#giuseppina turrisi colonna

Byron’s death in Greece affected his reputation, both in Britain and on the Continent, but in different ways and for different reasons. Immediately after he died in 1824, British public impressions of Byron as a person rose slightly, though the critical appraisal of his poetry did not. Britons applauded Byron’s efforts to help Greece, which ultimately freed itself from Ottoman domination and gained independence with the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832. Many, however, viewed his political actions as dilettantish attempts to redeem himself from the consequences of a hedonistic lifestyle. Contemporary Italians saw the situation differently, believing that Byron fought for Greece as he had prepared to fight for Italy. They connected Greek and Italian nationalism, in part because both peoples share the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome. In antiquity, the Greek Empire of Magna Graecia included parts of the Italian peninsula and Sicily. Later, during the Roman Empire, an elite that included emperors, senators, and wealthy citizens studied Greek texts and discussed them in Greek, often in homes near Naples not far from former Attic settlements. Consequently, in Italy, where Byron garnered praise as a liberator of Greece, many people viewed his actions as a complement to his support for Italian nationalism. Francesco Guardione identifies this sentiment in the lyric “Lord Byron a Missolonghi” by mid-nineteenth-century Sicilian poet Giuseppina Turrisi-Colonna: “Italy and Greece, two great muses and one heart”. This typifies the attitude of many Italians who associated Byron with their shared Greco-Roman heritage. More generally, after Byron’s death in Missolonghi, his already prominent reputation on the Continent consistently grew, while in Britain, it declined through the mid-nineteenth century. […]

Consequently, the Byron whom Italians encountered proved very different from the one presented by British critics. Zuccato differentiates among nineteenth-century Italian characterizations of Byron, which vary from one region of Italy to another. He describes Italian responses to Byron in Milan, between 1816 and 1830, by authors like Giacomo Leopardi and Pellico as “Catholic” and “Sentimental,” in Florence between 1829 and 1850 by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and others as “anti-clerical,” and in southern Italy between 1840 and 1870 by Pasquale De Virgilii as “wildly romantic”. Despite these differences over time and space, writings about Byron, his work, and his influence, even into the twentieth century, share certain common tropes. […]

Byron became a favorite of another Sicilian writer, Turrisi-Colonna, as she grew up in  Palermo (Corniani 329–330), feeling the influence of nationalist events, including the unsuccessful revolt by and the execution of the Bandiera brothers. A supporter of the revolution of 1848, she died before seeing it fail. Turrisi-Colonna came from a patriotic family. Her father took part in resistance to Sicily’s Bourbon powers, participating in the provisional government during the revolution of 1849, receiving an honor from Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860, and serving terms as senator of the Italian parliament and as mayor of Palermo. Turrisi-Colonna, a child prodigy who learned English, French, German, Greek, Latin, and Spanish, composed poetry that brought her the praise of Massimo d’Azeglio, Guerrazzi, and Giuseppe Nicolini (Corniani 329–330). Turrisi-Colonna translated “Maid of Athens” and “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” and featured Byron in several narrative dialogues that appeared in various editions of her work between 1846 and 1887. Guardione, in the preface to Turrisi-Colonna’s letters, praises her for choosing Byron as a subject, observing “that George Byron, in his immeasurable love of unhappy Italy, awakened patriotic feelings and forced a great tear [constrinse a lungo pianto] from the Italians, bowed down prostrate before foreigners … With the Prophecy of Dante andLament of Tasso, the English poet … induced [instigò] magnanimous sensations denied to Italy by the poetry of the court,” then written for money, rather than inspired by truth (Turrisi-Colonna, Lettere12–13). In the introduction to an 1890 edition, Bice Milizia-Tacchi describes Turrisi-Colonna’s poems about Byron as “a gracious garland that she hoped to append with tears to his glorious sepulchre,” important because they revolve around “his example [tipo], his ideas”.Four of her poems on Byron warrant special attention because their rhetoric incorporates and deploys elements of his biography and mythology, his texts and his nationalist identity in ways that typify much of the Italian poetry of the period. Turrisi-Colonna does not formally link these dialogues, but they do recount a chronological narrative that begins with Byron’s private life with Teresa Guiccioli and ends with his death in Greece. “Lord Byron” (titled in some editions “Giorgio Byron”) centers on a visit to Ravenna that Byron makes to Guiccioli on hearing of her illness. Turrisi-Colonna bases the narrative on a biographical incident, creating a sense of the psychological in a poetic dialogue that blends fact and fiction, incorporating telling references to Byron’s poetry that enhance her characters’ inner lives. The poem opens as a “gloomy and menacing wind howls” amid a scene whose melancholy Byron praises: “Oh, beautiful vivid scene! Oh, what transport I feel! … this sea, this sky, this horror” (Poesia189). […]

“Lord Byron” blends together Byron’s biography, characters, and reputation in ways that conflate the man, the poet, and the legend. Turrisi-Colonna presents a series of familiar tropes: the melancholy lover, the author identified with his characters, the patron of Italy, the seeker of glory and death in a dialogue that sanitizes Byron’s tendentious associations. Incorporating sentimental and gothic tropes, it presents him as a sincere, monogamous partner, countering images of him as rake and philanderer. Byron’s tenderness toward Teresa during her illness implicitly combats gossip about him as unfaithful. The closing stanza has a wish-fulfillment quality, as Byron seems to deny the possibility that he will fight and perhaps die for Italy or Greece, but instead will find satisfaction living only for Teresa. Significantly, the poem’s focus on the ardor and sincerity of Byron’s private relationship with Teresa reinforces his public image as a worthy nationalist hero, countering unflattering images of his personal life from biographies or satires.

