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

In the following essay, Ferrucci compares Foscolo's ideas on history—which Foscolo felt could be recreated as a human mythology and thus be made more culturally significant—with those of two other Italian authors of the romantic period: Leopardi and Manzoni.

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...