"The marriage of choice and the marriage of convenance": a new England Puritan views risorgimento Italy.

American and European social differences are perennial topics of discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Fascination with views from the other shore peaked in the early and mid nineteenth century, as the United States, avowedly demo-cratic and egalitarian, became a bellwether for Old World reform, while Europe reverted to post-revolutionary reaction. During these decades, Alexis de Toc-queville, Fanny Kemble, and Frances Trollope penned classic American pot-traits, and New World writers and painters toured Europe, envying Old World storied scenes yet disgusted by their ancient and enduring infamies. One well-informed and deeply enthralled American observer of Old World ways was Caroline Crane Marsh [hereafter CCM], wife of the newly-appointed American envoy to the new kingdom of Italy. Her Yankee-based reflections on manners and mores in the Savoyard court of Turin between 1861 and 1865 provide comparative perspectives on nineteenth-century social history unique for their topical range and insights.

In March 1861 President Abraham Lincoln named as envoy to the fledgling Italian nation the Vermont scholar and Italophile George Perkins Marsh [hereafter GPM], four-time congressman, former envoy to the Ottoman Empire, and staunch anti-slavery Republican. Accompanying Marsh to his new post were his semi-blind and invalid wife Caroline Crane Marsh, translator, poet, and essayist, and her young namesake niece Carrie Crane. They reached the Italian capital of Turin on June 6, three days after the death of prime minister Count Camillo di Cavour, the Piedmontese statesman whose consummate diplomacy, together with the armies of Giuseppe Garibaldi, had brought the Italian state into being. GPM remained American envoy to Italy for more than twenty-one years, a length of service unequaled before or since.

GPM's Italian perceptions are recounted in his thousand-odd State Department dispatches and in his essays and letters. (1) Here I focus on CCM's impressions, from the purview of her own New England upbringing and experience. Her views are reported in vivid and voluminous detail in diaries dictated to her niece during their four years in Turin, before the Italian capital was relocated to Florence and then to Rome. At the outset idealizing renascent Italian freedom, she grew exasperated by the gulf between rhetoric and action, but at length came to terms, if not into agreement, with modes of thought and behavior stemming from ingrained assumptions alien to her own. From narrator as Puritan moralist, CCM increasingly turned informant as participant sociologist. Her seventeen notebooks--a thousand typescript pages--are abridged in an Italian translation of 2004 but remain unpublished in English. (2)

CCM was a typical New England bluestocking of her time, but. little in her early career foreshadowed her extraordinary Italian diaries. Born in 1816, the seventh of nine children of a Massachusetts sea captain turned farmer, CCM at-tended and taught school in Providence, Middlebury and Burlington, Vermont, under the aegis of her brother Silas Axtell Crane, schoolmaster and Episcopai clergyman (3)In Burlington she met and in 1839 married the widower GPM, fifteen years her senior. With him she went to Washington in 1843 and to Constantinople in 1849, traveling extensively, despite being unable to walk, by litter through Egypt, Palestine, Germany, and Italy. Back in America after 1854 she learned and translated German and Swedish literature, notably the evangelical pastor Johann Christoph Biematzki's The Hallig: or, The. .Sheepfold in the Waters (1856), a devout romance set in an island off the coast of Schleswig, and Wolfe o} the Knoll (1860), poems by the Swedish Gothicist Bishop Esaias Tegner and others, along with her own, inspired by the German geographer Johann Georg Kohl's Marschen und Inseln der Herzogthumcr Schicswig und Holstein. Both works were highly praised by critics but proved commercial failures. Like CCM's diaries from the Levant, these books showed a gift for landscape and travel description but little of the deft social analysis that informs her Italian diaries.

Her initial aim in detailing daily events was born of "the hope we then entertained of being useful to Italy by pointing to our own successful experiment in civil and religious freedom," at an historic moment in both Italian and American affairs. But as the Northern cause in the American Civil War seemed on the verge of collapse, and the reformist ideals of the Italian Risorgimento to hog down in petty intrigue, that hope by the following year had grown "fainter and fainter. For these reasons I have had less to record concerning persons likely ever to be in any way historical, [and] matters more personal have crept in." (4) Time has made her "matters more personal" vividly historical. No other eye-witness of newly national Italy comes close to CCM's tart, astute, yet empathetic portrayal. And as her rigidly egalitarian rustic New England Puritanism confronted every-day life in snobbish, hierarchical, Catholic yet cosmopolitan Italy, she became less critical and more compassionate, less censorious and more self-deprecating, though always an acutely clearheaded observer.

CCM's semi-invalid state and need to dictate aided rather than impeded her eyewitness reporting. Often unable to walk more than a few steps and periodically having to rest, she was spared the visiting chores and many formal occasions that were the normal lot of a diplomatic spouse. Instead she received, in her own home and on her own terms, callers put at ease by her combination of physical frailty, mental alertness, and responsive sympathy. Never censorious, she attracted interlocutors as an empathetic yet discreet auditor. And because they had to come to her, not she to them, she provoked quizzical scrutiny. As she said of her long-deferred reception by the Duchess of Genoa, King Victor Emmanuel's sister-in-law and chatelaine of the royal household,

  If I were well and could go to see her with the rest of the diplomatic
  ladies on all ceremonial occasions etc. the Duchess would consider me
  a bore. As it is, her curiosity is piqued, she would like to know
  whether I am ill or indifferent, and so she really wishes me to come
  to her. ...My advice to all ambitious Republicans who desire to
  excite the interest of crowned heads, is, to show as little
  disposition to seek them as possible. This seeming indifference rather
  piques them. Certainly I have not been designing in my course towards
  Her Royal Highness but I have succeeded in making her want to see me,
  which I could not have done except by staying away. (5)

And CCM's warm and attentive manner won her many garrulous confidences. "1 scarcely know at which most to wonder," she commented on court gossip divulged by Rosa Arhesser, the young governess of the king's niece, "at the things related, or at the imprudence of the narrator who had never talked half an hour with me before." (6) Decades of being read to had, moreover, enlarged CCM's powers of memory, enabling her to store up quantities of verbatim converse over several days. CCM's accounts benefited also from being spoken by her rather than written, enlivening her diary with sparkling conversational immediacy.

