A voyage into Catholicism: Irish travel to Italy in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The analysis of travel writing and Italy has often focused on the beauty, the history and the heritage of the country; this essay argues that religion was a key element in depictions of the country and that this was especially the case for Irish writers. Italy was a conflictual site for Irish religious debates in the nineteenth century and narratives of Italian travel developed against the background of Irish sectarian religious tensions in this era. This article shows how the Irish accounts of travel to Italy divided along religious lines and how it is crucial to understand Irish travel in the light of the tense religious dynamic of the period. Travel to Italy represented a divergent and influential experience of Catholicism for Irish travellers and Irish travel writing in the nineteenth century accommodated both anti-Catholic views and an emerging counter-narrative penned by indignant Catholic clerical writers.

Keywords:

• Italy
• religion
• Roman Catholicism
• travel
• sectarianism
• Ireland

Notes

1 On the rare occasion when religion is considered as, for example, in Stabler (2003), the conclusions drawn that travel and contacts herald “the revaluation of Italian Catholics as a worthy British cause” which “predicts the ‘worship’ of Garibaldi” (33–34) are completely at odds with the religious and political realities of the Risorgimento and with Anglo-Italian relations in which anti-Catholicism was in fact a driving force behind support for Italian unification and Garibaldi. For an analysis of the position of religion in Anglo-Italian relations in this period, see Carter (2015) and for Catholicism and Early Victorian writing, see Fisher (2012).

2 This publication must also be viewed through a number of authorial layers: Francis Mahony (also known by his satirical nom-de-plume, Fr. Prout) put down as the author of the work the fictitious Don Jeremy Savonarola, Benedictine Monk. In so doing, he invoked many shades of Catholic rebellion – this publication was certainly not a straightforward Benedictine publication, in fact Mahony had trained as a Jesuit. For the history of Mahony’s work on Italy, see Dunne (2009).

3 Many of these letters are preserved in the Cullen and Kirby archives of the Pontifical Irish College in Rome. The catalogues to these archives are available at http://www.irishcollege.org/archive/online-catalogues/