Abstract
The Illustrazione Italiana was the leading illustrated magazine of its day; it spearheaded a drive by Fratelli Treves, one of the largest publishing houses in the country, to carve out a market across Italy for its products. In its efforts to follow, interpret, and mold the outlook of its readers, the Illustrazione Italiana can give us an insight into how the South was perceived by the bourgeoisie at large in the magazine’s golden years between 1880 and 1900. As I will argue, a set of primarily commercial objectives influenced the content and tone of the magazine and made it into a relatively consistent attempt to shape taste in its own interests. What concerns me in this study of the Illustrazione Italiana is the magazine’s images of bourgeois culture, its efforts to construct a model sensibility. My case is that representations of the South had a central place in those efforts. In describing the workings of what I call the Illustrazione Italiana’s discourse of the picturesque I will look at how the magazine constructed Southern Italy in relation to the cultural values it imputed to its readers. As elsewhere, my readings will also have theoretical as well as historical aims: in this case I will be attempting to provide a theoretical description of the imaginary dynamics associated with picturesque stereotypes.
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Notes
M. Grillandi, Emilio Treves (Turin, UTET, 1977), p. 436.
The indicator of the commercial success of magazines compared to literature is from Grillandi, p. 410. Mario Bonetti comments that “The Treves brothers’ tills were the coffers which subsidized Italian literature for almost half a century,” M. Bonetti, Storia dell’editoria italiana (Rome, Gazzetta del Libro, 1960), p. 102.
See A. Gigli Marchetti, “Lo stato e i caratteri dell’industria tipografica,” in I tre anelli. Mutualità, resistenza, cooperazione dei tipografi milanesi (1860–1925) (Milan, Franco Angeli, 1983), pp. 9–33.
The Treves archive, which had passed on to Garzanti, was destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War. The only (isolated and unsubstantiated) figure I have been able to discover for the magazine’s circulation is 15,000, quoted in N. Bernardini (ed.), Guida della stampa periodica italiana (Lecce, Tipografia Editrice Salentina, 1890), p. 518.
“Milan was once described as Italy’s moral capital. The truth of that statement is proved by the extraordinary progress that some book and magazine publishers have had in our city,” Mediolanum IV, p. 240. On the “myth of the moral capital” see G. Rosa, Il mito della capitale morale. Letteratura e pub-blicistica a Milano fra Otto e Novecento (Milan, Edizioni di Comunità, 1982). On the limits of middle-level culture in Naples, by comparison,
see P. Macry, “La Napoli dei dotti. Lettori, libri e biblioteche di una excapitale (1870–1900),” Meridiana, 4 (1988), 131–161.
See D. Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era 1880–1980. Cultural industries, politics and the public (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 33–34.
For an account of the pilgrimage, see B. Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani. Spazi, itinerari, monumenti nell’Italia unita (1870–1900) (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1991), pp. 130–142.
On Margherita in particular, and on nineteenth-century women’s fashion magazines in Italy in general, see S. Franchini, “Moda e catechismo civile nei giornali delle signore italiane,” in S. Soldani and G. Turi (eds.), Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea, vol. 1, La nascita dello Stato nazionale (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993), pp. 341–383 (pp. 378–380).
U. Eco, “La struttura del cattivo gusto,” in Apocalittici e integrati (Milan, Bompiani, 1964), pp. 65–129 (p. 71).
What follows is an analysis of the specific variety of connotations given to the picturesque in the Illustrazione Italiana. The term obviously has an important role in other contexts, notably in eighteenth-century British landscape aesthetics, although, as is well known, it showed itself to be a particularly vague concept even then. See S. Copley and P. Garside, “Introduction” in S. Copley and P. Garside (eds.) The Politics of the Picturesque. Literature, landscape and aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–12.
On Verdi’s Aida and its place in European representations of the colonial world, see E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Vintage, 1994), pp. 133–159.
E. W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), pp. 58–59.
For a compelling account of the epidemic, see F. M Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884–1911 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 59–178. Estimates of the total number of deaths varied from the 7,143 recorded at the municipal cemetery to the 18,000–20,000 considered a more honest figure by the Times (ibid., pp. 104–105).
On the cult of Queen Margherita see G. Bollati, “Il modo di vedere italiano (note su fotografia e storia),” in L’italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin, Einaudi, 1983), pp. 124–178 (pp. 153–156).
See F. Renda, I Fasci siciliani (1892–94) (Turin, Einaudi, 1977).
See M. Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, ARK, 1984).
See G. Squarciapino, Roma bizantina. Società e letteratura ai tempi di Angelo Sommaruga (Turin, Einaudi, 1950), pp. 172–180.
Further information on Contessa Lara can be found in: R. Barbiera, Il salotto della contessa Maffei (Milan, Garzanti, 1943), pp. 312–315;
M. Borgese, La contessa Lara. Una vita di passione e di poesia nell’ottocento italiano (Milan, Treves, 1938).
H. Bhabha, “The Other question. Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 66–84 (p. 75).
For a very acute account and critique of Bhabha’s work on colonial discourse, see R. Young, “The ambivalence of Bhabha,” in White Mythologies. Writing History and the West (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 141–156. I should make it clear that, in using Bhabha’s work on colonial stereotypes, I am in no way suggesting that the stereotypes of southern Italy I analyze here have a straightforward colonial situation as their historical background.
See S. Freud, “On fetishism” (1927), in On Sexuality (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), pp. 345–357.
A. Nozzoli, “La letteratura femminile in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Tabù e coscienza. La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1978), pp. 1–40.
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© 1999 John Dickie
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Dickie, J. (1999). The Power of the Picturesque: Representations of the South in the Illustrazione Italiana . In: Darkest Italy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299521_4
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