Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789) has usually been studied as one of the leading literary figures of the Italian Enlightenment: a critic, lexicographer, translator and polemicist whose career unfolded between the Italian peninsula and Georgian Britain. Rather than treating Baretti simply as a literary figure, Elisa Bianco and Alessandra Vicentini use his protracted British experience as a lens through which to examine the wider political, cultural and intellectual connections linking the Italian peninsula with Britain during the Enlightenment. In doing so, the volume contributes to a growing historiography that examines Italian history through the circulation of people, books and ideas across Europe.
The useful bibliographical note by Paolo L. Bernardini and Vicentini locates the collection within existing scholarship, from studies of eighteenth-century London and its cultural life to work concerned with Anglo-Italian encounters. Particularly relevant is Paola Bianchi and Karin Wolfe’s Turin and the British in the Age of the Grand Tour (Cambridge University Press, 2017), with its attention focusing on ‘Turin in Britain’ and cultural exchange in Grand Tour Europe. Baretti’s England both complements and extends this perspective by concentrating on the experience and networks of an Italian expatriate over the course of his long engagement with Britain.
The editors have assembled a collection that moves from intellectual biography towards a broader reconstruction of the political, cultural and social connections linking the Italian states with Britain during the eighteenth century. The volume comprises a substantial introductory essay by Bernardini, a bibliographical note, nine essays, and an appendix reproducing the records of Baretti’s celebrated 1769 trial for murder. The latter substantially enhances the documentary value of the collection by making an important primary source readily available to historians. Despite the diversity of approaches, the essays share a coherent editorial vision that places cultural mediation, mobility and exchange at the centre of Baretti’s experience. As the introduction makes clear, the aim is not simply to recover Baretti but also to reconstruct his London, thereby situating his career within the wider European world in which eighteenth-century Italian culture developed.
Bernardini’s introductory essay deserves particular mention for the vividness with which it reconstructs Georgian London as a cosmopolitan environment characterised by migration, sociability and conflict, drawing on a well-established social history of the eighteenth-century metropolis. Especially illuminating is the discussion of Baretti’s murder trial, interpreted not merely as a dramatic biographical episode but as a revealing case study of the legal and social experience of foreigners in eighteenth-century Britain.
One of the collection’s principal achievements is that it consistently shifts attention from the individual to the networks in which he operated. Baretti emerges less as an exceptional literary figure than as a participant in the continuous movement of books, languages, political ideas and scholarly practices across Europe. The description of him as a ‘mediatore culturale ancipite’ (‘two-way cultural mediator’) (p. 13) is particularly apt: his role was inherently two-directional, involving both the communication of Italian language and culture to British audiences and the interpretation of Britain for Italian readers. The editors thus encourage us to understand eighteenth-century Italy not as a self-contained cultural space but as one continually shaped through encounters, exchanges and negotiations beyond its borders. Bernardini’s description of the ‘costante, vivace, produttivo contatto’ (‘constant, lively, and productive contact’) (p. 11) between the two countries effectively captures the wide perspective that underlies the volume as a whole.
The individual essays approach this objective from different angles. Some reconstruct the social and cultural networks surrounding Italians in Britain, while others investigate translation, lexicography and literary controversy as forms of cultural mediation. Others again explore urban experience, expatriate sociability and intellectual exchange. Read together, the essays reveal how mobility and cross-cultural encounters formed an integral part of eighteenth-century Italian experience rather than representing marginal or exceptional phenomena.
Particularly evocative from a historical perspective are those contributions that embed Baretti’s career within broader social and cultural contexts. Davide Arecco’s chapter reconstructs Baretti’s movements between Turin, Venice, Milan and London, showing how geographical mobility shaped both his intellectual development and his public identity. Pierangelo Castagneto’s reconstruction of the adventurous career of the Genoese resident Francesco Maria Ageno offers a revealing glimpse into the cosmopolitan networks and social worlds inhabited by Italians in eighteenth-century England. Of particular interest is the role of the Anglo-Italian artist and musician Maria Cosway, whose London salon emerges as an important site of sociability and whose correspondence with Ageno provides further evidence of the personal relationships underpinning Anglo-Italian exchange. Giovanni Iamartino’s discussion of London illustrates how the metropolis was observed and interpreted through Italian eyes. Laura Orsi’s comparison between John Florio and Baretti, finally, extends the chronological framework back to the sixteenth century, revealing a much longer history of Anglo-Italian cultural mediation.
Even the primarily literary essays repeatedly point towards broader historical questions. Discussions of Shakespeare, translation, language teaching and lexicography are valuable not simply for what they reveal about literary culture but because they illuminate the mechanisms through which Italian knowledge circulated abroad, acquired authority and reached new audiences. Literature consequently appears throughout the volume as one dimension of wider processes of cultural exchange rather than as an isolated field of enquiry.
As with many conference volumes, the collection displays a certain methodological diversity; this variety is one of the volume’s strengths. Nevertheless, the absence of a concluding chapter means that readers are largely left to draw together the wider historiographical implications themselves. A final essay explicitly reflecting on themes such as mobility, cultural mediation and European exchange would have reinforced what is already the collection’s most original contribution.
Similarly, although many essays implicitly resonate with recent scholarship on transnational history, cultural brokerage and the circulation of knowledge, these historiographical perspectives are only occasionally addressed explicitly. A more sustained dialogue with this literature might have broadened the volume’s appeal beyond specialists in Baretti and eighteenth-century literary studies. At the same time, one of the collection’s merits lies precisely in showing how traditional Baretti scholarship can be productively reinterpreted through questions that increasingly occupy historians of modern Europe.
For readers of Modern Italy, the significance of this volume lies above all in its invitation to reconsider eighteenth-century Italy from beyond the geographical boundaries of the peninsula. The careers of figures such as Baretti reveal an Italy continually shaped by travel, diplomacy, publishing, translation and intellectual exchange. Rather than treating these experiences as marginal, the collection convincingly places them at the heart of its historical interpretation.
