SOURCE: “Alfieri between France and Italy as Reflected in the Vita,” in Voltaire, the Enlightenment and the Comic Mode, edited by Maxine G. Cutler and Peter Lang, 1990, pp. 215-39.

In the following essay, Ragusa closely examines Alfieri's autobiography, focusing on the author's perceptions of French culture.

Alfieri first saw Paris in mid-August 1787 at the end of a precipitous trip from Marseilles which took him across the better part of France in little more than a week. He had spent a month in Marseilles, anxious to avoid travelling in the excessive heat of July and attracted by that city's “cheerful aspect, new, well laid out, clean streets, beautiful corso, beautiful harbor, [and] graceful, lively women” (III 4)¹—“ses femmes, si jolies et agaçantes,” in the words of the anonymous translation of the Vita, his autobiography, into French.² This is the very translation from which Chateaubriand quotes in his own...