SOURCE: “Vittorio Alfieri and the United States of America,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, December, 1971, pp. 310-16.

In the following essay, Lebano examines Alfieri's Odes to Free America and speculates on Alfieri's political interest in American democracy.

The works of Vittorio Alfieri that contain numerous references to America and its people are the political treatises Della tirannide and Del principe e delle lettere¹ and, particularly, the five odes that the Italian dramatist published with the title Odi per l'America libera (Odes to Free America). But although Italian and foreign scholars have written extensively on Alfieri's political works, very little has been said about the poems celebrating the newly acquired independence of the American people.² If the critics' lack of interest is due in large part to the scanty aesthetic value of the Odi, it cannot be completely justified, since these odes constitute indeed an important historical and...