The new Italian state was beset by aristocratic and clerical reaction, grinding poverty, and widespread brigandage. On Risorgimento hopes and frustrations, the political and social dreams and failures of a half-made nation thwarted by Napoleonic ambition and papal and Hapsburg regression, and riven by provincial rivalry, religious oppression, linguistic confusion, and irredentist folly, CCM had much to say. This essay deals mainly with her depictions of the often deplorable lot of women and their domestic roles, notably among northern Italian elites. (7)

* * * * *

It is the 2nd of January, 1864--a cold bleak Saturday in Turin, for three centuries the seat of the Savoyard monarchy and, since 1861, the capital of newly uniting Italy. The scene is the four-story Casa d' Angennes, hard by the palazzo of the patriot-poet Massimo D'Azeglio and his still more famous father-in-law, Alessandro Manzoni, whose J promessi sposi remains the archetypal Italian novel, and within a stone's throw of every agency of power in this austerely baroque Piedmontese capital city. The piano nobile and the floor above of the Marchesa Clementina Ghirardi's Casa d'Angennes have episodically housed the Marsh family. CCM has finished dictating the day's events to her young niece Carrie Crane. Bad weather made it a quieter Saturday for social calling than usual:

  Mr. Marsh came out about tour o'clock from his Library into the
  drawing-room, and I said: "I would not have believed that so much as
  a dog would have come out visiting in this dismal snow-storm." "And
  did a dog really come?" he said with such a serious air as was beyond
  all comedy. "No dogs," I said "hut two or three very nice
  Countesses--the Bernes, the Delia Rocca, and the third whose name had
  escaped the servants." We had been sitting for half an hour trying to
  make up our minds whether it wouldn't be best after all to go back to
  the old system of receiving once a week rather than to be so
  constantly interrupted, when the door-bell rang again. Mr Marsh
  started. I said--"don't go, the lamps are already lighted; it is just
  dinnertime, no visitor would come now." "It's another of your
  countesses, I dare say," he said as he slipped quietly through the.
  dining-room door, and at the same moment the Marchesa Mari [wife of
  Tuscan lawyer and government minister Adriano Mari] was ushered in
  from the other side. She is one of my special favorites, but I don't
  know how it is, all these Piedmontese ladies bewitch me with their
  indescribable grace and delicacy. (8)

The Piedmontese were nor the only charmers. The belletristic gossip Abbe Giuseppe Baruffi proved to be "a priest that even a Protestant can respect." (9) The poet-historian Cesare Cantu was a reactionary bigot hut enormously likable raconteur, the radical editor Angelo Brofferio a dynamic and eloquent if impractical visionary, the Venetian linguist Conte Marini (doubling as Turkish ambassador Rustem Bey) a font of amusing malice, the Egyptian-born French ambassador's wife Pauline Benedetti a sure harbinger of storm-centered protocol. The renowned soprano Contessa Clara Novello Gigliucci, frank and plain-spoken, was, for GPM, a welcome antidote to often inconsequential and empty-headed Piedmontese ladies. Yet what fun they were! Bluestocking though she was, CCM enjoyed it all. "We Americans complain greatly of the insincerity of these polished Europeans & Orientals, but I must confess, that ... as a matter of social comfort, I like much better a little meaningless courtesy, than an excess of that Anglo-Saxon bluntness, which quite as often proceeds from arrogance and censoriousness, as from a love of truth." (10) She was provoked beyond politesse by some of her own clumsy countrymen and women, still more by supercilious, condescending Englishmen. "If you want an Englishman to he civil," she concluded on meeting young Edward Herries, British Secretary of Legation, "treat him haughtily." (11)

The Marshes knew everyone and were concerned with everything in these first years of the new Italy. Turin was not only the national capital but the home of all Italy's illustrious exiles.

  Friday, June 21st 1861 Drove out this evening with our friend the Abbe
  [Baruffi] to pay a visit to the Countess Balbo, widow of the famous
  Cesare Balbo [Dante scholar and Risorgimento pioneer). We found her an
  amiable old lady surrounded by affectionate children and
  grandchildren. It seems very strange to meet in this way those who
  have lived familiarly with Silvio Pellico and all the Italian poets
  &. patriots of the generation just passing away ... It was the fete
  day of the Countess and she had many visitors, among them the Countess
  [Ida] Ghislieri of the family of Pope Pius 5th ... with manners as
  fascinating as her person, and her three children seem the creation of
  some poet-painter. The company were all well-bred and refined with
  that perfect consideration for each other which one sometimes misses
  among the English. (12)

The American envoy and his wife had unparalleled access to all levels of Italian society, from king and court and Piedmontese aristocracy to the bourgeois intelligentsia and journalists, engineers and agronomists who were transforming Italy. Unusually for foreign visitors, they also engaged in intimate converse with artisans and laborers, paesani and contadini met on frequent Alpine travels and during the six months in 1863 when they were tenants in the castello at Piobesi Torinese, a Po plain village whose impoverished habitants huddled for winter warmth among their stabled cows. In Piobesi, CCM was dismayed to learn "from our Marie woo really has quite a little fortune, that she considered it a very happy thing to be able to retreat to a sta1 '' for the winter, and regretted that they had no cattle, and consequently no s. de." (13) Speaking as well as reading Italian, the Marshes were devotees of present-day Italy, not merely of storied antiquity, unlike their English friends Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning; the Brownings shared the typical transalpine literary sojourner's view of contemporary Italians as "degraded," "demoralized," and "culturally backward," and consorted with few Italians other than servitors in the sheltered Anglo-American circle of Florence. (14)

Piedmont and its capital were, to be sure, in many ways atypically Italian--to many, given Piedmont's Provencal-Catalan-infused dialect and Savoyard monarchy, hardly Italian at all. Although their administrative cadres spearheaded peninsular unification, the Piedmontese were socially more stodgy and politically more conservative than Lombards and Tuscans. Culturally, Turin was no match for Milan or Florence, nor even Bologna or Naples. The Piedmontese aristocracy kept up class distinctions elsewhere, save at Rome, increasingly passe. (15) "No court in Europe now offers so much of ancient etiquette, so much of real stately aristocracy," noted CCM, equally dazzled and dismayed, "as that of Turin." (16)

  Friday, June 14th 1861 We drove again this evening to the fashionable
  rendezvous. The weather most delightful and everybody looking quite
  gay--but oh the caprices of the monde! It does not do to drive beyond
  the limits of the Corso, unless one would at the same time put
  himself out of the pale of the best society. At the end of a short
  half mile every body turns round and goes hack again and so to and
  fro till twilight. Even to lis strangers it seemed very stupid,
  but to those who go every day I should fancy it must soon become
  the greatest of bores. After a few turns you recognize every
  carriage, every toilette, and every face. The eye glass is used
  with an effrontery worthy Queen Victoria's drawing-rooms. (17)

