speak and write Venetian, Tuscan, Modern Greek, English, French and Spanish. She translated from Latin, Ancient Greek and English. She refused to follow the norms of her time on female virtue. She divorced twice, to the detriment of her parents and brother. She was a businesswoman who expanded the family fortune in precarious times. She tried to build a female philosophical and literary canon by researching and writing on women scholars of the past. She published three books and two translations and had many more unpublished works in her drawer. She was celebrated among her contemporaries. In the correspondence of the learned people of her circle, there was always a line or two about her and her endeavours. She strove for a public image. She wanted to be someone like Lady Mary Montagu, the English author she translated; like Cassandra Fedele, the Renaissance scholar whose biography she wrote; like her cousin Isabella Teotochi-Albrizzi, whose transnational salon she frequented. She wanted to be a scholar and a public intellectual. She succeeded. People, men and women of her time looked at her and her writings for inspiration.

She also failed. She has not been remembered, and her words have not been deemed important or representative enough to endure the “test of time”.¹ In this chapter, I will examine Maria Petrettini’s life and writings with a focus on her translation of Lady Mary Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters. But I will also try to trace the anatomy of this success and this failure. They are, I will argue, of course connected with her being a woman, but also because Maria Petrettini was posthumously caught between what was understood as the West and the East, Italy and Greece. When telling her story, we are at a vantage point whence we can view Italy and Venice not as peripheries but as centres of intellectual activity for both men and women. We cannot tell her story without exploring the amalgam of Enlightenment questions and Romantic answers that characterized her intellectual environment. We cannot tell her story if we do not understand the Adriatic as a common space, its unity not yet affected by the fall of the Serenissima. We cannot tell her story if we do not account for her origins in the Ionian Islands, and her experiences in the borderland between three empires.

Maria Anastasia Petrettini was born to Alessandro Petrettini and Cremesina Pieri in 1772. The Petrettini were one of the first entries of the Corfiot Libro d’ Oro—the list of aristocratic families of the island—and had been part of Corfu’s governing council for centuries (Schroder 1831). They moved to Corfu in the fourteenth century, were given a large barony on the island, and then were converted to Orthodox Christianity in the beginning of the sixteenth century (Pantazi 2014). This distinct environment of peripheral Venetian aristocracy is where Maria Petrettini grew up. We do not know much about her childhood, but we can infer she was educated as was common for women of her status.

On the Ionian Islands of the late eighteenth century, children of aristocratic families had priests (either Orthodox or Catholic) assigned as their teachers. In some cases, girls were also allowed to learn the basic reading and writing skills in both Greek and Italian. Since there were no institutes of higher education on the islands, customarily, young men would travel to Italy, commonly Venice or Padua, in order to attend University. Petrettini, however, would have to remain in Corfu and follow the fate of young women even though she longed for education herself.

The fate of young women was marriage and in 1793 she married Zacharria Rodostamo, also a member of the Corfiot aristocracy and many years her senior, only to be separated two years later.² In 1797, her brother and their cousin, Mario Pieri who had been in Venice studying, fled because of the revolution that would signify the fall of the Venetian Republic and moved back to Corfu. From Pieri’s diaries, we learn about the time he and Maria Petrettini spent reading Latin, French and Ancient Greek texts they considered to be crucial for their cultivation and their self-fashioning as scholars (Pieri and Masini 2003). They had already both developed the ambition to become important, well-read and well known in the Italian literati circles. Their life and studies were upset when in June of that year the Ionian Islands were occupied by the Napoleonic army. Maria’s brother, Spiridione Petrettini, was imprisoned as a traitor, and Maria had to retreat to the countryside and Mario Pieri, who sympathized with the French revolutionary ideas and was of lower social status, remained in the city of Corfu. The events surrounding them were world changing. After hundreds of years enveloped in the stability of the Venetian Republic, the Ionian Islands would be taken from the French Empire, to the Russian and then the British within the space of a few decades.³

“A Race of Most Secret Companions”

