The essays in this volume make the case that the age of nations had a profound impact on Italian history and contributed to the creation of an Italian identity within the framework of well-functioning imperial and global networks.

Edoardo Tortarolo is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy. He received his PhD in history from the University of Turin in 1987. He is a permanent fellow of the Academy of the Sciences in Turin. He has co-edited the Oxford History of Historical Writing (2012).

Contributors

Introduction

Section 1 Italy and the Mediterranean

1. Renato Pasta, Reflections from the East: Experiences in the Levant of two eighteenth-century travellers (1760-1792)

2. Catia Papa, Crossing sights: Women and nation between Italy and Egypt

3. Cristina Baldazzi, Emerging Egypt looks to Italy: Relations and Interactions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Arabic Sources

Section 2 Visions of Italy

4. Roberta Gefter Wondrich, Charles Lever's Italy in the Risorgimento: An Anglo-Irish perspective

5. Irene Gaddo-Daniela Piemontino, Through the mists of Albion: the couple Ball-Parolini

6. Leonardo Buonomo, Beyond aesthetic consumption: Italy in Henry James's early travel literature

Section 3 Italy in the Far East

7. Claudio Zanier, Acquiring advanced Italian technologies: The Japanese Silk and Silkworm Committee in Italy in 1873

8. Alessandro Di Meo, Italian explorations in Southeast Asia

9. Massimo De Grassi, Italian artistic culture in the Far East: Galileo Chini at the Siamese court in the early twentieth century

Section 4 Transatlantic Italy

10. Matteo Sanfilippo, Exporting Italy across the Atlantic: The 'Romanization' of the North American dioceses and assistance to Italian emigrants

11. Irene Fattacciu, Circulation of knowledge, competing therapies and exotic drugs: The case of sarsaparilla and China root in early modern Italian medicine

Section 5 A Florentine View

12. Igor Melani, The cradle of the Renaissance? Foreign travellers in Florence from the past to present-day times (1755-2020)

Index