"Thee all men greet with joy!" Italy through English Romantic eyes

Everyone can recognize the exceptional and widely-felt interest that Italy has always stirred in English writers since the Middle Ages until these days. Many poets have sung the vital and luxuriant beauty of Italy¿s land, many novelists have exploited the fascination of its history, countless writers have found inspiration in the Italian literature, while numerous artists challenged themselves in painting its ruinous cities, its countryside, the landscape wrapped in the hues of luminous sky and the reflections of its deep, unruffled sea. Yet, this attention has never reached such a high point as in the days of the Grand Tour and especially with the first and, subsequently, the second generation of the Romantic poets, when it flourished as vigorously as ever. Building on the romantic theories of beautiful, picturesque, sublime, ruins and fragments throughout the pages of this book, one will have the chance to regard and enquire about the way Italy has been perceived through Romantic eyes, souls and pens, within the literary elaborations of some of the most famous and notable exponents of the period under discussion: Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth.