Between culture shock and Franciscan ecology. Wordsworth's last encounter with Italy

Wordsworth visited Italy three times during his long life: in 1790, during the French Revolution, on a pedestrian tour with his fellow-student Robert Jones; in 1820, on a family tour of the Continent; and in 1837, with his friend Henry Crabb Robinson. The last journey provided the poet with a more comprehensive view of Italy and was recorded in Memorials of a Tour in Italy, a series composed at Rydal Mount in the subsequent years and published in Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842). The chapter reads the composite poetical series as a specimen of Wordsworth’s late poetics of memory that recaptures and accomplishes the poet’s lifelong engagement with Italy, refashioning it in terms of a cultural and environmental heterotopia. Through the analysis of the most significant compositions included in the series, the chapter argues that Wordsworth’s widened historical consciousness of the 1840s significantly draws on the symbolic capital embedded in Roman classical mythography, as opposed to the new German historicism, and on the Franciscan legacy at work in the Risorgimento national discourse.