SOURCE: "Italian Romanticism: Myth vs. History," in MLN, Vol. 98, No. 1, January, 1983, pp. 111-17.

In the following essay Ferrucci compares the views of history and myth held by the major figures of the Italian Romantic period, including those of Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, and others.

The modern notion of history was born in Italy, as elsewhere, between the late Enlightenment and the first wave of Romanticism. The effects of such a cultural revolution are visible in the three major Italian writers of the romantic period: Foscolo, Leopardi, and Manzoni.

Each of these writers has something different to say about history and what history is about. They are all witnessing the direction that history as a literary genre is taking: its transformation into a systematic study of the past, thus more of a science than a creative genre with moral purposes as it had been considered since ancient...