In this uncertain framework, Petrettini, with the help of Pieri, intensified her efforts to become part of the Italian literary and philosophical circles. Her correspondence at that time, though dotted with worries about the disruption the war was causing in her exchanges, mostly concerned her readings and news about friends on both sides of the Adriatic. When Pieri introduced Petrettini through a letter to Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808), the Paduan professor of Ancient Greek, her connections with the Venetian literary community deepened (Chiancone 2012). She was to become what Cesarotti called a member “of the race of the most secret companions”, one of the Greco-Italian intellectuals that frequented Isabella Teotochi-Albrizzi’s salon and enjoyed Cesarotti’s mentorship.⁴

Cesarotti was a close friend of Giustina Michiel Renier (1755–1832), the first translator of Shakespeare into Italian, and seems to have been urging both her and Petrettini to write and publish.⁵ He did the same for Mario Pieri, Ugo Foscolo and other ambitious young scholars, many of them Ionians that were in touch with him. In a similar position to Cesarotti was Isabella Teotochi-Albrizzi (1763–1863) whom Byron had called the “Venetian Madame de Stael” (Dalton 2014, 209). Teotochi-Albrizzi held an esteemed position in the Venetian aristocratic and literary circles and acted as the mentor for many Greco-Italian or Italian scholars.⁶ Although she has been studied as the quintessential post-Venetian saloniera (salonnière), there is another dimension to her salon. The people who frequented it, like Ioannis Kapodistrias, later to become the first governor of Greece, Andreas Mustoxidis and other philhellenes from the Ionian Islands, had caused the Austrian secret police enough suspicion to actually follow her (Manin 1851, 189). This does not necessarily mean that the salon was a hub of covert political action, since the Austrian secret police was overly suspicious, but it does point to the fact that some of the people in Teotochi-Albrizzi’s salon were prone to discuss revolutionary politics. In this entourage at times, one could find well-known philhellenes like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron and self-exiled Wallachian aristocrats who would play an important role in the Greek Revolution, like Alexandros Mavrokordatos.

All these people formed an atypical intellectual environment in the sense that they had a sui generis approach towards the debates of their time. We do not have access to their discussions about politics or revolution, but we know some of their views on literature and philosophy that allow us to understand how ideas were being shaped at their time and place. The way they viewed translation is indicative: they did not engage in the controversy between classicism and Romanticism that was raging in Europe. Instead, they kept the quest for the classicist impeccable form, while keeping at heart Romanticism ideas, and asking Enlightenment questions.

Classicists viewed translation as a tool for people who were already familiar with the original text, as a way to learn and practice a language. Yet, under the influence of Romantic ideals for standardization of national languages and construction of literary canons, others were looking into translations as vehicles for enriching the target language. This many times meant the “foreignization” of the original documents in a way that would make them more relatable and approachable for a bigger audience. In a sense, translating texts was the answer to a question that had been posed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the influence of Enlightenment motivations on the education of people. Reading texts that belonged to different cultures was a way to improve the individual and, in consequence, human societies. In the Venetian circles to which Petrettini would eventually belong, the discrepancy between the classicist perfection and the Romantic vulgarized version was very small. The professed goal of translation was to acquaint the public with the works of a scholar, but there was an effort in keeping as close to the original as possible marrying the two approaches that had in the past seemed to be irreconcilable (Agorni 2021, 9–11).

This non-combative view of intellectual debates was representative of that place and time. For example, the Ancients versus Moderns debate was contextualized very differently in a time and place that was being re-imagined based on a Roman past. In fact, it is in the south of Europe that we can clearly see the interdependencies between what have been so far considered clearly delineated intellectual trends. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, much later than the usual periodization of what is called “the Enlightenment” we encounter ‘Enlightenment projects’ that are affected by Romanticism. In the case of Petrettini’s circle, we can see this clearly as a trans-Adriatic trend. It was essentially a brand of ideas that permeated the common world of the Adriatic and comprised Romanticism answers to Enlightenment questions (Zanou 2018, 200–204).

In Corfu, far away from the group in which she was aspiring to become a member, Petrettini was planning her own intellectual project. She was in thrall of Enlightenment ideas that proposed manners to free oneself from the shackles of immaturity and ignorance.⁷ At the same time, and although patriotic ideals did not seem to move her, she was influenced by the role the construction of a canon played in the formation of the intentional communities called “nations”. She resolved to build such a community for Italian women, and she planned to create a female literary history and canon. The first book she would publish opened up with the phrase “I wholeheartedly wanted a collection of the lives of illustrious women” and this she worked very hard to do (Petrettini 1814, 2).

