<i>Postal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy</i>. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewPostal Culture: Writing and Reading Letters in Post-unification Italy. Gabriella Romani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. x+272.Maria Grazia LollaMaria Grazia LollaHarvard University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Risorgimento Italy, the pace of rhetoric far outstripped the pace of reality. As cultural historian Alberto Mario Banti has eloquently demonstrated, the idea of a unified and independent Italy thrived in works of the imagination but languished both as a political or juridical project and as a shared experience.1 If Italians imagined themselves as brothers and sisters living under the same sky in their literature, melodrama, and figurative arts, in their daily lives they failed to trade with, write to, or even talk to one another. Commercial routes consistently trace the path of goods that easily left Italian ports and cities for England, France, and Holland but struggled to connect the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic side of even the same state. Only 2 percent of Italians spoke (standard) Italian and 80 percent were illiterate; they can hardly be said to have entered into a dialogue with one another, whether in person or through the post. The post, in fact, was the one place where Italians could not be imagined as a inhabiting a modern and independent nation-state. Entirely under Austrian control since 1815 and routinely violated by the police in the infamous cabinets noirs (black rooms) that lined postal routes, the postal system was designed to disrupt the project of a unified Italy and to impress upon the citizens that the personal freedoms once sanctioned by the French Revolution did not apply to them. One letter that resonated with Italian patriots was the one written by the Bandiera brothers to the exiled Mazzini. Intercepted by the English and delivered to the Austrian police, it cost the two brothers their lives and crushed the Calabrian insurrection of 1844. It is perhaps because the post was the embodiment of foreign oppression that the Italian post was unified before the Italian nation; the establishment of a nationalized “Italian” postal system occurred in December of 1860, a few months prior to the famous declaration of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.Gabriella Romani’s engaging and important book opens precisely on the vista of the “new geography of national identity” that Italians experienced through postal exchanges in the aftermath of the unification of the country (4). Fostering the kind of “horizontal comradeship” that Benedict Anderson has posed as essential to the nation as imagined community and imagined,2 indeed, by officials as “happily joined together in a single family,” a unified postal system was essential to “the formation of a collective national identity” (4). It is not surprising that statesmen who fretted over low literacy rates tallied the volume of postal exchanges closely and welcomed the new postal system as an indicator of “progress and civilization” as well as an agent of unification (5). Undoubtedly tangible evidence of an increasingly literate population, letters read and letters written are most valuable for Romani when they allow us to imagine Italians coming together as a community of writers and readers, as cultural agents occupying a literary space (and a market) that paralleled, intersected, and largely enabled the print industry of postunification Italy. Romani notes the coincidence between the increased volume of postal exchanges and the new visibility of the letter as an art form. Keeping in mind that “both readers and authors of epistolary fiction responded to and functioned in a world of shared practices and perceptions,” Romani sets out to explore the “overlapping of real postal usage and the fictional representation of it” (13). And it is the newly imagined letter that sustains the whole book, whether it is the letter traveling the new Italian-run postal routes and represented in epistolary manuals of the first section or the letter of the epistolary fiction of Giovanni Verga and Matilde Serao that makes up the second part of the book, or the letters printed in periodicals gathered in the appendix of the book. Fictionalized in epistolary novels, the letter evoked by Romani is not “an emblem of solitary meditation” but “a vehicle of public mediation” (8). According to Romani, epistolary fiction of postunification Italy consistently “emphasizes the actual process of communication” and shows “a change of focus from individual order to social interaction, from the speaking ‘I’ to the receiving ‘us’” (8–9). The shift “from letter as confession” to “letter as communication” (9), according to Romani, is of great consequence for two main reasons. First of all, “the stress on the recipient of the message suggests a rearrangement of agency in the discourse, one in which the reader of the letter becomes as important an agent as the writer” (9). Even more important, the letter imagined in the new Italy showcases “the interplay between the correspondents inhabiting both the internal space of fictional interaction and the external arena of cultural production” (9). Epistolary fiction, in other words, “becomes in the literary imagination an arena for public exchange and interaction” (9).Most valuable is the book’s reconceptualization of the letter as a defamiliarized artifact located in a liminal space, at once both private and public. Both public and private is the letter imagined as penned and carried to the post office, paid for, stamped, transported through circuitous routes, delivered, opened, and often read aloud. Both public and private is the letter that was molded by writing manuals or printed in magazines. Far from being the literary genre best suited to women because, as anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza put it, “men write in a rush, because they have more serious business to attend to.…Women instead have almost always less to do than us” (10), the letter printed in the “piccola posta” of magazines that Romani focuses on provided a “virtual space of female sociability” (58): “At a time when the national rhetoric of the family emphasized the domestic role of women, whose freedom of movement within the public realm even in urban settings was quite limited, the newspaper with its correspondence feature offered a space in which to convene regularly and feel part of a debate that involved a community of female readers, albeit a small one” (63). The public (and gendered) vocation of the letter is also prominently displayed in the epistolary manuals discussed in the first part of the book. Just like conduct books, epistolary manuals were marketed primarily to a female audience and “aimed at normalizing behavior according to a new vocabulary of social relations” (34). They were also just as “filled with conflict and anxiety” as they “sought to contain the sense of disruption perceived in society during the process of redefinition of social and cultural identities, and of transformation from an older order of life to modern social interactions” (35).The purpose of the first section of the book is to provide a context against which to place the epistolary fiction of Verga and Serao. First, Romani invites us to read Verga’s Storia di una capinera alongside other narratives about forced monachization by Enrichetta Caracciolo and Caterina Percoto; contemporary reviews; the author’s own postal exchanges with family, friends, and publishers; and the stylistic advice contained in epistolary manuals. The end result is a highly textured reading of Verga’s novelette. Romani’s reading of Serao’s sentimental fiction in the defamiliarized context of the “civic pedagogy of the heart” (116) successfully exploited by Edmondo De Amicis, is also refreshing, nuanced, and compelling. Romani sees Serao as an interpreter of the “hopes and anxieties that accompanied Italy’s efforts to create a national cultural identity during the post-unification period” (117). Building on Alberto Mario Banti’s work on the role of emotions in Risorgimento politics, Romani argues that “Serao’s sentimentality aimed at creating a pedagogy of cultural and social unity” (125). In terms of gender roles, far from encouraging women to embrace their passions and desires, according to Romani, “Serao’s short stories in the epistolary form conformed to [a] conservative perception of gender roles and provided her female readership with an exemplary narrative of feminine self-denial” (139).Even though the book purports to privilege the reading of Verga and Serao by “recapturing the historical and cultural atmosphere in which they produced their works” (8), the first part is highly valuable in its own right. Replete with references and quotations from sources not easily found, Romani’s discussion of the postal culture of postunification Italy offers an intimate view of how the new medium looked and was perceived by contemporaries, whether through the gorgeous reproductions of postal calendars, the reference to complaints about the unwelcome recourse to letters for matters that used to be the domain of face-to-face interactions, or the mention of instructions about how to conduct a clandestine amorous correspondence with the help of newspapers. Romani’s ability to enter a cordial dialogue with other scholars and her keenness to place her research within wider contexts make this book an incredible resource. The book did not wish to be a comprehensive discussion of epistolary fiction in postunification Italy, but its main achievement is inspiring the desire to further her research on the fruitful relationship between literature and the letter.Notes1 Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia Unita (Torino: Einaudi 2000 and 2006), and L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal XVIII secolo alla Grande Guerra (Torino: Einaudi, 2005).2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 2November 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/682127 Views: 129Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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