Travels in Italy

Gautier, Théophile (1811–1872), translated by Kline, A. S. (contact-email)

In 1850, Théophile Gautier travelled through Italy from Milan to Rome and Naples. The feuilletons he penned both during and after his expedition were originally published in La Presse and Le Pays, before being later collected in his 1852 travelogue, Voyage en Italie. His account focuses predominantly on Northern Italy, since Rome and the south are absent, and Florence is treated in brief only in the last section. Gautier combines the admiration of an art lover for some of Italy's most renowned monuments with sharp observations on the everyday life and landscapes of contemporary Italy.

The narrative focuses on Venice, which Gautier claimed as one of the three cities of his dreams, namely Granada, Venice and Cairo. Gautier reshapes the dark, romanticised image of Venice into a more contemporary perspective, touching on themes such as Austrian occupation. Originally titled Italia, this work became both a guide for 19th-century travellers and a landmark in Gautier’s literary legacy.

This enhanced translation has been designed to offer maximum compatibility with current search engines. Among other modifications, the proper names of people and places, and the titles given to works of art, have been fully researched, modernised, and expanded; comments in parentheses have been added here and there to provide a reference, or clarify meaning; and minor typographic or factual errors, for example incorrect attributions and dates, in the original text, have been eliminated from this new translation.

Author Details

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was born in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of south-west France, his family moving to Paris in 1814. He was a friend, at school, of the poet Gérard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo. Gautier contributed to various journals, including La Presse, throughout his life, which offered opportunities for travel in Spain (1840), Algeria (1845, 1862), Italy (1850), Russia (1858-59, 1861), and Egypt (1869). He was a devotee of the ballet, writing a number of scenarios including that of Giselle. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, he expressed strong support for the ideals of the second Republic, a support which he maintained for the rest of his life.

A successor to the first wave of Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand and Lamartine, he directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856, worked as a journalist for La Presse and Le Moniteur universel, and in 1856 became editor of L’Artiste, in which he published numerous editorials asserting his doctrine of ‘Art for art’s sake’. Saint-Beuve secured him critical acclaim, he became chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1862, and in 1868 was granted the sinecure of librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III, having been introduced to her salon.

Gautier remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the aftermath of the Commune of 1871, dying of heart disease at the age of sixty-one in 1872.

Though ostensibly a Romantic poet, Gautier may be seen as a forerunner to, or point of reference for, a number of divergent poetic movements including symbolism and modernism.

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Kline, A. S.

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