The decision to build an intellectual project for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas to Italian women was so fundamental that permeated her entirely scholarly life and guided all of her choices on what to publish and translate. Petrettini never engaged publicly in debates about women’s position in society, but she took up a type of covert literary activism by inventing and constructing a tradition of female writers. This was not uncommon for women authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In their classic text The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar have extended Freud’s and Bloom’s ideas about the anxiety of authors to propose female writers of the nineteenth century suffered from an anxiety induced by the visible lack of predecessors.⁸ In the case of Petrettini, and many others, the effort to uncover and reinstate women scholars can be viewed as a counter to this, but I would propose that there is another layer to this effort. It was not only a single woman’s endeavour to find her footings in the past, but also, inspired by the spirit of their age, women like Petrettini saw an opportunity to fashion a female community by gleaning a canon, much like it was done by patriots trying to fashion national communities at the same time.

It took Petrettini a while to put her plan in motion because in 1803 she was pressured by her mother and brother into yet another marriage. This time to Marcantonio Marmora, an old Corfiot aristocrat.⁹ The marriage did not hinder her relationship and correspondence with Pieri and his friends in Italy. To the contrary, in the spring of 1803, pretexting health problems, she was finally allowed to travel to Italy, as she had longed, and socialize in person with her group of post-Venetian intellectuals. In 1808 she divorced once more and started living in Venice for longer periods. When in Italy, she introduced herself as a widow and lived with Mario Pieri while she was engaging with research and writing.

Since at the forefront of her ambition as a scholar was the establishment of a literary history for Venetian women, she started investigating the lives of those she thought to be important: the Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), the philosopher Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684) and the Renaissance scholar Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558). On these she wrote but unfortunately, only La Vita di Cassandra Fedele was published in 1814 (Petrettini 1814). In fact, many of Petrettini’s works remained unpublished, even though according to her eulogy she had completed them (Arrigoni 1851). Of the published ones we will turn now our attention to an unusual choice she made of translating the work of an eighteenth century English woman who followed the deist religion.

The Translation of the Turkish Embassy Letters

The work she chose was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), an epistolary travel novel that had been published posthumously narrating the travels of Mary Montagu through Europe and her stay in Constantinople. Its witty, lively writing style and the fresh view it afforded on the so-called Orient had made it a success. Montagu’s bright commentary on theology and religious practice, her acute political observations and her considerations on gender proved to be as compelling as her own public persona. Montagu was a woman who had ignored social constraints, had educated herself in the classics from a young age and had eloped with a man her father did not approve. She had then followed him in a difficult trip to Turkey with two infants, had brought back with her the variolation for smallpox, had publicly defended it against sceptics and had moved to Italy without her husband. For all this she was equally vilified and adored in her time and for centuries after that, earning the title her biographer Isabel Grundy gave her as a “Comet of the Enlightenment” (Grundy 1999).

By the time Petrettini decided to translate the Turkish Embassy Letters in Italian (Lettere di lady Maria Wortley Montague), almost a century after its original publication, there were more than ten reprints in English and many more in French and German. Essentially, the educated audience she was targeting already had access to the book. In addition, Petrettini had no financial reasons to work as a translator, and already had published original work, which meant she had no need of a translation to ease her entrance to the Veneto-Italian literary world. Since her choice to work on the Turkish Embassy Letters cannot be attributed to practical considerations, we can infer she understood the work of an English woman to be useful and representative of her own female Enlightenment project. This was true to such a degree that unlike all her previous choices, Petrettini disregarded her friends’ advice about which book to choose. She had been urged to translate Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, but instead she opted for Montagu’s book which she had discovered herself through her readings of Francesco Algarotti’s work. Thus, translating Montagu was a personal statement Petrettini made to her intellectual friends and the Italian public.

