When Stendhal wrote Milan it was a great Milan

He even had to admit it, through gritted teeth: «…since finally, I travel not to get to know Italy, but to give myself pleasure». But you have to look for it well, this fleeting confession by Stendhal, in the three hundred pages of Rome, Naples and Florence, his narrative debut even if diaristic, the first book signed by Marie-Henri Beyle with the famous pseudonym, which returns in the Italian edition (Humboldt Books) in the historic translation of Bruno Schacherl, almost two hundred years after its first edition. The right opportunity to ask ourselves: but what journey did this masterpiece of travel literature tell us about? In which land? Italy, certainly. «God, how right I was to come to Italy!».

The first time he went, very young and ardent like Fabrizio del Dongo, an enthusiastic Napoleonic soldier who was not prevented by cannon fire from falling in love with Cimarosa’s music. Then he returned in his early thirties, a defeated and luxurious exile, in 1816, traveling for four months along the peninsula, before settling for seven years in Milano. He edited an account of that trip already in 1817ma la Edinburgh Review he panned it as “frivolous,” and he rewrote it and republished it in 1826, however continuing to consider it “a bad book”. Instead, it was a revolution in the centuries-old genre of manuals Grand Tourthanks to the impertinent curiosity of his sociological and anthropological observations, and to the ease of a brilliant, at times cheeky style, very different from the “precision and conciseness of a civil code” that Stendhal would recommend to himself in his maturity.

What kind, therefore, was the “pleasure” that “the adorable Stendhal” (so Sciascia) was fond of on his journey “in pursuit of happiness” (a journey that touched many more cities than those mentioned in the title: an important stop in Bologna, and a trip to Calabria)?

The musica it was his most delicious loot: on the evening of September 24th, having landed in Milan at seven in the evening, he set off for the Scala without even changing clothes; but in the foyer of that theater, the city’s echo chamber, from evening to evening he collected news and mischief, loves and disagreements, he spied on the affairs of gentlewomen and “vagheggini”, gentlemen and “cojononi”, and kept nothing for himself .

L’until, then, obviously. But that syndrome that will bear his name, that faintness that seizes him in Florence in the presence of such beauty, that “emotion so profound”, that “the life in me was exhausted, I walked with the fear of falling”, how psychosomatic it was and how ostentatious? A few weeks later, in Rome, attending the pope’s mass in Sistine Chapel, having paid a quick and unfailing homage to the “male beauties of the vault”, he begins to observe with meticulous ferocity those cardinals who seem to him to be “good country parish priests; many have a sickly appearance…”.

If anything, it is Italy as a whole, Italy itself, that fascinates him, almost as if it were an animal organism, and he its ethologist. But no longer the Italy of Michelangelo, but the fallen Italy, where “a people of giants and heroes died in 1530 and were replaced by a people of pygmies”. An Italy of strong rustic passions and bourgeois mediocrity, inhabited by an “unfortunate people, pulverized by hatred”, resigned victims of “pretism”.

Why does he choose her, then? Obviously, to escape from France, his homeland, reduced even worse, for opposite reasons: that is, by cynicism, Machiavellianism, opportunism. But in the Europe of the restorations, why Italy of a thousand despots, and not perhaps the courageous Greece of Byron? Because that primordial and instinctive Italy had almost been redeemed to civilization by the French themselves: “The imperial administration, which often suffocated the Enlightenment in France, only encountered absurdities in Italy.”

Stendhal, a Bonapartist however disenchanted, even thinks that Napoleon gave his best here: «Napoleon came to wake up Italy with the cannon fire on the Lodi bridge, and then to eradicate anti-social habits with his government». In Milan, the Milan of Manzoni, Pellico, Monti, which he will choose as his heartland (he will be buried in Montparnasse under a tombstone which, in Italian, proclaims him “Milanese”), still recognizes that imprint.

As it descends towards the south, much less. Already a Firenze Stendhal avoids «lowering my gaze on the little opaque men who pass through those sublime streets». In the streets of Rome “the smell of rotten cabbages dominates”. Further on, even worse: «Civilization ends at the Tiber».

He laughs at the idea that a Napoli, in that “African” atmosphere, a philosopher could ever develop “a metaphysical explanation of man and nature” (that is, what Giacomo Leopardi would do in Naples, a few years later). In short, for Stendhal «Lombardy is a century ahead of Rome and Naples, and at least thirty years ahead of Florence», while «fourteen years of despotism by a man of genius have made Milan the intellectual capital of Italy»: it would be It is interesting to delve deeper into these pro-Napoleonic roots of the Northern League’s idiosyncrasy. Stendhal’s Italy is observed from north to south, from top to bottom, in every sense.

With wise editorial malice, in the appendix of this new edition, as the only contemporary critical comment, here is a sixteenth of only images, the photographs of Dolphin Sisto Legnani to Italy in Miniature, the Romagna theme park that already fascinated Luigi Ghirri: a country of pocket-sized monuments, of now miniaturized glories.

But Italy, for Stendhal, has an even deeper flavor: that of mother’s milk. Mother Henriette spoke Italian and recited Dante’s Comedy from memory. Henri lost her at seven. So what was he looking for in the great womb of “this beautiful country” where “there is nothing else to do but love”? In his unsurpassed introduction to the 1960 Italian edition, Carlo Levi he claims that «Stendhal’s Italy is invented and therefore absolutely true». Of a truth, much more than historical, internal, perhaps even psychoanalytic. If France is for him the degenerate and renegade Father, and Italy the longed-for Mother, well, that of “myself” in Italy is nothing but a version of Oedipus’ eternal journey.