California Italian Studies

Rediscovered in fascist Italy, when Cuoco’s epistolary novel was read in a nationalist and anti-Jacobenean key, or even as the allegorical anticipation of Mussolini’s Italian imperialism, Plato in Italy is today regarded as a minor literary work to be quickly forgotten and archived as the pathological allegory of all the evils of Italian nationalism. By focusing on the figure of the Mediterranean, the reading proposed by this essay aims at re-reading Plato in Italy in a figural, rather than allegorical, way: its goal is to question canonical interpretations of the novel by restituting Cuoco’s nationalism to its radically anti-authoritarian logics.