Italian Sexualities Uncovered presents a series of innovative essays on both hetero- and homosexuality among women and men during the long nineteenth century. As such, the collection, edited by Valeria Babini, Chiara Beccalossi, and Lucy Riall, represents an important milestone in the relatively new but growing field of sexuality studies in modern Italy. It builds on pioneering work by Bruno Wanrooij, Domenico Rizzo, Alessandra Gissi, Lorenzo Benadusi, and Laura Schettini as well as the much-cited earlier collection of essays on the private sphere edited by Perry Willson. Yet the editors are correct in pointing out the tardiness with which modern historians have taken up research into the Italian sexual past compared to their colleagues in northern Europe and the United States. They also convincingly argue against the widespread notion that bourgeois prudery and Catholic hegemony imposed a silence about sexuality that precludes research into its nineteenth-century manifestations. Instead the essays demonstrate that, between the French Revolution and World War I, Italian sexuality was integral to many diverse discourses circulating within and outside of Italy.
A major strength of the book is its truly transnational scope facilitated by the collaboration of editors from both Italy and the United Kingdom and authors from an even larger array of countries. As a result, a good number of the essays deal directly with British-Italian relationships and several others place their subjects within the larger international historiography on the history of sexuality. While some of the contributors delve more deeply into the types of sources already utilized by earlier studies, such as criminological and medical tracts, others open up new perspectives by consulting diaries, memoirs, personal letters, newspapers, and literature. Reliance on these types of sources results in a book that offers more new insights into the cultural than the political, economic, and social aspects of private life. As compensation, this cultural approach offers a refreshing and often moving glimpse into the sexual beliefs, feelings, and experiences of a range of individuals, not all of whom came from the social elite.
The essays fall into four categories of inquiry, although this schema is too simplistic to encompass the complexity of most contributions. One group focuses on heterosexual desire among women, a topic that historians have often ignored either because it did not fall within the traditional prescription for the female role or because it seemed too elusive. Mark Seymour, however, has creatively used both trial records and letters to document the passionate longing of lower and middle-class women for male circus performers who represented an exciting alternative to their lives of boredom and sexual frustration. In her conceptualization of the ‘female gaze’, Katherine Mitchell similarly argues that young women experienced ‘erotic escapism and liberation’ by identifying with the romantic heroines of nineteenth-century opera, theater, and novels and expressed these feelings in admiring fan letters (p. 131). That female sexual needs were recognized by certain members of the first feminist movement is elegantly demonstrated in Valeria Babini’s article, which uses autobiographical narratives by Sibilla Aleramo, Maria Montesssori, and Linda Murri to document a growing sense of private unhappiness that was too dangerous to reveal in public rhetoric. In her study of the long adulterous affair between Natalia Morozzo della Rocca and Sidney Sonnino, Paola Carlucci documents that even an aristocratic woman could defy social convention in the pursuit of sexual happiness with complicity from her peers.
The second, equally innovative, focus is on homosexuality, about which we know little for the nineteenth century. In a fascinating article on sexual tourism, Chiara Beccalossi portrays Italy as an attractive destination for English men because of its identification with the classical tradition of homosexuality as well as the decriminalization of sodomy in the Zanardelli Criminal Code of 1889. While she focuses on the Italian South as particularly attractive and hospitable to gay men, Sean Brady makes similar arguments for Venice which, in the writings of John Addington Symonds and Horatio Brown, appeared vibrantly alive rather than stereotypically in decline. According to both essays, the relationships between bourgeois English and working-class Italian men were not always or only exploitative but sometimes drew on local traditions of male homosexuality, such as the southern femminiello, or involved long-term affairs. In her essay on lesbianism, Charlotte Ross identifies a variety of discourses in both scientific and fictional literature, which were often voyeuristic but could also be sympathetic to crushes among young girls (fiamme) or the redirection of female desire from unloving or abusive husbands to other women.
The third focus of the book, the family, has already constituted the subject of demographic studies in the 1980s and more recently of cultural re-interpretations of the Risorgimento as a patriotic movement seeking to model the new nation on bourgeois domesticity. Central to this vision was the condemnation by both Italian patriots and foreign travellers of the cicisbeo—the unmarried escort of aristocratic women—as a sign of the decadence of old regime Italy. Roberto Bizzocchi argues, however, that the well-known travel account by Lady Morgan revealed a more subtle and optimistic evaluation of the Italian family than that of most male writers. Similarly, Ross Balzaretti reads the diaries and books of female travellers to Italy during the early nineteenth century as more sympathetic to Italian marriage customs than their male counterparts, possibly because of the restrictions and coldness of their own domestic relationships. In her analysis of the biographies of Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Massimo D’Azeglio, Lucy Riall demonstrates convincingly that these male patriots did not live the ideal family lives that they preached. Each exhibited a neglect or carelessness in their relationships to women that contradicted their public advocacy of strong nuclear families and the elevation of women’s status in the new Italy. Finally, Linda Reeder argues that by the late nineteenth century, new scientific theories began to redefine the bad husband as degenerate and resistant to the domestic harmony that was requisite to a healthy nation.
The final two essays address sexual deviancy, a category that was broad and malleable during the nineteenth century and included behaviors discussed above such as homosexuality and adultery. Pietro Gibellini and Edoardo Ripari analyze the sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli as tricky but useful documents of the illicit sexual practices of the Roman lower-classes such as prostitution and homosexuality. In her exploration of infanticide, Silvia Chiletti finds an increasing divergence between legal theory, which held that only ‘honest’ women could employ the concept of ‘honor’ to excuse their crimes, and the courts, which increasingly absolved even prostitutes for killing their offspring. This trend toward the acquittal of infanticidal mothers typified not only Italy but Europe more generally at the turn of the twentieth century.
As is clear from this all too brief overview, Babini, Beccalossi, and Riall are to be commended for putting together such a rich and varied collection of essays. Future research should extend the transnational approach to the many other European and American nations that that had diplomatic, artistic, feminist, scientific, and other exchanges with nineteenth-century Italy. It would also be useful to explore further the complicated relationship between the new history of sexuality and other more traditional political (touched on in this volume), economic, and social approaches to the same era. As a pioneering model for subsequent research, Italian Sexualities Uncovered constitutes an essential step toward the incorporation of sexuality into the larger narrative of modern Italian history.
