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Italofilia. Opinione pubblica brittanica e il Risorgimento italiano 1847-1864 , by Bacchin Elena , Turin , Carocci editore , 2014, 266 pp., [euro]39.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-88-430-7437-2
Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento. Britain and the New Italy 1861-1875 , by Raponi Danilo , Basingstoke , Palgrave Macmillan , 2014, xi+302 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-137-34297-3
Elena Bacchin's Italofilia is a wide-ranging survey of recent attempts to explain the fascination that the Risorgimento exercised on mid-Victorian Britain from the revolutions of 1848 to Garibaldi's visit to London in 1864. She begins by setting the protagonists of the pro-Italian movement in Britain, the exiles and their British supporters, in their respective political coteries; Mazzinians, republicans, radicals on one side, moderates (and a clutch of diplomats) on the other. Turning to the numerous pro-Italian associations that came into being in these years, the essay explores how the pro-Italian campaigns were promoted, underlying the importance of public oratory and meetings and the strong support for the Italian cause in the provinces as well as the metropolis. A comparison follows of the contrasting outcomes of the attempts by the moderates (including the Piedmontese ambassador in London in the 1850s, Emanuele D'Azeglio) and their radical counterparts to influence the press and government policies. The final chapters focus on the multiplicity of different currents, from Romanticism and anti-Catholicism, to liberal emancipationist sympathies, radicalism and Mazzini and democratic republicanism that all contributed to the prominence of the pro-Italy movement in Britain. In concluding, Bacchin opts for the argument that popular Italofilia was driven primarily by emotions, on which the advocates of the pro-Italy movement played skilfully by deploying a wide repertoire of communication techniques from rhetoric, the press and representations to commodification to portray the Italian cause as a clear-cut conflict between good and evil.
Yet Garibaldi's visit of 1864, the emotional high point of Italofilia with which this essay closes, revealed more divisive forces at work and indicates that even at this moment of enthusiasm, popular Garibaldi-mania could not eclipse, never mind bridge, the political divisions that characterised the British friends of Italian emancipation. In...