Madame de Staël was born in Paris into a wealthy and influential family, the daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s Minister of Finance. After an early education shaped by the years of the French Revolution and her formative engagement with the liberal principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she became famous for hosting one of the most important literary and artistic salons of Ancien Régime Paris. Before long, her salon became a hub for the development of ideas that, more or less openly, irritated Napoleon. He had already made himself known to Madame de Staël, who, at least initially, had been able to appreciate and admire the “incomparable” qualities of the young Corsican.

With the publication of the novel Delphine in 1803—which helped define the prototype of a free-spirited and determined woman capable of fighting against prejudice and the suffering of love—the author gained significant notoriety. However, this success fuelled Napoleon’s hostility, ultimately forcing her to flee from Paris. She embarked on travels between Germany and Italy, which proved crucial for the development of works such as Corinne, ou l’Italie(1807) and De l’Allemagne (1810), where a burgeoning Romantic sensibility merges with extensive reflections on thought and art.

In some of her works published after her exile, drawing on the ideas of Diderot and Montesquieu, she argued for the existence of slow and steady progress capable of leading thought and the arts toward perfection. She also described the impact of environment and climate on the development of different literary traditions, ultimately deducing the superiority of Northern civilisations over those of the South. After various travels across European countries and a late return to France, she died in Paris in 1817.

Yet, from another perspective, her relationship with Mediterranean culture—though deeply imbued with Romantic sensitivity—remained significant. Indeed, in Delphine, Italy is a persistent, albeit indirect, presence, frequently woven into events surrounding the protagonist. The character of Madame l’Albémar, for instance, comments on her intention to visit Tuscany—a place she had seen in childhood and recalled several times, though with contradictory feelings: “To Tuscany? Why?” she replied. “I would be quite upset to go to Italy: it was when my mother so dearly loved that country that we were most unhappy.”

The encounter with Italy remains pivotal, as seen in Corinne, not only for staging a sentimental drama but also for the artistic growth of the author. While cities like Venice and Bologna evoke only melancholic reflections due to the protagonist’s love story, the imagined (but never personally experienced) landscapes of Maremma allow the writer to focus on “the true pleasure of listening even to those from the lowest classes”—for listening, in its spontaneity, exposes the illusion “of believing oneself in a nation where all individuals would be equally educated.”

The grandeur of Rome, which reveals a “world animated by sentiment, without which the world itself is a desert,” is not enough to obscure the city’s true reality, which, as Leopardi himself observed, is uniquely capable of displaying “the grim spectacle of misery and decay.”

Yet, in keeping with the author’s Romantic vision, this decay is also an opportunity for knowledge. As she writes: “A broken column, a half-destroyed bas-relief, stones arranged with the indestructible technique of ancient architects—these remind us that within man there exists an eternal power, a divine spark, which we must never tire of rekindling within ourselves and igniting in others.”

The pleasure of listening and perceiving natural beauty in the Tuscan landscape appears so powerful—at least in the eyes of a protagonist in a state of sentimental exaltation—that it even evokes, in a longing for harmony, the classical world and Athens itself. Tuscan expressions, “full of imagination and elegance, give the idea of the pleasure one might have felt before the villas of Athens, when the people spoke Greek so harmoniously that it was like continuous music.”

However, the author’s reflections turn out to be far less flattering, as she notes: “The swampy, unhealthy lands of the North announce themselves with their terrifying appearance, but in the most fatal regions of the South, nature maintains a deceptive serenity, whose gentle illusion misleads the traveller.”