Tracing the European roots of the news about Walter Scott published in the Italian gazettes. A preliminary survey

Abstract

Since the beginning of their capillary diffusion in the Italian peninsula, gazettes contained multitudes of articles about the prominent writers of the time, and were one of the most effective tools for spreading knowledge and information. Nevertheless, the role played by the Italian gazettes in the reception of foreign culture has not been sufficiently investigated. This paper focuses on a particular case study, namely the reception of Walter Scott and his work in the gazzette published in Milan, Turin, Parma, Florence and Naples. The choice of Scott as a case study is not arbitrary: a preliminary reading on the corpus shows that no other foreign author is mentioned as many times as the Scottish novelist. The aim of this article is primarily to show how the Italian gazettes recurrently selected and republished articles about the writer taken from many sources belonging to the British and French press, and explain the attitude the Italian journalists had towards them; secondarily, the study will demonstrate how this crosscultural and polycentric approach favoured the wide spread of information about Scott across the peninsula, which contributed to designing a portrait of the writer even without being in close contact with him or his cultural context.