Sidney Sonnino and Natalia Morozzo della Rocca: Adulterous Love, Aristocracy and Politics between Two Centuries

Abstract

There is now a copiously documented and well-established tradition of research into the ‘underlying culture of the Risorgimento’, foregrounding ‘the mentality, sentiments, emotions and existential trajectories’ of those who took part in it.¹ In this context, love, marriage and adultery are complex topics, the ‘moralisation’ of the family and of women being an essential passage in the affirmation of Italian national identity, both in itself and with respect to international public opinion. This public opinion had commented upon the licentious habits of an earlier Italy personified by the cicisbeo or cavalier servente, a personal servant of an aristocratic woman who was frequently also her lover, or so it was widely supposed.² The connection between the exemplary family and the nation was ‘pervasive’, but during the subsequent passage from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, conflicting viewpoints arose that ‘allow us to glimpse other less virtuous and even disquieting realities within the hearth and home’.³