Among the aristocratic codini, (18) who divided their time between palazzi in Turin and villas in the Piedmontese hills, distinctions of title were absolute, converse with the bourgeoisie out of the question, concern for the working classes limited to fear of their subversion. In a passage that would have been grist to Karl Marx's mill at the International Workingmen's Association in London a few months later, CCM reported her husband's discussion with a local lady

  about the hard fate of the poor here, forced to live in the garrets
  of these lofty palaces, without fire in winter & suffocated by the
  heat in summer, obliged to carry water & everything else up so
  many flights of stairs etc.--the lady replied "But do you not think
  it safer for the government that the poor should live in this way
  in the garrets of the rich than that they should have houses in
  quarters by themselves? Would they not then meet together to talk
  over political subjects, and so get uneasy and turbulent? And might
  not such a person as Garibaldi then easily stir them up to
  mischief?" (19)

Mischief could hardly have been imagined of the Piedmontese patriot Lorenzo Valerio, journalist, silk manufacturer, lately appointed senator, whose American-born wife was a friend of CCM's. Intrigued by an intimacy that seemed to her socially anomalous, the Baroness Carolina Gautier, while sojourning in the Alps with the Marshes, asked her husband about the Valerios.

  The Baron replied, "O, e una famiglia da niente, uno e medico o che
  so io" [Oh, well, it's a family of no account, one of them is a
  doctor or something of the sort]. The lady [Gaurier] said: "But
  one of them is prefect of Como." "Si, si, ma tutti ne ridevano--un
  Valeria prefetto!" [Yes, yes, hut everyone finds that laughable--a
  Valerio prefect!] The Piedmontese nobility had never heard of
  Valerio before he was made Prefet of Como ... owing to the
  narrowness of their own knowledge of the active and influential
  minds of Italy ... He was well and most honourably known in Tuscany
  ... But his being Prefetto and Senatore del Regno can not, in the eyes
  of a Piedmontese noble, atone for his being born untitled. When
  one talks with the Gautiers, sees how patriotic they are, how
  cultivated in some directions, it seems impossible to reconcile
  the contradictions one finds in them. (20)

Titled Piedmontese were not expected to think for themselves; their views were collectively congealed forever. "God had supplied one brain only for the nobility of Turin," scoffed D'Azeglio, himself stifled by that conformity, "which was kept at Court in a showroom, so that all could go and get any ideas they needed." (21)

Getting ideas from anywhere else was fraught with special peril for Italian women, CCM discovered. "We picked up the Countess [Clotilde Fantoni della Torre] Castellani" to go and hear the physicist Carlo Matteucci at a lecture hall.

  She explained to us that her family connexions would be dreadfully
  shocked at her going to such a place ... My note to her ... had been
  taken to her sister-in-law by mistake, and in this way, the startling
  fact of what she was about to do had got out to the great dismay
  of the family. "Ma belle-soeur se ferait ecoreher vive plutot. que
  de se trouver a un tel cours!" [My sister-in-law would sooner be
  flayed alive than be seen in such a place!] She told Mr Marsh how
  amerce all her family were, and said she had to thank God for a
  twelve year residence in Lombardy or she should be no better
  than the rest. When she ventures to criticise this illiberality a
  little, and tells them that the world must and will go on in spite
  of the efforts of the Piedmontese nobility to hold it back, they
  cry out: "Pour charite, Clothilde, pour charite, ne dues pas ces
  chases la devant mes filles!" [1 beg of you, Clothilde, 1 beg of
  you, don't say such things in front of my daughters!] Among
  themselves they say, "Pauvre Clothilde, comme elle a la tete
  chaude! Dieu! qu'est ce qu' elle va devenir! Je suis regardee dans
  ma famille comme une femme pernicieuse." [Poor Clorhilde,
  what a hot-head she is! My God, what will become of her? I
  am seen by my family as a pernicious woman.]" (22)

* * * * *

The degradation of Italian women of all classes was for Caroline painfully apparent. Women had no rights save as appendages of fathers and husbands. Among the peasantry they were commonly beasts of burden, almost entirely unschooled. As few as one Italian woman in twenty could read and write; by contrast, in CCM's native Massachusetts in the 1820s evidence suggests that only one in twenty could not. (23) A prime impediment to schooling Italian girls was the fear that learning would subvert obedient submissiveness. Hearing that the Marshes were helping peasants who sought to become teachers, a lady chastised GPM, "Mais, Monsieur, elles aspirant a se declasser! They want to rise above their caste." Female inferiority was part and parcel of the general tyranny of class servitude. (24)

Other shackles constrained upper- and middle-class Italian women. They were not free to travel, to appear alone in public places, to walk out of doors unchaperoned. Strict religious observance was obligatory even for those whose fathers, brothers, and husbands were free-thinkers. "The Catholic statesman who never enters a church and even encourages his sons to share in his skepticism," charged GPM, "has continued to commit his daughters to clerical instructors and is not content unless his wife keeps on good terms with her confessor." (25) Fealty was enforced to buttress their husbands' and sons' repute, not their own salvation. The Italian convent was less a sanctuary for saintly vocation than the refuge of women disowned or dishonored; marriage and motherhood were the only acceptable female course. Any husband was better than none, Caroline was told. The Duchess Maria Luisa of Parma explained why she had married the Bourbon Duke Charles III of Parma, despite his notorious brutality. "Mais, ma chere amie, que voulez-vous! J' avais deja vingt cinq ans, et j'aurai epouse le diable meme plutot que de ne pas me marier." [But my dear friend, what could I do? I was already 25 years old, and I would have married the devil himself rather than remain single.] "Poor woman!" commented CCM, "she did the next thing to it." (26)

Scores of women who thronged CCM's drawing room made her their confidante, pouring their own and others' marital woes into her sympathetic Yankee ear. Marriages arranged for money and position, lives ruthlessly controlled by their husbands' families, inequalities of age, of education, of inclination seemed to her to ensure incompatibility, deceit, infidelity. Accounts of adultery, poisoning, crimes of passion, even incest came readily to Piedmontese lips from all levels of the haut monde.

