Un affresco smagliante o forse una sinfonia.

L’India di Mantegazza e quella di Gozzano: cenni sull’orientalismo italiano

Abstract

Paolo Mantegazza, the founder of Italian anthropology, visited India in the years 1881-82. In 1884 he published a voluminous account of his travels there
which was aimed not only at fellow scholars but, as were all his books, was written with a general readership in mind. The book became widely known and
exerted a considerable influence on later travelers. Mantegazza’s work enables us to gain a broad understanding of the development of Italian Orientalism,
understood in Edward Said’s sense of the term as the process by which the East was “domesticated” by the West but with the difference that, unlike other
European powers, Italy was not a colonial power and hence questions of power were not involved. Mantegazza’s narrative style, evocative, gripping and rich in
factual detail, is particularly marked by mythical and imaginative images of India and by the underlying comparison between “us” and “them”. His style strongly marked the writings of later visitors to India, especially Angelo De Gubernatis’ account (published in 1886-87) and the poet Guido Gozzano’s Lettere dall’India (published posthumously in 1917): it is especially the latter that helps to complete a national genealogy which descends not only from European culture in general (Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Max Muller and Ernest Renan) but also from Mantegazza’s volume whose influence was at work until the early years of the twentieth century, by which time the nineteenth-century vision of the East may be considered as historically and culturally exhausted.