![]() ![]() It transpires that Milton, the most English of poets, was a polyglot Europhile whose most famous work is at least partially tinged by Tuscan ochre. Moshenska believes that discussion of Milton’s Florentine sojourn is particularly timely as Brexit looms. Somewhere that will place an interesting pressure on the ideals he’s forming for himself.”Īs Milton himself writes in characteristic prose: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary … that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.” “He deliberately wants to go somewhere which will be alien and different and ‘other’. “He was not going there because it would be a comfortable, languorous wander through the Italian countryside,” Moshenska said. “Milton does help to create the later tradition – they are self-consciously following in his footsteps,” Moshenska said.īut Milton’s reasons for visiting Italy were more personal than cultural. They all visited the country as part of the grand tour, the practice of visiting Europe’s culturally important destinations that became popular among the British upper classes in the 19th century. Dickens, too, was enthused by a tour of Italy, drawing on his experiences for Little Dorrit and publishing a book about his visit.Ī small army of literary pilgrims followed Milton’s trail through the Italian states – from the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. There has long been speculation that Shakespeare, who set around a third of his plays in Italy, may have visited the country. In visiting several of the regions that would one day comprise modern Italy, Milton was following in the path of Chaucer and drawing inspiration from a country that fired the imaginations of two other giants of English literature. “There’s this fascinating tug of war in Milton’s mind between a very bookish and scholarly mindset, where he sees the world through the wisdom of the ancients and all the classical mythology, and this total fascination with the immediacy of the world around him.” ![]() Would one of the greatest poems in the English language have turned out differently, had he not visited Italy? Moshenska has no doubts, believing the Italy that Milton experienced in his youth was a well upon which the older poet drew for some of his most evocative, detailed passages. In the book’s beginning, Milton describes the fallen angels strewn across the floor of hell who “lay entranced, thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks, in Vallombrosa”. The poet is also believed to have visited the Benedictine monastery at Vallombrosa, nearly 20 miles from Florence and also mentioned in Paradise Lost. Milton pays tribute to the astronomer in several passages of his masterpiece, including one where the Angel Raphael is granted a clear view through the heavens, “As when by night the glass of Galileo, less assured, observes imagined lands and regions in the moon”. “It’s such an extraordinary thing to picture, the two of them crossing paths, people who you think of as belonging to two entirely different worlds, especially now, when we tend to separate science from literature so dramatically,” Moshenska said. ![]() The meeting of two of the finest minds of the 17th century, one from the arts the other from science, left a deep impression on Milton. While in Florence he made friends with the lutenist Vincenzo Galilei, the illegitimate son of Galileo, who introduced him to his father, who had been convicted of heresy. But it appears he threw himself into the alien culture with gusto. Milton had described Catholicism as “the worst of superstitions” and a “heresie against the scripture”. “You encounter him as this towering figure of militant Englishness, someone who is very hostile to Catholicism and hostile to certain kinds of idolatory and tempting beauty, and all these things that the English Protestant mind associated with Italy.” “In some sense he’s the person you’d least expect to find there,” Moshenska said. Only a small plaque on a hotel five minutes’ walk from Florence’s vast Duomo confirms that Milton visited Florence “drawn … by the Italy of the classics”. If he is correct, one of England’s most famous works of literature also bears the stamp of the city of Dante. In preparation for a Radio 4 documentary – In Search of Paradise Lost –to be broadcast next Sunday, Dr Joe Moshenska, an academic at Trinity College, Cambridge, retraced Milton’s journey to Florence in the late 1630s and claims that the legacy of a formative trip can be spotted throughout Paradise Lost.
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