Hearing manifold flagrant tales, CCM at first could not believe "that the persons I meet here in society are guilty of the sins laid to their charge. If there are no evil-doers, there is a prodigious number of liars," she reflected. "I had rather believe that 'all men are liars' ... than that all men 6k women too are the whited sepulchres that vulgar rumor makes them." Alas, vulgar rumor ruled. "I bad taken a great fancy to an Italian lady of rank and wealth [and now laded beauty]. After telling me that Marchese X has for many years been notoriously this lady's lover (no objection being made on the part of the husband)," said another friend of CCM, " 'every resident of Turin knows it, but so long as there was no probability of your being much thrown together, I did not think it worth while to tell you as I know you do not relish such tales.' (27)

Yet few women could thus stray without being censured, whereas men generally philandered with impunity. Victor Emmanuel himself was admired as a famed womanizer; the Turinese were fond of saying, "no sovereign has been more successful in becoming the father of his subjects." The King's open liaison with his low-born mistress Rosina, whom he made Contessa Mirafiori, had deeply chagrined the genteel aristocrat Cavour. But few others minded. Past and future prime minister Urbano Rattazzi's liaison with the legendary litterateur and courtesan Princess Marie Laetitia Studholmina Wyse-Bonaparte, Countess de Solms, Louis Napoleon's cousin and reputed mistress, was to most Turinese a surprise but no scandal--until he wed her. Her "gross and open misconduct as a wife year after year would have been easily overlooked but for ... her marrying again just 23 days [actually only 15] after the death of her husband, the Comte de Solms," the Abbe Baruffi told CCM. "No moral delinquency affects position in the European world so much as an offence against its conventionalities." (The affair particularly outraged the Marshes, in part because it was being consummated in the Casa d' Angennes, which they had scrupulously tenanted and were shortly to return to. The "Witch de Solms," as the outraged and in this case unforgivingly puritanical CCM termed her, had turned the place into a shambles, the grand marble staircase now resembling "the entrance to a gaming house." (28))

"Even the king is said to lament the infatuation," CCM reported; he found Rattazzi so besotted "with that woman he is good for nothing." (29) And when Rattazzi asked whether the king would object to their marriage, Victor Emmanuel replied, "Et si l' on vous disait qu' elle a ete ma maitresse?" '"Sire, je ne saurais etre que tres flatte!" ["And if you were told that she had been my mistress'" "Sire, 1 should be only too flattered."]. (30) Of this writer-painter-composer-demi-mondaine, CCM heard "terrible things ... --too terrible to be believed even" of her. (31) At a Rattazzi party the Orientalist Jules Oppert noticed a small girl and asked to whom she belonged and why she had not been sent to bed. "It belongs to Madame Rattazzi," he was told. Oppert reflected and concluded, "After all, it is quite possible; she gets people to write her music, and her articles, and to carve her statuettes; she is quite capable of getting someone to have children for her." (32)

Public performances in what CCM had supposed strait-laced Turin mirrored casual unconcern toward extra-marital laxity. "The moral of most of the plays I have seen this winter," she wrote in March 1862, "seem intended to prove the hollowness of the marriage vows." (33) At a Liceo lecture in January 1864 she "found the hall well filled with the very elite of Turin society ...[The lecturer's] style was admirable, ... and a delicate vein of irony pervaded the whole composition. [But] the subject ... was a narrative of certain domestic events and scenes, ending after the manner ... of the day, in the betrayal of a husband by his wife--and careful mammas had brought their young daughters of from 12 to 18 to be edified by this Lecture!" (34)

With such dangerous delights in the offing, it is no wonder those daughters were chaperoned to the hilt. They were left alone with no man of whatever age or status. Parents were all too familiar with Princess Solms-Rattazzi's first mother-in-law's advice: "Be good, my child, if you can; but whatever happens, always see that there are bolts on your doors and never write a word." (The Princess herself had "always done the exact opposite.") (35) The Marshes bitterly resented such fetters for their niece Carrie, an independent American girl.

  Carrie ask[ed] little Miss Trotti [Manzoni's granddaughter] to go to
  the Teatro Re-gio with her uncle [GPM] to take charge of the two.
  Mme Collegno [Contessa Margherita Trotti Provana Bentivoglio
  di Collegno] said that she should so much like to have her go if
  there was to he a matron in the box--otherwise it would not be well
  received! ... With all I have previously learned of the stupidity of
  their convenance here, I was not prepared for this--that a man of
  over 60--of Mr Marsh's character and position--should not be a
  sufficient protection for his own niece and a little friend of hers,
  still a schoolgirl! (36)

For Carrie to fetch another little girl from Turin on a short train ride to the village of Candiolo "it was not enough that our footman had to accompany her, bur I must send my maid besides. Sometimes I am tempted to defy the nonsense altogether, but when 1 remember that the freedom of our young girls could not exist in a country where the young men were nor brought up to respect that freedom, my judgment shows me that I must yield to public sentiment." (37)

Unaware of or averse to such constraints, spirited lasses who would "have the Romans know that a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her horse alone, and laugh at their rules" caused GPM much grief; again and again the American ambassador had to rescue them from heedless scrapes similar to the "foolish simplicity" of Henry James's Daisy Miller. (38)

The mix of sexual seclusion and public decorum bemused CCM. After three years she found "such contradictions in the character of this people, that I sometimes feel myself more ignorant of them than before I came among them." At a great Turin fete despite "tens of thousands in the streets ... there was no drunkenness, no noise, no rowdyism of any kind ... The whole population of a city afloat at night with a very small police scarcely noticeable anywhere--still all is order, & no one complains of insult or robbery. And yet in this same city a young lady is not safe to walk ten rods by herself in broad daylight." (39)

* * * * *

These contradictions stemmed from gender assumptions wholly at odds with an emancipated New Englander's. To be sure, American men and women also occupied separate and distinct spheres, men's exclusively public, women's private, cast as pious, pure, domestic, and submissive to male authority. But in Italy (and indeed Europe generally) women were deemed and treated as men's inferiors, whereas in the United States they were increasingly encouraged to regard themselves, though set apart, as intellectual equals, their moral influence and maternal roles licensing forceful self-assertion. (40) American men were not automatically assumed to be sexual predators; women were revered but judged capable, on the whole, of looking after themselves. "A young unmarried woman may, alone and without fear, undertake a long journey," observed Tocqueville. "In the United States men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them"; prepared to accept that "her mind is just as fitted up as that of a man to discover the plain truth ... they sometimes show they have the hearts and minds of men." (41)

