Liberal Cultural Exchange: Leigh Hunt and his Italian Experience

In this article, I consider Leigh Hunt’s writing about Italy and Italian people, culture and literature. Specifically, I focus upon the texts that Hunt penned during his sojourn through the Italian Peninsula between 1822–1825. Hunt’s first-hand experience of being a traveller in Italy both influenced and was inflected by his work as a critical writer for several English journals. Hunt had acquired a particular knowledge of Italian literature, language, culture, theatre and music before he had ever even visited Italy. In England, as a professional Italian-English translator, Hunt was regarded by his contemporaries as being an authority on – and a proponent of – Italian culture. Consequently, readings of Hunt’s writings – his “Letters from Abroad” (published in the journal, The Liberal), travel narratives, critical essays, translations, and his detailed autobiography – reveal Hunt to be a complex literary figure who proved to be an important intermediary in the transference of knowledge, culture and liberal ideology between England and Italy during the Romantic period.