If we also consider how the Turkish Embassy Letters posed a set of problems for its translator, we can see how Petrettini’s choice was not an easy one. The very first and obvious problem for her was that her English was not good enough. A letter from the poet Ipolito Pindemonte to Pieri in 1816 highlights the fact that, as was common at the time, Petrettini used this translation in order to learn English and was in no way proficient in the language (Montuori 1863, 95). Even harsher than that, Lord Byron who was a great fan of Mary Montagu, referred to this effort in his commonly misogynistic manner. The “Venetian lady, learned and somewhat stricken in years”, wrote Byron to his publisher, John Murray, on December 3, 1817, has “in her intervals of love and devotion taken upon her to translate the letters and write the life of lady M[ar]y W[ortle]y Montagu” despite “firstly ignorance of English -and secondly- a total dearth of information on the subject of her projected biography” (Byron 1976, 275–76). Byron’s vitriolic comments possibly stem from some kind of rivalry to anyone working on Montagu, because he was at that time very much involved in retrieving and promoting some of her forgotten writings (Hegele 2011), but also highlight how Petrettini was taking a risk on her scholarly reputation by trying her hand on a subject and a language that were not part of her expertise.

This was not the only risk though. There were reasons why a popular book like the Turkish Embassy Letters had not been translated into Italian for over a century. One was the general reluctance to translate from other European languages into Italian. For the greatest part of the eighteenth century, the classicist conception of a literary canon did not allow for anything other than Latin and Ancient Greek texts. Translations were considered to be an inferior, diluted type of text and literature should comprise original works (Calvani 2014, 82). It was only in the beginning of the nineteenth century that works from French or English began to be translated into Italian. But in the case of Montagu and her Turkish Embassy Letters there was more than just qualms about translating from vernaculars that had stalled its publication in Italian. It was also the writer’s unconventional life and religious beliefs that made her a controversial subject of scholarly attention in Italian society.

It is because of the controversy the persona of Mary Montagu would generate that her work was chosen by Petrettini, but still the translator was very careful to tone down the idiosyncrasies of the original text to a degree that would be acceptable for the Italian public. A big part of the finished text, more than one third of it, was the biography of Montagu as it had been written by James Dallaway in the 1803 edition of the Letters, titled Memoirs of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.¹⁰ In a similar fashion, most of the introduction written by Petrettini was a presentation of Montagu, an effort to explain her personality and prove her worth as an intellectual. Petrettini dedicated her introduction to vindicating Mary Montagu on more than one account. After explaining how the text is an easy, pleasurable and harmless read for women, she had the more difficult task to address the issue of Montagu’s stance against the Catholic religion which did not seem as harmless. It is true, admitted Petrettini, that Montagu’s conceptions about religion as superstition sometimes touched the “bitter borders of satire”, but this was something the reader could forgive because “who does not know how difficult it is for a sensitive and generous soul, when she is about to unmask and repress prejudice, to contain itself” (Montagu 1838, 5). Battling with superstition, says Petrettini, Montagu might have been carried away into exaggerating her anticlericalism, but this was a forgivable sign of a truly enlightened spirit.

That said in the introduction, and although Petrettini tried to keep as close to the original throughout the text itself, she felt compelled to omit whole passages. For example, the following one from Letter IV where Montagu describes to her friend Lady Rich her visit to a Jesuit church in Cologne and its abundance of relics: “I will not imitate the common style of travelers so far, as to give you a list of them, being persuaded that you have no manner of curiosity for the titles given to jaw bones and bits of worm – eaten wood” (Montagu 1838, 15). Similar passages are left out from letters V and XII where Montagu “could not forbear laughing at their shewing me a wooden head of our Saviour, which, they assured me, spoke, during the siege of Vienna” (Montagu 1763, 1:54). These omissions tell us how even though Petrettini defended Montagu’s attitude on religion in the introduction and was publishing her translation in Corfu, a place where the dominant religion was Orthodox Christian, she was still aware of the impact and possibly the danger involved in badmouthing the Catholic church. They also speak once again on the need she felt to introduce Montagu to the Italian public.

Mary Montagu’s relationship with religion was not the only point of contention. Petrettini also had to deal with the fact that she was considered a woman of disputable moralities. Montagu had been a celebrity recognized but also caricatured and defamed by many. In her lifetime, there had been a lot of talk about her relationship with the poet Alexander Pope and their fight, but also about her decision to leave her husband and pursue a life in rural Italy.¹¹ The scandal related to her quarrels with Alexander Pope had such powerful impact that it resonated through an entire century and Petrettini felt it was imperative to dispel the bad publicity that had gathered around Montagu because of it. She had a clear opinion: Pope had dishonourably tried to bring down “that idol to which he first had raised altars” and his efforts in no way had diminished Montagu’s value as a thinker and scholar (Montagu 1838, 5).