Tocqueville stereotyped American women, few of whom he had consulted, through European eyes. (42) A decade before his visit, the English traveler Anne Royall reported that genteel women were "never seen on the street on foot" in American cities. Decorum long continued to require them to be invisible in public spaces. (43) If visible they must on no account be attractive; recruiting nurses for soldiers wounded in the Civil War, Dorothea Dix famously insisted they be matronly 35-to-50 year olds, as "it was considered indecorous for angels of mercy to appear otherwise than gray-haired and spectacled." (44)

Italian women, on the other hand, were objects of both passion and reverence, but never both at once. They "may be angels until they marry, but then almost immediately become very far from angelic," as D'Azeglio's translator put it. "After they have produced sons, they evolve, through matriarchy, to the angelic status once more. At their death, all the bells of Heaven ring, and ever afterwards their names are only mentioned in hushed tones of profound veneration." (45) A leading instance was Tuscan governor and subsequently Italian prime minister Bettino Ricasoli's treatment of his young wife, famously punished for dancing too long with a foreign gallant. Ricasoli swept her from the Florence ballroom and drove all night to his distant estate at Brolio, where she was incarcerated for the rest of her life. His diary brims with complaints over his wife's indifference to his own needs--until, virtually from one page to the next, her imminent agonizing demise from stomach cancer transmogrifies a cold-hearted harpy into a selfless saint. (46)

That Americans, no less than Italians, allotted separate spheres to men (the world) and to women (the home) both the Marshes deplored. (47) But Italian gender segregation seemed to them more extreme and degrading, as manifested in CCM's exchange with Conte Luigi Federigo Menabrea, Risorgimento hero and another future prime minister. "At the theatre [Regio, in January 1862], General Menabrea ... said, 'I want grace not force in a woman.' I thought but did not say, alas, poor woman' how large a portion of her mortal life demands force or she sinks to a worthless thing--a wretched trifler or a wretched slave. This is the second time I have heard a truly great man utter the same unconsciously selfish sentiment." (48) A few weeks later at her Saturday at-home Menabrea repeated that grace and family devotion alone were wanted in women. But, CCM asked him, what if

  nature has not gifted us with graces, if we have no family to which
  to devote ourselves or if ill health deprives us for long years of
  all social enjoyments and of the strength necessary to attend to
  household matters' With thousands of women one or more of the
  suppositions are stern facts. You would deny us all those mental
  resources with which wide knowledge furnishes you--you would
  leave us to count our beads, ... but you would leave us nothing else.
  I then told him that I thought nature had made wide differences
  between men and women and that if should he the object of education
  to bring them nearer together rather than to increase these
  differences, and finished my speech with a quotation from
  St. Clement's advice to his clergy, "teach your men to be modest,
  your women to be brave." The General seemed much amused and quite
  inclined to pursue the discussion, but we were interrupted by ... a
  new set of visitors (49).

Italian upbringing deliberately magnified the differences. Sons of the elite were exposed at least to rudiments of classics and science along with martial arts, but daughters were confined to fashion, French, and fundaments of the faith. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries "the number of learned, genial, and liberal Italian women," as GPM learned from Italy's pioneer feminist Anna Maria Mozzoni, had exceeded those in all the rest of Europe. (50) But with the counter-Reformation the convent and the confessional had replaced the schoolroom. Only under rare paternal aegis did any young women in Turin acquire learning taken for granted in, say, cultured Boston. At CCM's audience with the Duchess of Genoa, she spoke "with admitation of the vie. serieuse which she understood to be so common among the ladies of New England. By this vie serieuse she evidently did not mean a vie devote, but simply a life of earnest occupation. I was surprised to find she had ever given a thought to our habits in this respect." (51)

Some Turinese ladies had good cause to rue the absence of such habits. The widowed Marchesa Doria di Cirie as a girl had known the naturalists Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt and the philosopher Victor Cousin, all frequenters of her parents' Paris salon. But though Doria herself was now the formidable ruler, "La Pomposa," of Turinese society, that society was strictly social and nothing more. "A woman without husband or brother to sustain her is inevitably put down as pretentious & ridiculous if she ventures to show that she has tastes and aspirations above the ordinary, low, flat surface of society," she lamented. "So all that my father labored to teach me is now valueless." (52)

* * * * *

Most Turinese daughters were less fortunate in their fathers. The astronomer Barone Giovanni Plana's daughter Sofia "spent two long hours with me today," recounted CCM. "She gave me something of her own sad history which chimed in strongly with the thoughts suggested by the remark of Gen. Menabrea. 'I was brought up after the old Turin manner, never allowed ... to express a wish of my own,' " she told CCM. " 'My parents are not to be blamed--no other way was thought of as possible. I looked to marriage as something likely to give me more freedom. I was married very young to a man [of] wealth and a title'"--and of unspeakable atrocity. Had she known him, '"I might possibly have been able to ... accept even his worst qualities. As it was ... the shock was more than a poor weak ignorant thing as I was could endure. I staid with my husband twenty-three days and then took refuge with my father and mother,'" who failed, as not sufficiently influential Catholics, to get the marriage annulled. (53) Some who stuck with their husbands fared little better.

  A very pretty half-English woman married to an Italian asked [CCM] if
  1 knew another lady who had separated herself from her husband. I
  said no, and added that I had no great fancy for knowing women who
  could not get on with their husbands--no doubt it was impossible to
  live with some, yet the presumption was against both parties ... This
  led to a long talk about unhappy marriages, 1 in my innocence
  supposing that with my young interlocutor the honeymoon could
  hardly be over. After she left I was told to my dismay that her
  husband, jealous as a tiger, had been walking up and down the
  street keeping his eye on the entrance to our court during her
  whole visit and joining her as soon as she came out. ... He locks
  up all her bonnets and all her visiting dresses whenever he is
  obliged to leave his own house, and all this ... without any fault
  on the part of the wife except that she is pretty and that the King
  has been heard to say so. (54)

Even Italian marriages that were less confining seldom seemed congenial in CCM's eyes. At the seaside near Genoa where the Marshes wintered in 1862--1863, several "Italian ladies passed some weeks. They were without their husbands as Italian ladies generally are, and after observing for several days that an English couple [the more than nominatively virtuous Mr. and Mrs. Henry Virtue Tebbs] sat down to the table regularly together, walked together, etc., they said, 'Do you always stay with your husband?' and being assured that separation had been rare over 32 years of marriage received this statement with astonishment that would have been overwhelming had it not been relieved by a little scepticism as to its truth." (55)

