Italophiles and Italomaniacs
ITALIAN ART, LIFE AND LANDSCAPE. By Bernard Wall. (Heinemann, 21s.) THE Victorian colonisation of Italy has in retrospect its comic side. The fifth column of maiden ladies advancing, parasol in one hand, paintbox in the other, to appropriate for the British sensibility the beauties of the peninsula do none the less represent our diastole at its most engaging. The Victorian approach to Italy was a serious affair, nourished by a good deal of solid knowledge of Italian art, history and literature. Aldous Huxley, in his prelapsarian days, was perhaps the last of the eminent Anglo-Italians; the people in his novels move easily about the world of Italian culture, ready with a quip from Parini or a cavatina from Donizetti, aware that the most beautiful picture in the world is to be found in Borgo San Sepolcro. This easy commerce ended in the Thirties when Italy became a rude word— the fact that Ezra Pound lived at Rapallo proved he couldn't be a serious writer. Now we are once again in a distinctly italo- centric period, but we have a New Model Italy. Ours is not the frowsy old Italy of Giotto, Savonarola and Isabella d'Este, but the glittering almost transatlantic Italy of Messrs. Lambretta, Gaggia and Olivetti. Our enthusiasm leaks over into the arts so that second-rate Italian films and novels are sure of a genial press, but essentially the new italomania is nourished on the rather bogus lure of the Antique South (which requires sensi- bility, not knowledge) and the flair and chic of contemporary Italian achievement in technology and the applied arts. It is all to the good that we should be exposed to Italy once again—the Frankish bondage had gone on quite long enough—but the present uncritical excitement is not doing anyone any good.
Mr. Bernard Wall has stepped timely forward with an attempted Grand Tour in depth. In Italian Art, Life and Landscape he takes the country region by region and by relating the present to the past he provides the extra, indispensable dimension which most contemporary writing on Italy lacks. The persona Mr. Wall pro- jects is that of the well-informed resident, at hand to proffer an anecdote about the shuttered palazzo opposite or an explanation of the curious behaviour of the man at the end of the street. Of the trinity announced in his title, he is strongest on the second person. His prose is too utilitarian to cope with the Italian land- scape, and although much of his information about the arts is helpful, it sometimes degenerates into a catalogue and does not always distinguish between the merely-good and the very great. Familiarity with Italian culture and politics need not, as Signora Artom Treves shows in her pleasing study of the mid-nineteenth- century Anglo-Florentines, involve any familiarity with Italians. The colonists do not mingle with the natives. Landor seems positively to have disliked Italians, and even the Brownings, Italianissimi as they were, did not admit many of them into their house. The Golden Ring covers the period immediately before and after the climacteric of '48, from the placid tran-
quillity of the last days of the Grand Duchy to the feverish anticipations of national unity. But the English colony lived so cloistered a life that her book is really a study in Victorian charm : strawberries and cream at Bellosguardo, long high-minded con- versations at Casa Guidi with little Penini exquisite in his embroidered muslin trousers, visits to Doney's, rides in the Cascine on Sundays, a family box at the Pergola during the season. It
is all very agreeable and all very far away. D. S. CARNE-ROSS
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