Italy and eastern Adriatic through the autobiography of Beatrice Speraz

Dalmazzo, Pietro

Abstract

From the year of the unification of Italy, there was a consistent number of intellectuals who claimed a further Italian expansion towards the Italian-speaking communities settled on the eastern side of the Adriatic. This expansionist attitude became evident when Italy entered the First World War with the treaty of London that, in case of victory, would have assigned to Italy the sovereignty over the eastern Adriatic seaside. The Italian ambitions, the involvement in the war and the displacement of those ambitions in Versailles led to an enhancement of the literary production about the eastern Adriatic and its – putative – Italianness. The authors that engaged these themes deployed a cultural production focused on the sense of loss and displacement on which Fascism built part of its political message. Among these authors, an original space is covered by Beatrice Speraz. She was a socialist author, with great public success at the end of the 19th century, who published an autobiography about her childhood in Dalmatia. In this paper, I aim to investigate the identity that Speraz drew for herself, as the daughter of a Dalmatian father and an Italian mother, and which kind of relation she represented between her identity, Italy and Dalmatia. I will try to look firstly at these themes through the patterns of representation of Dalmatia that emerged in her autobiography, which kind of literary topoi and descriptive elements are involved in the featuring of the region. Secondly, how these descriptive elements were involved in the perception of her identity, trying to understand which kind of feelings were triggered by the narration of her national identity.

Citation

Dalmazzo, P. (2022, May). Italy and eastern Adriatic through the autobiography of Beatrice Speraz. Paper presented at 3rd IASA International Symposium in Italy Italian Diaspora(s): the manifestation and dynamic of the cultural change., Lucca

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 3rd IASA International Symposium in Italy Italian Diaspora(s): the manifestation and dynamic of the cultural change.
• Start Date: May 26, 2022
• End Date: May 28, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 30, 2024
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1759156