California Italian Studies

Italy’s finest poet at the twilight of the Renaissance, Torquato Tasso (1544–95), has long been cast as the lionized icon of lonely genius, absorbed into a Romantic fantasy of torturous exile and withheld community. The figure of “mad Tasso,” however, misses key points in the historical poet’s dynamically social literary career, in which Tasso’s immersion in poetic communities prompted novel reflections about history, place, time, and belonging. Rome uniquely served as a catalyst for Tasso’s reflections on these very themes. A new kind of patria to which to direct the encomiastic voice of his late literary production, Rome became the subject of much of Tasso’s writings in the final three years of his life. With an eye toward the city’s classical heritage, Tasso composed a series of lyric, dialogic, epistolary, and epic experiments designed to immortalize the image of “Roma celeste” (celestial Rome) and the urban renovation projects that redefined its cityscape. This essay analyzes the forms of accoglienza Rome extended towards Tasso, outlined in the twinned lights of literary hospitality and readerly patronage, particularly as they evoke the poet’s collaborations with the Aldobrandini family and its Vatican literary academy.