In “Lord Byron a Ravenna” (Lord Byron in Ravenna), Turrisi-Colonna brings together a variety of themes, praising Italy’s literary heritage, advocating a national, not provincial identity, and linking Byron with both Dante and Greece. It opens with a brief interchange between Teresa and Byron, who in the second stanza admits that he feels himself “in the middle of the path of my life” (“a mezzo del cammin sento la vita”), echoing the famous opening line of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Byron then leaves to visit Dante’s tomb, reminding him of Florence’s Basilica di Santa Croce, which holds the tombs of Alfieri, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo and serves as a central scene in Childe Harold IV. Byron enters Dante’s tomb, and, in a motif that Turrisi-Colonna borrows from The Prophecy of Dante, calls forth the Italian poet’s spirit. Dante mentions various episodes from the Divine Comedy, offering himself as an example of an Italian identity linked with the peninsula’s classical heritage, characterizing himself as “neither Guelph … nor Ghibelline… . I was Latin” (Liriche88.18). The poem then moves forward through time, alluding to renaissance works by Ariosto and Tasso, praising eighteenth-century authors Alfieri and Parini, and arriving at Napoleon and “the fatal point of risks and frauds” (90.26). Dante addresses Byron: “nor will you fail the glorious task … go: Greece awaits you … Among the tyrannous swords he is fortunate who conquers and falls” (91.29). In the final stanza, Byron interrupts: “Yes … even I have a thirst for glory among the dust and the dead and the blood and the arms, nor do I fear death” (92.30). Then, as the morning arrives, Byron urges Dante’s return to the grave.

“Addio de Byron all’ Italia” (Byron’s Farewell to Italy) illustrates another common way that Byron figures in Italian writing of the period. In 1825, Alphonse de Lamartine published his continuation of Childe Harold, entitled Le dernier chant du pelerinage d’Harold. The work proved quite successful, but provoked a scandal among Italians for the way that they felt he represented the peninsula as a land of the dead. Though, as Anne O’Connor points out, Lamartine merely employed a familiar theme that focused on Italy’s great past rather than on its lackluster present, the publication resulted in a famous duel between the Neapolitan soldier-patriot Guglielmo Pepe and Lamartine, ending with a slight wounding of the author (31–32). Though Byron himself explores the theme of Italy’s past greatness in Childe Harold and elsewhere, quotes from his work frequently appear in response to Lamartine’s.“Addio” opens by countering Lamartine’s sentiments with echoes of Byron’s preface to Childe Harold IV. There, Byron urges those who think of the peninsula and see only the past to note that “Italy has great names still,” among them the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, the saloniereand author Teotochi Albrizzi, and neoclassical authors Vincenzo Monti, Ugo Foscolo, and Ippolito Pindemonte. Byron goes on to note that the

man must be willfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck

with the extraordinary capacity of this people … the fire of their

genius, their sense of beauty, and amidst all the disadvantages of

repeated revolutions, the desolation of battles and the despair of ages,

the still unquenched “longing after immortality,”—the immortality of

independence. (2: 123)

“Addio” praises Italy as the “beautiful land [patria] of the arts” and condemns its treatment under Napoleon, who brought “liberty worse than tyranny” (Poesia94–95). The narrative follows Byron’s thoughts as he prepares to leave and fight for Greek independence, and closes as he says “Farewell, my true country, Italy farewell” (96), another familiar motif, one that locates Byron’s home in Italy, rather than Britain. This poem received particular praise from Isabella Rossi Gabardi Broschi, the Florentine poet and novelist who in 1878 published a tract advocating the rights of women entitled “Emancipation.” In a letter to Turrisi-Colonna, she lauds “Addio de Byron all’ Italia,” “since here I distinguish the citizen more than the woman,” pleased that the work avoids exploring the “individualism” of her own sensations, adopting instead an outward-looking nationalistic perspective. In its representation of Byron, the poem presents “broad effusions, spaciousness of spirit, that launch one over great national subjects interesting to every heart, every person, and every class” (Turrisi- Colonna, Lettere52).

The narrative presented by these poems ends with “Lord Byron a Missolonghi” (Lord Byron in Missolonghi). Opening with an apostrophe to Greece, home of the muses, of Homer and Sappho, of Marathon and Salamis, Byron calls out to “my Greece” that “the yoke of opprobrious servitude has broken” (Liriche97). He wants no “condolences,” but only that his blood sets an example (97), since the time has come for the nation to “revive itself in ardent thoughts of liberty” (98). Cognizant “of the victories, of the risks, of the attempts” (98) over the years, Byron recognizes that “the warrior’s life must end quickly” (99). He remembers his “days of childhood” at Harrow and Newstead, then, weary and unhappy, thinks again of hopes and delights, of bitter thoughts “that torment future dreams” (99). Turning to his Suliote warriors, he admonishes them to fight bravely: “Today, what cowardly spirit will death deny the strength to vindicate with me” (102). The poem ends with a roar: “death to the barbarous oppressors of Greece, the indomitable troops shouted trembling,” and closes with Byron’s final wish: “if ever by fortune or heaven you conquer [prostri], your children will enjoy the full victory of it” (102–103).

Arnorld Anthony Schmidt,Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism,  44-45; 62; 68-72