Revolutionary Heroes and Italian Men

Abstract Capra and Graziosi ask why Settembrini never completed his Memoirs, preferring to devote his post-revolutionary life to public service and scholarship. They argue that he could fit neither himself nor his wife into the pattern of heroic, virile, revolutionary biography that was becoming canonical. More specifically, Settembrini’s conception of equality and reciprocity in love between men and women, as well as among men, did not conform to emerging notions of Italian masculinity. The revolutionaries and romantics who freed Italy from foreign rule were (and are) held up as examples of virility, not least in an attempt to disprove northern European clichés about Italian sensuality and effeminate weakness, which were used to advance foreign interests in Italy. Settembrini was dismissed as ‘a kind rather than a great man’, in the words of Benedetto Croce, because foreign discourse was internalized and inspired a definition of Italian masculinity that, this chapter argues, limited the impact of Settembrini’s legacies, as both a revolutionary and a classical scholar.