Disparity of age and interests made companionship unlikely. "The Marchesa [Gabriella Teresa] Cusani [di Bonvillaret] spoke very kindly of her husband [Paolo], said he had always been very considerate of her comfort and happiness, but that the match was not a discreet one for her--she being but fifteen and he forty-five when they were married. 'Now he is an infirm old man, almost helpless from paralysis--I am thirty two years old and my daughters are just beginning to need a father to guide and direct them--instead of which they must he his nurses.' I suggested that it might after all prove the most valuable possible training for them. 'Yes' replied my visitor, 'that hope consoles me much for their loss of pleasures that seem more befitting their age.'" Caroline, for whom conjugal care always took precedence, was saddened by this seeming callousness; "for a wife it seemed to me most singular. She is a person highly esteemed in society, and I have no doubt a very worthy woman -this manage de convenance having turned out better than usual." (56)

And such worldly marriages, whatever their failings, had after all some compensations. When told of one lovely marcbesa's lurid misdeeds, Caroline's husband exclaimed, tongue at least half in cheek: '"Well! Well! 1 thank God we are not like these publicans!' as naturally and as heartily as if the words had not been borrowed from one intended to serve, not as an example, hut as a warning." (57) Whatever truth the tale of the marchesa's transgressions might hold seemed to her now of less moment than the Old Worldly context in which it circulated. "And under the soft twilight my charity grew broader, 1 contrasted a N[ew] E[ngland] education and an Italian one--the teachings of a Puritan preacher and a popish priest, the marriage of choice and the marriage of convenance, until I was forced to the conclusion that these publicans were not worse than we Pharisees might have been under the same circumstances." (58)

CCM was unusual, in her day, in being able to envision herself in the place of others remote in culture or in epoch. "It is curious," she mused, "to see how inclined we are to attribute all the mistakes, the follies, even the sins, of our lives, to a faulty training. Then we run in the other direction with our own children, and they in turn think we made monstrous blunders, and either go back to the faith of their grandfathers, or try a third way still to be blamed again by their descendants." (59) But her non-judgmental tolerance had its limits. To be made to marry for money and position rather than by free choice she found morally reprehensible. The seeming marital felicity of her household servants cushioned her conjugal bias. "Mr Marsh & 1 strolled into the garden," she wrote one summer evening in Piobesi,

  and we soon met Carlo & Susanna arm in arm in one of the walks
  enjoying the sunset-hour like ourselves. Another turn and we came
  upon Alexander and Giacchino with their hands full of feathered
  foundlings and followed by two per kittens. As we came back to the
  house the gardener was silting under the cloisters beside the tall
  rose-vine, his wife by his side, his baby on his arm, and the older
  boy beaming on his mother's knee. We laughed as we counted up the
  Darhys and Joans that inhabit the Castle, and concluded that as three
  of these faithful Benedicts who were always so quiet and contented
  at home were Italians, there must after all he some domestic
  happiness even among this race. (60)

* * * * *

CCM's own domestic circumstances were soon to change. The shift of the Italian capital brought the Marshes to Florence in 1865 and then to Rome, for the remaining seventeen years of his ambassadorship. Although she unexpect- edly recovered much of her health and eyesight, (61) the return to America of her faithlul niece-amanuensis and her own expanding social duties as doyenne of the diplomatic corps and "for so many years the brightest ornament" of Anglo-American society in Florence and Rome, according to its long-time leader, (62) left no time for diary-writing. Although CCM's journal ceased with the departure from Turin, she wrote a number of encyclopedia essays on Italian topics, mostly sketches of cities. (63) From an observer of the woes and welfare of women and children, she became an active reformer, sponsoring creches, kindergartens, and secular schooling, and succoring scores of wretched wives, woebegone daughters, and abandoned infants. The orphan asylum she helped found in Florence aimed to promote "the better education of women, which may teach Italian females to respect themselves by compelling men to respect them." The Marshes thought this asylum was "doing more permanent good than any other charity" they supported. (64)

By the time she left Italy, after GPM's death in 1882, CCM felt sanguine that civil marriage and coeducation were beginning to mitigate the ingrained disparities of privilege, power, propriety, and position so damaging to women and men alike. The Lega promotrice degli interessi femminile, founded by Anna Maria Mozzoni in 1881, was a major milestone in the emancipation of Italian women. (65) Separate schooling, in America as in Italy, seemed to both Marshes a major source of these evils. Far from making boys manly and keeping girls safe, segregated education debased both sexes, Their hearts hardened and their sensibilities deadened, men held aloof from matters of hearth and home, "devolving exclusively upon women the burden of domestic duties, parental responsibilities, and personal charities." As in New England half a century earlier, male-only schooling made no provision for social training, scarcely any for moral. "Youths are deprived of the humanizing influences of domestic life," wrote GPM, "and the young man comes out of the hands of his professors a coarser, a more unsocial, too often a more vicious, being than the mother's boy he has grown out of." (66)

Men and women were of course not the same, but "we know next to nothing at all about the relative powers and capacities of the two sexes." Nothing could be known until we "make woman legally and socially the peer of man, afford her equal if not identical means of education, give free scope" to her talents, and break down the "brazen network of arbitrary institutions which has everywhere enchained them. " (67) As CCM said to General Menabrea, "nature had made wide differences between men and women ... It should be the object of education to bring them nearer together rather than to increase these differences." (68) She might have echoed her neighbor Manzoni's condemnation of Italian men: "The whole question of the differences and similarities between the two sexes will never be clarified, nor even properly put, as long as it is only discussed formally in men's writings, because all men are guilty either of fawning gallantry or of gross hostility toward women." (69)

Confident in discourse with men and women alike, CCM was blessed with a wholly congenial marriage. The daily invalid care she needed was always gladly given and gratefully received; in return, GPM's niece never "knew a husband who depended more entirely on a wife." (70) In his last year he penned a "loving and reverential" dedication "To my deaf wife who devoted to me her youth and beauty and has given me her maturer age, having been, for more than forty years, my ever faithful and most affectionate companion, my wisest counsellor and my most efficient aid." (71)

CCM's indomitable spirit sustained her, on her return to America after his death in 1882, for another nineteen years. She kept up with Italian friends and causes, gathered materials for a biography of her husband, (72) learned Greek, studied philosophy, and wrote articles on American foreign policy and immigration for the New York Evening Post. Physically but not mentally incapacitated by a paralytic stroke in 1888, she died in 1901.

London

United Kingdom

ENDNOTES

I am grateful to Katerine Gaja and Pamela Neville-Sington for advice and encouragement, to Adriano Aymonino for correcting anachronistic translations, to Luisa Quarter-mainc for collaborative help, and to Margaret Mackenzie for a critique of the penultimate draft.

