The “Alpine Sybil”: Her Verses and Prose Between Arcadia and Romanticism (the Italian Way)

Diodata Saluzzo was a poet and intellectual crucial to the intellectual life of Italian pre-unification period. A noblewoman with a vast web of personal and epistolary correspondences, she was able to interpret the sensibilities of her times in the best Arcadian and neoclassical spirit and at the same time, and here lays the exceptionality of her experience and the focus of this essay: she was able to introduce the completely new and revolutionary elements of pre-Romantism in her verses and proses. The relevance of her innovations has long been undervalued and dismissed by scholars: it is time to critically read her works with a particular attention to the international context and especially to the tumultuous period in which she lived in Piedmont: the epicenter of Italian Risorgimento during the decades that lead to 1861. Diodata witnessed much of it and contributed, from her privileged position of noblewoman, intellectual and poet, to the formation of a new, more modern sensibility within the classic, seemingly everchanging Italian literature.