To support her position on this Petrettini quoted two popular Italian men of letters: Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764) and Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789), both of whom she presented as connoisseurs of the English language and literature. In an admirable feat of intertextual continuity, she quoted Algarotti, who quoted Pope, who quoted Virgil comparing Montagu to Pentesilia: “And the warioress, a virgin, dares to attack men” (Bellatrix audetque viris concurrere virgo). This uninterrupted line of important male thinkers culminating in presenting Montagu as a fighter cleverly rebranded accusations of virility against the writer as a virtue instead of a vice. The arguments against female writers were circular and paradoxical: women could not be original writers, so if one was a writer, she was not truly a woman.¹² In this case, Petrettini had turned the paradox on its head: being manly was a virtue, a sign that Montagu, and the women like her, were an elevated type of human. It was along these lines that she was trying to fortify the translation with the legitimacy of two recognized Italian writers. On the one hand, she quoted men to show she could be as worthy as them and, on the other, she was reinforcing a possible pool of quotable texts from women.

The effort Petrettini made in proving she had the expertise to translate Montagu’s book, the text and its writer were worth it and the decades she spent in writing and editing it makes us understand that it had great significance both for herself personally and her intellectual project. For one, there were some similarities between the two women that probably made Petrettini identify with Mary Wortley Montagu. They had both educated themselves and lived the unconventional lives of a female scholar. They had both abandoned their unhappy marriages and chosen to live in Italy. And, although Petrettini in no way enjoyed the celebrity status Lady Montagu had, she was probably aware of how fragile a reputation a woman like her had.

These similarities between the two women may have partly guided Petrettini in her choice, but it is clear there were other reasons as well. Montagu with the breadth of her self-education, her mental curiosity, her distrust against prejudice and her appetite for adventurous travels embodied female Enlightenment ideas for Petrettini. She was one to imitate, one of those women that she and her Venetian readership could lean upon for inspiration. Petrettini and her cousin, Isabella Teotochi-Albrizzi followed in many ways Montagu’s example, even in using her variolation technique for Teotochi’s children or following Montagu’s reading lists on English poetry (Nardo 2013, 139). In effect, this is what Petrettini was also proposing to her readership, to follow Mary Wortley Montagu as an example of the avant la lettre “new woman”.

If Petrettini chose Montagu as an example for a feminine Enlightenment project, there is still more we can glean about her choice of this specific work. There is textual evidence that the translator worked with three different English editions and a French one which means she had in her hands many other letters of hers that could show Montagu’s erudition or character, if that was the only goal of her translator. But Petrettini specifically chose the letters that described Montagu’s trip to Constantinople and her life there. The Turkish Embassy Letters, known for casting the lives of Muslim Ottomans in a new light, were an ideal text for illustrating what “the Orient” could mean in an Enlightenment context. Possibly the most famous of the letters, the one describing the Hammam, the communal Turkish bath, as a place of female political and personal freedom, is a vivid example of how Montagu’s book has been used as the departure point of analyses on Islamic culture and womanhood. However, the restricted context of the Hammam letter does not allow us to fully understand and follow the vibrant narrative of the Turkish Embassy Letters. They were not only a record of Islamic life in the Ottoman Empire, but also of the richness in different cultures it encompassed.

Contemporary examination of the Turkish Embassy Letters situates them within the discourses of post-colonial studies and it has spurred a lively debate on whether they offer an orientalist gaze or not (Campbell 1994; Aravamudan 1995; Secor 1999; Weitzman 2002; Dadhaboy 2016; Hall et al. 2017). Whichever stance one might take in this debate, Montagu’s positionality is clearly that of a British woman who mirrors herself upon the “other” in order to structure her own image. But the “other” is not always the Muslim, in fact very often the “other” is Greek. In the Turkish Embassy Letters Montagu follows the steps of early philhellenes in discovering Ancient Greece anew (Koundoura 2004). Using Theocritus and Homer as her guides she looks for the signs of the perseverance of a Greekness she imagines is at the root of everything European. She devotes many letters to looking for and finding Troy, being certain that she recognizes the magnificence of such a historical place (Montagu 1763, 1:154–57). She also feels it is important to judge Modern Greeks in comparison to those she recognizes as their ancestors. As in most cases of philhellenism, an orientalist discourse runs parallel with that of admiration for the Greeks. Montagu does not doubt the farmers, shepherds and traders she encounters are Greeks following a straight line from their ancestors. But she also reiterates how they are completely oblivious of their great past.

