Golden Days. Artisti Americani in Toscana all’inizio del Novecento

American cosmopolitan culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reflected in visual media, offering an image of Italy and Tuscany as complex and faceted as its literary equivalent. Thus for every kind of expatriate intellectual, turning towards Italy meant sharing a “sentimental pilgrimage”. This essay makes a series of comparisons drawn from both the genre of illustrations for travel literature — which saw an extraordinary revival after its eighteenth- century beginnings — and the work of artists tied by strong bonds of friendship and common points of view with writers, as in the celebrated friendship between John Singer Sargent and Henry James. This provides the occasion for an unpublished study of Tuscan artistic and critical culture of the period, showing the involvement of Anglo-American foreigners and their most cosmopolitan counterparts such as Carlo Placci and Ugo Ojetti; new light is also cast on Anglo-Saxon publishers (Heinemann, The Century, et al.)