(1.) David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation (Seattle, 2003), 220-369.

(2.) Caroline Marsh, Una Americana alla cone dei Savoia: II diario dell' ambasciatrice degli Stati uniti in Italia dal 1861 al 1865, ed. David Lowenthal and Luisa Quartermaine (translator) (Turin, 2004). The original notebooks, entrusted to me by Caroline Marsh's great nieces in 1951, are in the Marsh Papers, Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont, Burlington. A typescript corrected (and sometimes bowdlerized) by Caroline Marsh in the 1880s is in the Crane Family Papers, Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. Luisa Quartermaine. "Views beyond the Alps: An American in Turin," in Margined Voices. Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History,. ed. Rachael Langford and Russell West (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1999), 61-77, draws extensively on CCM's diaries.

(3.) [Elizabeth Green Crane], Caroline Crane Marsh: A Life Sketch (Privately printed, c. 1902), 3-6.

(4.) CCM journal (subsequently Cj), 29 Dec. 1862, VII: 75.

(5.) Cj 31 July and 11 Dec. 1864, XV52-53, XVI: 59.

(6.) Cj 27 Feb. 1862, III:64

(7.) As an American, CCM differed from those English women who found "that their own sex was, in Italy, in many ways more liberated than at home" (Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom [London, 2005], 10).

(8) Cj 2 Jan. 1864, XIII: 4.

(9.) Cj 18 June 1861, I:7.

(10.) Cj 4 Nov. 1861, I:29.

(11.) Cj 4 Nov. 1864, XVI:29. GPM began his .scholarly career as a Gothicist devotee of Teutonic virtues, especially of the heroic Viking legacy, but came to share CCM's Latinate partiality. Earlier animadversions against lazy folk in "the sunny climes of Southern Europe" in essays like The Goths in New England (1845) (Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 52-61) gave way to praise for "the urbanities and amenities of mutual intercourse ... the courteous regard for the sensibilities and the self-respect of others, so characteristic of the Latin nations, which contrast so strongly with the bluff, if not brutal address of the Englishman, the offensive self-sufficiency of the German, and the rude self-assertion of the American" (Not Ab Unoe Societate Jesu [George P. Marsh], Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles [New York, 1876], 18-21, incorporating his subsequent handwritten additions in the copy in my possession).

(12.) Cj 21 June 1861,1:8-9.

(13.) Cj 24 and 27 Sept. 1863, XI:51, 55. 'Cur Marie' was a young Piobesan befriended by CCM's niece Carrie.

(14.)Britta Martens, "'Oh, a day in the city square, there is no such pleasure in life!': Robert Browning's portrayal of contemporary Italians," Browning Society Notes, 32 (March 2007): 4-16 at 4-5; Cavaliero, Italia Romantica, 207-8. The Brownings and the Marshes had become firm friends in Florence and Rome in 1853 and 1854, during and alter GPM's tenure as American minister to the Ottoman Empire. Devastated by EBB's death, just after their own return to Italy in 1861, CCM wrote: "we had always named her almost first when we talked of the pleasures of living in Italy" (Cj 30 July 1861, 1:25).

(15.) Anthony L. Cardoza, Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861 1930 (New York, 1997).

(16.) Cj 13 Jan. 1862,111:12.

(17.) Cj 14 June 1861, 1:5.

(18.) Codini, the term used for Piedmontese nobles, derived from their taste for little queues, pigtails aping King Victor Emmanuel I, after his return from exile in 1815.

(19.) Cj 3 June 1864, XV21-22.

(20.) Cj 19 March 1863, VIII41-42.

(21.) Massimo D'Azeglio, Things 1 Remember (1873), transl. E. R. Vincent (London, 1966), 6-7.

(22.) Cj 15 Jan. 1864, XI 11:2 1. Like most Piedmonese elite, the Contessa Castellani habitually conversed in French or in the local patois, "the most awful jargon in or out of Christendom," in a British ambassador's view (Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 261), echoed by CCM: "Oh that these unhappy Turinese had something like a language! If they try to speak French, they speak bad Italian--if Italian, bad French, and one is left to divine at least half of what they would say" (Cj 14 June 1861, 1:5).

(23.) Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, "When did New England women acquire literacy?" William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 48 (1991): 50-67; Nancy F. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood: 'Women's Sphere' in New England, 1780-1835, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1997), 101-25. Owing in part to evangelical Protestants who equated Christian virtues with female traits, "white women in [early national] New England seem to have been the most literate in the Western world" (Linda K. Kerber, " 'Why should girls he learn'd and wise': The unfinished work of Alice Mary Baldwin" [1993], in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women [Chapel Hill, 19971, 224-58 at 237).

(24.) George P. Marsh, "The education of women," The Nation, 3 (1866): 166. Even anticlerical liberals kept Italian women in their place (Alice Kelikian, "Science, gender, and moral ascendancy in liberal Italy," Journal of Modern Italian Studies 1 [1995]: 377-89).

(25.) George P Marsh, handwritten addition to his Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles, 216.

(26.) Cj 5 June 1864, XV:25.

(27.) Cj 22 June 1863,X:7-8.

(28.) Cj 29 Nov. 1862, VII55; 29 Mar. 1863, VlII:58-60.

(29.) Cj 14 Jan. 1863, VII84; 4 Feb. 1863, VIII: 10.

(30.) Magda Martini, Une reine. du Second Empire; Marie Laetitia Bonaparte-Wyse (Geneva. 1957), 115.

(31.) Cj 29 Mar. 1863, VI1I59.

(32.) Oppert quoted in Frederic Loliee, Women of the Second Empire: Chronicles of the Court of Napoleon III, transl. Alice M. Iviny (London, 1907), 81. In fact Mme. Rattazzi was still nursing her daughter Isabella-Roma, born 1871. See Marie Studolmine Letizia de Solms, afterwards Rattazzi, Rattazzi et son temps, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881-87); Denis Mack Smith, Italy and Its Monarchy (New Haven, 1988), 36.

(33.) Cj 22 March 1862, IV:7.

(34.) Cj 8 Jan. 1864,XIII:9-10.

(35.) Solms letter to Count Henri d'Ideville, March 1860, in d'Ideville, Journal d'un Diplomate en Italic. Vol. I. Turin 1859-1862, 2nd ed. (Pans, 1872), 106-7.

(36.) Cj 23 Feb. 1864, XIII57.

