Letters from London : a bridge between Italy and Europe

THIRD ANGLO-ITALIAN CONFERENCE ON EIGHTEENTH CENTURY STUDIES Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. 12-14 September 2011 Abstract − “Letters from London: A ‘Bridge’ between Italy and Europe” In a letter to his brother, heading for Paris and London with Cesare Beccaria in the autumn of 1766, Pietro Verri famously wrote that their journey would help “build a bridge between Milan and Europe”. This metaphor was meant primarily to convey the full import of the cosmopolitan drive underlying the debates and works of the former “Caffettisti” (and their awareness of being a force for modernization and justice at work within the Milanese milieu). At the same time, it pointed to the notion of their being somewhat ‘marginal’, on political, social and geographical grounds, to the mainstream network of European Lumières, and to their determination to acquire full membership in the international community of knowledge. Focusing on Alessandro Verri’s letters from London, the first part of this paper aims to investigate the discursive tension, in his words, between the attraction of London’s cosmopolitan ‘centre’ (also a metonymy for the superior status of English culture) and the gravitational drawback represented by living in a ‘marginal’ region. This ambivalence is embodied, on the one hand, in the haunting of the brothers’ correspondence by Beccaria’s textual ghost; on the other hand, it is at the heart of Verri’s progressive agenda of intercultural mediation. Taking my lead from Verri’s famous portrait of Vincenzo Martinelli, and focusing on cloze reading of selected passages from the latter’s familial letters, I shall then try to explore a few issues in the changing perception of what it meant to be an Italian intellectual writing in and from London over the decades 1750-1770, with a focus on such variables as age, acculturation and status, and the impact of different generic conventions on the letter form.