Vernon Lee and the “sunny dream” of Arquà

Abstract

An expert traveller, a lover of art and literature as well as a ‘lover’ of Italy, Vernon Lee published in The Tower of the Mirrors and Other Essays on the Spirit of Places, published in 1914 and hitherto untranslated into Italian, an evocative description of the Euganean village of Arquà, famous for having been Francesco Petrarch’s last earthly abode. We propose here an unpublished Italian version of the Euganean chapter, complete with commentary and followed by the English text, reproduced from an anastatic reproduction of the book printed in 1914. The title chosen by the author for her essay (Petrarch’s house at Arquà) focuses attention on the singer of Laura and on the dwelling that soon became the object of devout pilgrimages, almost as if it were a temple of the Muses, after his death; However, the scenarios – of landscape and culture – towards which Vernon Lee’s discourse is projected are much broader than the horizon of Arquà, and his considerations – always acute, sometimes surprising – are a cue to rediscover, from a new perspective, a territory that we think we know.