“He Looks like He’s Stepped out of a Painting:” The Idealization and Appropriation of Italian Timelessness through the Experience of Romantic Love

Abstract

This paper investigates two popular historical novels, Marina Fiorato’s The Glassblower of Murano (2008) and Anne Fortier’s Juliet (2010), in order to shed light on a discourse of pure origins and unbroken continuity that concerns ‘Italy’ as a cultural construct. Within both narratives, ‘falling in love in Italy’ occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, a notion often contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. This essay proposes an exploration of the notion of romantic love as one of the forces reconnecting displaced and fragmented Anglo-American souls with a supposedly timeless and unbroken society. From a point in time when the dialectics of history have been allegedly transcended, Anglophone popular narratives portray Italy as a space of timelessness and pre-modernity, where the experience of romantic love carries within it the promise of a new identity.