Italia anelata, Italia straniata, Italia ironizzata. E.T.A. Hoffmann e Wilhelm Hauff

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Italy simultaneously represents the land of freedom and art. Unfortunately, his ardent longing to visit the country was never to be satisfied throughout his lifetime. However, he did succeed in filling this traumatic gap thanks to his deep knowledge of Italian language and art. His “imagined” Italy is a sort of shaded, multi-faceted prism diffusely taking shape in different landscapes, characters and atmospheres, covering a wide range from the beautiful to the uncanny. Compared to his supposed “master”, the recurrence of Italian motifs in Hauff’s works is much thinner on the ground. However, far from being uninteresting, it is actually this low profile that plays a central role, taking on a higher meaning in his entire production. As a kind of “distorted mirror”, Hauff’s Italian motifs become a kind of mise-en-abyme of his diffuse “masking/unmasking” technique quoting his supposed models in order to question them, and thus paving the way for Heine’s modern, more “bitingly ironic” way of portraying Italy.