Publishing beyond Borders: The Roman Advertiser, the Tuscan Athenaeum, and the Creation of a Transnational Liberal Space
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The Roman Advertiser and the Tuscan Athenaeum were two English-language weeklies published in Italy by British expatriates seeking to defend the cause of modern Italy, both culturally and politically, during the mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary period. Like most foreign-language periodicals, they partook in the transnational flow of journalistic culture across European borders, but they also contributed to the emergence of a free Italian democratic press after the relaxation of censorship in 1846–47 in the Papal States and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. It is their position on the edge of two cultural worlds—British and Italian, national and cosmopolitan—that makes them particularly interesting to study. In this essay, I will show how they functioned as major sites of encounter and debate between British expatriates and the cultural and democratic movements in Italy. The editors of these periodicals, I argue, became major mediating agents between their democratic Italian friends and their compatriots. These cross-border periodicals created a transnational public space particularly well suited to the cosmopolitan nationalism that characterized the first phase of the Risorgimento.1
Transnational Cultural Networks
The Roman Advertiser (October 1846–April 1849) was the first English-language weekly published in Rome, even though there was a large British "colony" there beginning at least with the settlement of the exiled Stuart Court in the early eighteenth century.2 By the middle of the nineteenth century, that colony had expanded and become much more diverse in [End Page 464] social, religious, and intellectual terms. A large number of artists, scholars, art merchants, and collectors from the British Isles flocked to Rome at a time when the city was becoming a major centre for the training of artists, archaeological researchers, and contributors to the international art market.3 Precise figures are difficult to come by, but an article published in the April 10, 1847 issue of the Roman Advertiser informed readers that there were 17,686 foreign residents in Rome, accounting for 10 percent of the total population of 177,971.4 British—and increasingly American—expatriates represented by far the largest foreign colony: we can estimate the English-speaking population residing in Rome at the time at more than 10,000. In addition to this large group of expatriates, the intensification of travel abroad, thanks to steamships, railroads, and Thomas Cook's tours, brought thousands of visitors from the United Kingdom to the capital of the Papal States each year.5
The presence of such a large group of potential readers was one of the necessary conditions for the publication of an English-language weekly. Another was the lifting of the strict censorship the papal authorities had imposed on the press. The election of a new pope, Pius IX, led to the liberalization of the press in the late 1840s on the peninsula.6 The Roman Advertiser also benefited from the financial and material support of Luigi Piale, who owned the Monaldini bookshop and Piale's Library and reading rooms on Piazza di Spagna—then, as now, a favourite haunt of foreigners in the city—and consequently was eager to attract a large English-speaking public. We do not know whether the enterprising Piale or some of his regular English patrons founded the Roman Advertiser, but it is clear that the weekly was born in the back rooms of what was often referred to as the libreria inglese at the bottom of the Spanish steps.7
The first editor of the Roman Advertiser was Charles Isidore Hemans (1817–76), son of the poet Felicia Hemans. He had moved to Rome as a young adult after the death of his mother in the late 1830s, perhaps to join his Irish father, who had abandoned his wife and children to settle in Italy years earlier. Charles Hemans specialized in Roman and Catholic history and was linked to the growing number of scholars who conducted archaeological research in the city. Hemans was introduced in church circles and became a close friend of Massimo d'Azeglio, the future prime minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, to whom...
