“L’Oceano in calma”: Monti, Paradise Lost e l’Italia

Abstract

Despite the importance of Italy for Milton’s personal and intellectual formation, strong critical biases have characterized the reception of Milton in Italy between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the homeland of Catholicism and under the strong influence of classicism, Milton’s Paradise Lost seemed too unorthodox to meet the cultural expectations of Italian readership. Vincenzo Monti’s appreciation of Milton’s visionary imagination in his Discorso preliminare (1779) and his adaptation of Paradise Lost 7 in his poem La bellezza dell’universo (1781) are particularly worthy of notice in this context. More significantly, Monti’s first half of his poemlet nearly paraphrases Milton’s creation story through Paolo Rolli’s well-known Italian translation (1742). Monti’s indebtedness to the English epic paves the way for a new appreciation of Milton, but it does so by adapting the source text to the specificity and taste of Italian readers.