Italian Skies through English Writers' Eyes
by Frank McGilly

Italy has fascinated English writers for centuries. Inevitably, early works drew on Latin and Italian Renaissance literature. Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great English writer, placed several of his Canterbury Tales in Italy, as did Shakespeare many of his plays. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the fixation on Italy turned nasty; a long succession of lurid novels appeared, wildly popular in their time, unread today except possibly for comic relief, in which Italians were guilty of every villainy, especially if they were Dukes or Jesuits. Italy, it appeared, had lost something since the glories of the Renaissance. Even such a great spirit as Shelley worked this vein. But to name only a few of the later luminaries who saw with their own eyes a different Italy, Byron, Browning, Ruskin, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry James, American by birth but English by preference, all virtually turned the landscape, the climate and the social atmosphere, as much as the natives, into active characters in their narratives.

These writers, and others of lesser eminence and depth, sharply contrasted life in the two countries. Italy was sunnier, the vegetation lusher and more fragrant, the sea bluer; more importantly, the Italians were closer to nature, more spontaneous, more sociable, more open to pleasure (but not, regrettably, more honest, truthful, reliable, nor chaste); the English, by comparison, were tightly buttoned up, with their puritan morality and stifling social conventions. Private felicity was counterbalanced, however, by public abasement: Italy was politically subjugated, divided, corrupt, its religion at once superficial and oppressive. English writers of the nineteenth century made Italian liberation a crusade.

Especially in less serious popular novels, as in many recent movies, it has become a cliche for repressed Englishmen, or Englishwomen, to experience in Italy a sort of metamorphosis; they begin to really LIVE, usually assisted by a Bianca or an Antonio. To be sure, things often turn out badly, for neither the English nor the earthier Italian characters are prepared for each other.

Our play 'Enchanted April', like Elizabeth von Arnim's much-loved 1922 novel, breaks away from this somewhat hackneyed scenario. What will soften Mrs. Graves's crust? Or thaw Rose's icy rectitude? Or free Lotty from her mousy matrimonial skin? Or restore Lady Caroline's enjoyment of male attention, of which she has had too much?

See the play, and enjoy the answers to those questions. Not to give anything away, it is Italy - the land, the flowers, the sea -- that provides them.