Petrettini, a Greek who had carefully crafted an Italian literary persona, but still signed all her works as “Maria Petrettini, the Corfiot” could not have been unaffected by Montagu’s description of her homeland. In 1838, when the Letters were published, the Greek Revolution and the establishment of a Greek state that still did not encompass Petrettini’s island had already taken place. Petrettini seems to have been rather unaffected by the Greek patriotic cause even though there were many people in her circle with overt and covert philhellenic activities. For her, Greece was a “Boeotia”, a backward place with few stimuli. Yet, she understood and felt an affiliation with her own Greekness in a withdrawn literary way. The ideas of Enlightenment that she held dear had their roots in Ancient Greece, and what Montagu had described as a forlorn people who was at the same time in touch and detached from their glorious ancestry were very close to how Petrettini herself regarded them. In this sense, if the Turkish Embassy Letters were a way for Petrettini to enforce her project of a female Enlightenment, they were also a way to show the connection this project had with Greece. Petrettini was a person caught in what would become a boundary between Italy and Greece, two countries that were already in the borderland of Europe. This experience guided her choices. Her life and writings were part of a world that was being divided and her ideas were still lingering in this old world while trying to make sense of a new one that ended up being very different than she had imagined. Her female political community was still far away in the future.

Conclusions

How and why was Maria Petrettini forgotten? When and in what way did she slip through the cracks of historiography? These are questions that have been asked in women’s intellectual history almost ad nauseam and although the answer seems to be obvious and related to the material circumstances that guided female lives, I believe there is a lot to gain by examining the nuances of these omissions. In the example of Maria Petrettini, the neglect is so thorough and involves two different national historiographies. In her lifetime she was an integral part of literary and aristocratic circles both in Corfu and Venice. She was the first person to set up a literary salon in Corfu and one of the first to publish a book in the Corfiot press in 1814. And yet her name does not appear in any of the histories of Greek nineteenth century female scholars, not because she is unknown to Greek historians, but because writing in Italian naturally assigns her to Italian historiography (Denissi 2014). Unfortunately, Petrettini did not find a home in Italian historiography either. Apart from a Phd thesis on her and her brother, Spiridione, she does not figure in any other publications, nor is she present in Dizionario Biografico Treccani like other Greco-Italian historical figures of her time.

If we compare her to other nineteenth century women of Greco-Italian origin, we see how Petrettini’s writings and activities were not focused on the Greek Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento. She was concerned mostly with her scholarly work and treated war as an inconvenience, not more than a reason for her letters to be delayed and for paper to have steeper prices. Even when the Greek Revolution was waging, even when the battles for the unification of Italy were taking place, even when the world around her was violently changing, Maria Petrettini’s correspondence was full of discussions on the importance of this or that writer. Not once did she seem concerned in her personal or public writings with the affairs of any nation state striving to be born. It should then be no surprise that she would be completely omitted from two historiographical traditions whose nineteenth century focus has mostly been about nation state formation.

But if her life and work do not tell us the story of how nations were built, what do they tell us about the time she lived? I believe they tell us the story of the dissolution of empires and the longing of people not for a new world, but for the stability the old one had provided. At the same time, they tell us how people like Maria Petrettini, old aristocrats, who viewed nationalist aspirations as belonging to peasantry could still use the intellectual tools to bring together an intellectual community. Her work on Mary Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters in particular, trespasses the limits national historiographies have set in place and allows her, her audience and us to imagine places and cultures through a different lens. It is the lens of a cosmopolitan, a non-patriot who had been forced to live in a patriotic, revolutionary time.

We can conclude that Petrettini did not fit in narratives of scholarly importance because of her sex, but she also did not fit in narratives of national prowess and bravery because she was uninterested in patriotic ideas. She chose to live an intellectual life that simply did not engage in this matter. For her the future that had to be built was circumscribed by gender and not nation. This is why her story was left out, but it is also why her story is valuable in understanding the world she lived in. A world that imagined a future of freedom and independence in many different categories of humanity.