(37.) Cj 1 June 1863, IX:51-52.

(38.) W. W. Story to J. R. Lowell, 11 Feb. 1853, in Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston, 1903), 1: 254-57; Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 326.

(39.) Cj 12 June 1864, XV:32.

(40.) Barbara Welter, "The cult of true womanhood," .American Quarterly 18 (Summer [966): 151-74; Linda K. Kerber, "Separate spheres, female worlds, woman's place: the rhetoric of women's history," Journal, of American History 75 (1988); 9-39, reprinted in her Toward an Intellectual History of Women, 159-99.

(41.) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy m America, 2 vols. (1840; New York, 1945), 2; 211-14.

(42.) Kerber, Toward an intellectual History of Women, 1 60 61 n.

(43.) Anne Royall, Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States by a Traveller (New Haven, 1826), quoted in John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility in Nineteenth Century Urban America (New York, 1990), 117; see also 127-37.

(44.) Henrietta Stratton Jacquette, ed., Letters of Cornelia Hancock from the Army of the Po tomac, 1863-1865 (Philadelphia, 1937), quoted in Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York, 1994), 67-68; sec also 197-201.

(45.) E. R. Vincent, preface, in D'Aicglio, 1 hings I Remember, x.

(46.) D'Ideville, Journal, 1: 234-48; Bettino Ricasoli, Diario, in his Carteggio, ed. Mario Nobile and Sergio Camerani, vol 7, 1827-1859 (Rome, 1953), 156-85, 229-34. The Marshes, who admired Ricasoli's rigid rectitude, discounted this story.

(47.) Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 381-85.

(48.) Cj 30 Jan. 1862; 111:31.

(49.) Cj 3 March 1862, IV:5-4. St. Clement's letter to the Corinthians exhorts "young men to do things that are modest" but says nothing about women and bravery; Homily 49 of the Gospel of St. John, verse 18, says only "teach men to be modest." Brave women figure in Chinese, Islamic, and Swedenborgian philosophy. CCM echoes a feminist re joinder to Alexander Pope's misogyny: "Strangers to Reason and Reflection made; / Left to their passions, and by them betray'd / If wealthy born, taught to lisp French and dance, / Their morals left, Lucretius like, to chance / In education, all the difference lies / WOMEN, it taught, would be as brave, as wise, / As haughty man, improv'd by arts and rules. ... ' (attributed to Mary Wortley Montagu, 1759, in Maty Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination [\ 799; reprint, Washington, DC, 1998], 59; verse order slightly altered). The same poem, entitled "On Pope's Char acters of Women, by a Lady," is in American Museum 11 (June 1792), quoted in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women. 242.

(50.) George P. Marsh, "Female education in Italy" [review of Mozzoni, Un Passo avanti nella Cultura Femminile (Milan, 1866)], The Nation, 3 (July 5, 1866): 5-7.

(51.) Cj 18 Dec, 1861,11:60.

(52.) Cj 14 Feb. 1862,111:48.

(53.) Cj 31 Jan. 1862,111:32.

(54.) Cj 20 Jan. 1862,111:20-22.

(55.) Cj 12 Nov. 1862,V1L34.

(56.) Cj 22 Jan. 1862,111:23-24. Marchese Cusani died later the same year.

(57.) Luke 18: 10-14.

(58.) Cj 22 June 1863, X:7-8. Wives in America often felt confined by marriage too (Francoise Basch, "Women's lights and the wrongs of marriage in mid-nineteenth-century America," History Workshop Journal 22 [Autumn 1986J: 18-40; Cott, Bonds of Woman hood, 78-83).

(59.) Cj 2 July 1863, X: 19.

(60.) Cj 20 June I863,X:5-6.

(61.) The lamed gynecologist J. Marion Sims successfully excised what proved to he a benign tumor from her womb, in Paris in 1866; CCM regained her vision after thirty years thanks to an oculist in Coblenz in 187 3, and promptly reread what she had last been able to read in 1843, the first Ode of Horace.

(62.) T. Adolphus Trollope, What J Remember (New York, 1888), 530-3 1.

(63.)Perennially short of money, both Marshes were paid $20 a page by Johnson's New Universal Cyclopedia, 4 vols. (New York, 1874-78), of which GPM was associate editor. CCM's geographical-historical pieces were on Milan, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Palest-rina. Pavia, Ravenna, Siena, Syracuse, Turin, and Venice; she also wrote on Pompeii, the Falls of Terni, and Tivoli. Her other essays dealt with Mosaic, the reformer Savonarola, the poet l.eopardi, and the Vermont-born, Florence-based sculptor Hiram Powers.

(64.) George P. Marsh to Charles Eliot Norton, Apr. 1881; to Franklin P. Nash, 14 July 1876; Collegio Ferretti (Protestant Orphanage for Girls), Report of the Executive Committee for the Year /882 (Florence, 1 883), all in Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh 384.

(65.) Lucia Chiavola Birnhaum, Liberazione delle donna: Feminism in Italy (Middletown, CT, 1986), 13-25; Silvia Franchini, Elites ed educazione femminile nell' Italia deli' Ottocento (Florence. 1993), 434-86; Ester de Fort, La seuola elementare dall' urita alla caduta del fascismo (Bologna, 1996), 113-97.

(66.) G. P. Marsh, "Female education in Italy." GPM's feminist argument is far more force in] than those of (diaries G. Finney and James H. Fairchild, pioneer presidents of Oberlin College, America's first coeducational institution of higher education (Ronald W. Hogeland, "Coeducation of the sexes at Oberlin College: a study of social ideas in mid-nineteenth-century America," Journal of Social History 6(2) [1972-73]: 160-76).

(67.) G. P. Marsh, "Female education in Italy."

(68.) Cj 15 March 1862, IV:4.

(69.) Alessandro Manzoni, Fermo e Lucia (1821-23; Florence, 1985), 100, transl. in Verina R. Jones, "Lucia and her sisters: women in Alessandro Manzonfs / promessi sposi" in Zygmunt G. Baranski and Shirley W. Vincell, eds., Women in Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History (New York, 1991), 209-23 at 209.

(70.) Susan Edmunds to CCM, 6 July 1883, in Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 378.

(71.) Dedication in George P. Marsh, Lectures' on the English Language. First Series, rev. edition (New York, 1885), iii.

(72.) The first volume of CCM's Life and Letters of George Perkins Marsh (New York, 1888) covered his career up to 1861; her stoke prevented completion of the second volume.

By David Lowenthal

University College London