Journey to Italy by Marquis de Sade

Reviewed by: Journey to Italy by Marquis de Sade Clorinda Donato Marquis de Sade, Journey to Italy, translated by James A. Steintrager (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2020). Pp. 832. 8 color and 22 b/w illus. $131.00 cloth. James Steintrager's monumental translation of the Marquis de Sade's Journey to Italy is required reading for any student of Sade who wishes to discover what the most notorious libertine of the eighteenth century might have been like in the comparatively mundane role of grand tourist. Steintrager's meticulously translated, annotated, and edited edition envelops the reader in Sade's universe, as we hear the [End Page 496] marquis describe, in the first-person, cities, towns, monuments, churches, lifestyles, and habits in an encyclopedic work that is second only to Giacomo Casanova's Histoire de ma vie in its author's single-minded obsession over leaving a work for posterity. Indeed, the travel account—combined with the author's painstaking postediting which included additions, directives to a future publisher about possible titles for the work, lists of days traveled, post stops, and expenses incurred—makes this journey unique among the many "voyages en Italie" produced by grand tourists in the eighteenth century. Sade clearly strove to elevate the travel account genre to include historical and moral reflections on Italian customs and institutions in the interest of reforming them, to which his proposed addition to the travel account, "Project for a Reform in Italy," attests. Like those before him, he visited Italy full of expectations and preconceptions that would be systematically met or dashed over the course of two separate trips spanning several months and traversing the diverse languages, cultures, and practices that made up the cultural-political mosaic that was Italy. Thus Sade, the Frenchman, followed in the distinguished footsteps of the members of his sixteenth-century compatriots Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre Ronsard. All sought to steep themselves in the glory of an ancient Rome conflated, to be sure, with the superimposed Renaissance rediscovery of arts and letters. However, Sade's first-hand experience of "sic transit gloria mundi" in 1775, some 250 years after the Pléiade authors first struck out for Italy, landed him before new evidence of that glory in the recently excavated sites of Pompei and Herculaneum, unknown in the Renaissance. Imbued with erudition gleaned from the study of classical texts, albeit in translation, (as Steintrager points out, Sade was an amateur, not a classical scholar), Sade pieces together a personal narrative and history of Italy as a debauched archive for his future libertine writing. The repository function of Sade's Italian travel narrative is particularly evident when read in concert with his libertine novels, where the spatial parameters of his prose are confining, made up of locked-down menacing interiors. Just as Sade, libertine writer, imposes spatial control over the bodies and minds of his protagonists, so too does Sade, the travel writer, depict countless Italian places that he immediately casts as suspect; for despite the potentially spatial openness of unrestrained travel throughout Italy, Sade is inevitably drawn to enclosed settings where he speculates about the potential for abuse. He imagines scenarios that are reminiscent of his unfinished 120 Days of Sodom, or The School of Libertinage, when catacombs, monasteries, and walled-in villas become sites of no return for those whom he imagines trapped and sexually tortured inside. Sade is unflinching in his moralistic condemnation of the climate and history of Italy as a breeding ground and stage for the most profligate of behaviors. His assiduous readings of the most licentious of the classical authors, such as Catullus, Martial, and Ovid, certainly added ancient lascivious grist to the filter through which he viewed and commented upon the profusion of erotic statues and pictorial renderings that abounded at Pompei and Herculaneum. These sites had become, for Sade, synonymous with the foundations of depravity and, therefore, precursors and justifications for his own future writing and worldview. Indeed, everything he sees in Italy is processed to support his own beliefs in a flagrant, repeated performance of confirmation bias. This is particularly true when he discusses Italian women, whom, he explains, have rebuffed his advances through...

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