The Italian Woman, From Romantic Ideal to Contested Reality

“ It was the same with the landscape. It was hers down to the remote horizon, and nobody but she could really give it its due. And then, how she appreciated the Italians! Ever since she had bought a house in Italy, she had become the one foreigner who knew them intimately. The whole peninsula and everything it contained were her property and her secret. She had bought its arts, its music, its melodious language, its literature, its wine and cooking, the beauty of its women and the virility of its Fascists. She had acquired Italian passion: cuore, amore and dolore were hers. ”

“ If they changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash himself, they might successfully masquerade, one for another. The plebeian Italian, inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as proudly as the noble, without at all aggressing in his manner. His beauty, like that of the women of his class, is world-old,—the beauty of the pictures and the statues: the ideal types of loveliness are realized in Italy; the saints and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come true to the stranger at every encounter with living faces. ”

“ When an Italian woman loves, it is with a fierce, uncontrollable passion, not with that too often sickly admiration for a man’s good looks which is so characteristic of love among the more northern nations. In no country is love so ardent, so passionate, so enduring, as in the sunny garden of Europe. The Italian woman is slow to develop affection, or even to flirt with the sterner sex; but when she loves, it is with all the strength of her being; she is the devoted slave of her lover, and is his for life, for death. ”

“ Perhaps I should prefer to see Naples and Pompeii alone, but I haven’t the nerve. I’m willing to knock around in Paris or London, but when it comes to Italy I’m scared. The men look at me, especially the toughs, in a way that makes my flesh creep. Goodness knows I wish men would forget I’m a woman, but they don’t seem to want to.... See here ... why can’t we take the trip together? ”

“ We spoke awhile of common things; she had come alone. "What an emotion, for one who has loved Venice," she said, "to meet a Titian in other lands."
"They call it," I answered,—and as I spoke my heart was in my throat,—a representation of Sacred and Profane Love. The name perhaps roughly expresses its meaning. The serious, stately woman is the likeness, one may say, of love as an experience,—the gracious, impudent goddess of love as a sentiment; this of the passion that fancies, the other of the passion that knows." ”

“ In the cardinal point of his delineation of female character, for which he is highly praised because of the purity and grace of the womanhood he presented, he follows the Renaissance convention, as it seems to me, but with refining and often true English touches—that ideal of Italian origin which is, on the whole, one of outline, of pale graciousness, of immobile or expressive beauty, pictorial; these women seem like lovely portraits which have stepped down out of a frame, and have only so much of life as an environment of light and air and silence can give them. ”

“ He has incarnated the incomparable charm of the Italian woman, the most graceful, the most impassioned, the most seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the most imperious, pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her passions. ”

“ Ah, how much of culture, of reflection, before one could fathom the secret depths of one's own race! He has expressed one of the most essential characteristics of the race,--the deification of woman, considered not as a Beatrice as in Florence, nor as a courtesan as at Milan, but as a supreme glory of the national spirit.
This woman can do without being loved. She has no need of being loved. What she symbolizes is neither sensuality nor tenderness. ”

“ You have been seeking for a large dowry for some years; you wanted to make a great marriage. People in America and Italy will never believe you to be disinterested."
"But you who know and love me? You should see that I love and adore you only for yourself?"
"Even love wanes later, and not so very much later," she replied thoughtfully. "Your Italian love is so ardent and flattering; it sets very soon. Afterwards ... I should believe people ”

“ Men and women are free comparatively little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no opportunities for tête-à-tête. Early Italian poetry is fond of showing us the young poet reading his verses or explaining his passion to those gentle, compassionate women learned in love, of whom we meet a troop, beautiful, vague, half-arch, half-melancholy faces, consoling Dante in the "Vita Nuova," and reminding Guido Cavalcanti of his lady far off at Toulouse. But such women almost invariably form a group; they cannot be approached singly. ”

“ Among the Latin races many people still object to girls walking out alone in towns, and in Italy the number of women to be seen in the streets is so small that it must be considered improper for a young and respectable woman to go about alone. ”

“ Now that she has a bad reputation, it would be idiotic not to live up to it.'
'You speak with some feeling,' I remarked, laughing.
'Ah,' answered Matteo, with another shrug of the shoulders, 'I laid siege to the fort of her virtue—and she sallied and retired, and mined and countermined, advanced and drew back, so that I grew weary and abandoned the attack. Life is not long enough to spend six months in politeness and flattery, and then not be sure of the reward at the end.'
'You have a practical way of looking at things.'
'With me, you know, one woman is very like another. ”

“ Extremely ungallant, on the other hand, are some of the Italian proverbs about women of this and other periods. “A woman is like a horse-chestnut—beautiful outside, worthless inside.” “Two women and a goose make a market.” “Married man—bird in cage.” “In buying a horse and taking a wife shut your eyes and commend your soul to heaven.”
275Her exuberant health makes an Italian woman naturally prone to Love; but though she falls in love most readily, the passion is apt to be fugitive and superficial. She rarely loves with the passionate ardour of a Spanish woman. ”

