The Spielberg remembered: Nine prison narratives of the Italian Risorgimento (Moravia).

摘要

The tumultuous events of the Italian Risorgimento inspired a plethora of personal narratives, each bearing witness to an era of conspiracy, battle, political intrigue, and the ultimate triumph of a people who had long suffered foreign tyranny. From this trove of commemorative literature, the prison memoir, unlike any other genre, uniquely captures and defines the essence of an Age in which the prison, as both concrete reality and symbolic image, had become a part of the collective imagination. Indeed, as this study demonstrates, the prison motif had assumed a cultural centrality in nineteenth-century Italy, an era not only witness to thousands of actual imprisonments but to a vast production of literary, musical, and pictorial works echoing themes of captivity.; Between the years 1822 and 1846, a total of forty-four patriots of the Italian Risorgimento were imprisoned in the infamous dungeons of the Spielberg in Brno, Moravia. Much of what we know of their conspiratorial activities, arrests, trials, and carceral ordeals, has been narrated by nine of those very prisoners—Alessandro Andryane, Federico Confalonieri, Felice Foresti, Silvio Moretti, Giorgio Pallavicino, Silvio Pellico, Gabriele Rosa, and Antonio Solera—whose writings represent the only known surviving eyewitness testimonies to the “Italian” experience at the Spielberg. This study constitutes a collective reading and analysis of these nine texts, which, I maintain, are connected both to the prevailing Romantic environment of Resurgent Italy and to a centuries-old tradition of prison discourse. I examine the role of the prison as historical reality and as metaphor, manifest within these memoirs and in the broader cultural context of the era, as well as certain conceptual and literary tendencies of the Romantic period that celebrated the prisoner as a poetic, heroic figure. This study also considers problems inherent to all autobiographical writings of a highly subjective nature, such as questions of veracity, discrepant interpretations of past events, the selectivity of memory, and the use of personal confession as rhetorical device. I conclude that the Spielberg prison narratives, bound to the historical moment, yet laden with the imagery of an age-old tradition, are, paradoxically, both timely and timeless.