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It is a familiar story. a young american or english person ventures abroad to Europe, seeking some type of education or advancement-artistic, historical, social-and perhaps a way to concretize his ideological estrangement from his ancestral home. If it is European cosmopolitanism that he craves, perhaps he settles in Paris; or, if he envisions himself immersed in a vaguely pre-modern and beautiful experience of authentic living, perhaps he chooses an Italian city or town. Whether he seeks out Italy directly or only stumbles on Italian culture in an unexpected corner of the French capital, he finds himself ultimately bewitched by this Mediterranean influence. Suddenly he finds it possible to live more freely, with greater honesty and less attention to the confining social mores of his home country. He may even engage in meaningful forms of resistance to class hierarchies, gender norms, or other societal forms of limitation on the individual-though often enough, such experiments end in catastrophe. This narrative is enacted again and again in novels by Henry James, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Patricia Highsmith, and other Anglo-American writers for whom the Italian as an Other simultaneously represents a generative potential and a very real sort of danger.1 Such is the Anglo-American fascination with Italy.
On occasion, however, complications disrupt the unfolding of this narrative. Perhaps the young traveler is not a pure product of the Anglo- American cultural model, or the writer’s own heritage extends beyond the confines of Anglo-American history. By and large, canonical Anglo-American texts present binary portraits of American or British encounters with Italian landscapes and imagined versions of Italian culture, envisioning how such encounters might encourage a familiar hero to resist social normativity. In Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), staid protagonist Philip tests the boundaries of class hierarchy and heteronormativity in his encounter with the stereotypically passionate (and violent) Gino. In Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the permissive atmosphere of cities like Naples becomes the springboard for Tom Ripley’s class passing, his non-normative approach to sexuality, and even his murderous tendencies. Diverse as these narratives are in some respects, they share a tendency to stereotype Italy as a counterpoint to Anglo-American spaces: a fascination with Italy’s supposed foreignness and its purported differences from the...