“ Such simplicity and sincerity as are apparent in this real affection of the king and queen for each other cannot fail to have a widespread influence.
The modern Italian woman is not an easy person to describe, as it would be difficult to find one who might serve as a type for all the rest. In general, it may be said that they are not so well educated as the women in many other countries, and that so long as a woman is devout, and at the same time domestic in her tastes, she is considered to possess the most essential requisites of character and attainment. ”

“ In other words, ‘women’ are a fact, but ‘woman’ is a myth. Though this may be a little paradoxical,{118} there are certainly distinct types of women in each class of life. The smart society woman of to-day and the labourer’s wife, like the Venetian patrician lady of the sixteenth century and the fisher-wives of Chioggia, have in common only their sex, their weaknesses and their sufferings; there is very little resemblance between their virtues, and none at all between their joys.
The noble ladies of Venice in the sixteenth century were as idle and frivolous as Orientals. ”

“ The daughters of wealthy families are generally bestowed in marriage as soon as they leave these places of education. These matters are entirely arranged by parents and guardians, and youth and age are not unfrequently joined together, for the sake of uniting certain acres of land. But the affections, thus repressed, seek their natural level by indirect courses. It is a rare thing for an Italian lady to be without her cavaliere servente, or lover, who spends much of his time at her house, attends her to all public places, and appears to live upon her smiles. ”

“ The Italian ethics are the most singular ever met with. The perversion, not only of action, but of reasoning, is singular in the women. It is not that they do not consider the thing itself as wrong, and very wrong, but love (the sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, provided it is disinterested, and not a caprice, and is confined to one object. ”

“ Nevertheless, the conduct of men towards women is full of delicacy and attention. The domestic virtues in England constitute female glory and happiness; but if there are countries where love exists outside the sacred ties of marriage; that one among these countries where female happiness excites the greatest attention and care, is Italy. Here men have invented moral duties for relations outside the bounds of morality itself ”

“ But it would sound strange to your English ears to know the intense sense of appropriation which an Italian has with regard to his wife. It is true he adores her; but it is an adoration which would exclude the remotest homage of the merest stranger. He waits upon her, watches her, serves her. But it is possible to have too much of that, particularly when it is done with an evident intention to prevent the approach of any other human being. ”

“ Here women have one, and are the soul of society.
In Milan, also, I see in the Ambrosian Library the bust of a female mathematician. These things make me feel that, if the state of woman in Italy is so depressed, yet a good-will toward a better is not wholly wanting. Still more significant is the reverence to the Madonna and innumerable female saints, who, if, like St. Teresa, they had intellect as well as piety, became counsellors no less than comforters to the spirit of men. ”

“ Even the love-sonnets and religious poems are so precise and definite in their character, and so far removed from the tender twilight of sentiment, and from all the dilettantism which we commonly find in the poetry of women, that we should not hesitate to attribute them to male authors, if we had not clear external evidence to prove the contrary.
For, with education, the individuality of women in the upper classes was developed in the same way as that of men. Till the time of the Reformation, the personality of women out of Italy, even of the highest rank, comes forward but little. ”

“ The Renaissance was, indeed, the heydey of the intellectual woman throughout the whole of the Italian peninsula—a time when woman enjoyed the same scholastic freedom as men, and when Mme. de Staël's dictum, Le génie n'a pas de sexe, expressed a doctrine admitted in practice and not an academic theory.
It would require a large volume, or rather many volumes, to do justice to the learned women of Italy who conferred such honor upon their sex during the period we are considering. ”

“ The Italian women have awakened to a sense of their duties toward their families, and even toward society. The cultivated begin to take an active part in the education of their indigent sisters, in giving them instruction and work, and the independent labor of women is one of our century's greatest benefits to society. The seed which the struggle for freedom in the year 1848 sowed in the soul of the nation, shall not perish. When Italy gains independence and unity, she will shoot forth into new life. “Christian nations may fall sick, but not die!” ”

“ Women don't always report, because they are blackmailed by the presence of children, because they are not economically independent, because they are afraid, because they delude themselves that the man will change, because there is an emotional relationship involved, because they believe they are weak or because they feel sun. ”

“ The countries where the cause of women has made the least progress are the republics of France and Switzerland. In Italy, where the agitation has only been started in recent years, the appeal of women has already been carried to the practical stage. In the new world the English colonies have granted full political rights to women, while America, which was the first to formulate the claim of self-government for all, still denies political rights to its women. ”

“ By nature woman is not inferior to man, therefore she should not imitate him. Both sexes are created to enjoy equal rights, but each sex has its own and individual right."—
From Italy the Revival of Learning with its new conceptions of philosophy and religion spread to France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England, stimulating everywhere great intellectual life and achievements. ”

“ Would any Italian patriot, even though he were a Republican irreconcilable to the Monarchy, admit to the Parliamentary franchise the women of Italy at the risk of handing over the government of the country to priests and reactionists? ”