Caffe, Cadavers, Comedy, and Castrati: Italy in the Age of the Grand Tour

3 units

Taught in English. With French libertine philosopher the Marquis de Sade, German novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Romantic poet Lord Byron, and other illustrious travelers of high birth and good fortune who sought finishing enrichment by making their Grand Tour to Italy from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, we will explore the richness and variety of Italian life and culture as depicted by both Grand Tourists as well as their Italian interlocutors. Chief among our destinations will be Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome. Attractions typical of the early modern Tour will circumscribe our journey. Coffee houses first appeared in the eighteenth century and, in ways strikingly similar to their function today, became the real and symbolic centers of social, intellectual and civil exchange. We will explore eighteenth-century coffee culture through comedies and Enlightenment and popular journals that took them as their theme, as well as through a study of the coffee houses themselves, a number of which are still in existence. Theaters, concert halls, gaming houses, literary and scientific academies, galleries, churches, and universities will be part of the standardized itinerary we will follow. During the period, anatomy and physiology attained new legitimacy as crucial scientific disciplines and we will visit both the anatomical theater at the University of Bologna, where the annual Carnival dissection took place, as well as the first museum of anatomy and obstetrics founded in the Bolognese Institute of Sciences in 1742 by Pope Benedict XIV. We will visit archeological excavation sites, in particular Pompeii, first unearthed in 1748. Fashion, an obsessive preoccupation of the day, will also be a point of interest in our travels. Through primary and recently published secondary sources we will also encounter the remarkable authority of Italian women unmatched anywhere else in Europe at the time. Prereq: at least one 300-level literature course. Readings in Italian or English.