Paper short abstract:

My paper describes the complex connections between places, emotions and heritages. It takes into account two different Italian couples of the nineteenth century, connecting the places where they lived with the personal documents they left.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will analyze how different places and heritages were connected to Italian cultural tradition, in the long Nineteenth Century. It will focus on two couples, from the upper classes, who lived two different moments of the Italian nation- building process, at the beginning and at the end of the century. The couple of Gianna Maffei and Ercole Trotti Mosti shared an aristocratic background and lived its engagement in the huge Romantic garden of the Maffei family, in Valeggio (Verona). The sense of that place was connected with the spreading of Romanticism in northern Italy, which was a cultural, social and political phenomenon, but also with the ancient heritage of the family. The places where the couple lived (Valeggio and Ferrara) were described in many personal documents, where emerges the link between places and emotions.

At the end of the nineteenth century a Jewish couple, Angiolo Orvieto and Laura Cantoni, chose the dimension of the villa in the countryside of Florence to set its marriage. Both literate, Angiolo and Laura described in their love letters and their personal diaries their emotional places: the countryside, the home, the dimension of the villa. This choice of an aristocratic way of life was, in this case, connected to literature, which became the way to express the sense of life. This fact reflected the complex relationship with the Jewish cultural tradition and the many significances of the integration of the Jews in the Italian social and political life.