Reading Journal 1, Week 3

Reading The Italian, I am reminded of Shakespeare, and how the English preferred to use Italy as a place of scandal—a place taken by passion and distance, just foreign enough for all the madness and all the supernatural to seem normal and every day. This is what I think The Italian is emulating here. For example, in the opening, the Englishman is both shocked and outraged with the church for keeping and aiding an assassin, while the Italian friend smiles knowingly, naturally. And again, in the story supposed to constitute pure fact: a tale of a boy who denies his filial duty and throws himself, headlong, into danger and dishonor, taken by his passion for a girl the narrator admits Vivaldi barely knows, captured instead by the appealing features behind the veil, the sweet notes of her voice. And again, embodied in the elements of assassination and the almost inhuman qualities of the covert monk who consistently propels into the shadows, evading, The Italian uses Italy for its heightened sense of mystery and the reckless emotion still tied to the country as a whole. That being said, the only purely Italian architecture included (in specifics) are instances of a dock and shore, the constant presence of water, and the Roman arches—which serve less as a setting than as a place almost separate from the plane of reality, a realm of darkness and the potentially supernatural.