Yeats and Renaissance Italy

The focus of this chapter is Renaissance Italy as a model for art, for society, and for relations between the two. Yeats did not speak Italian. The two Italian writers most important to him, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Count Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), author of Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) (1528), he read in translation. Unlike James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Yeats spent comparatively little time in Italy. In May 1907, with Lady Gregory and her son Robert, he visited Ravenna, Urbino, Ferrara, Venice, and Florence. In January–February 1925 he toured southern Italy and Sicily, where he absorbed the Byzantine mosaics in Monreale Cathedral, and completed A Vision. From 1928 to 1930 he wintered in Rapallo, where Pound had settled. But Yeats’s very distance from contemporary Italy, apart from (or exemplified by) his erratic gestures towards Mussolini, may have protected the mythic presence of older ‘Italies’ in his work.