«From the Old World to the New»: Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy and Samuel Rogers’s Italy

Mary Shelley’s last work is a travel account on her return to Italy two decades after Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia. This essay explores the numerous yet little studied links between Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844) and the illustrated Italy, A Poem (1830) by Samuel Rogers, to whom Shelley’s travelogue is dedicated: the two works also share the same publisher. Shelley’s aesthetic recounting of the Alps, Lake Como, and Venice is thus examined in relation to Italy and Turner’s vignettes to the poem, explicitly cited in Rambles with regard to Venice. The analysis can shed light on the changes and similarities in British travel to Italy in the first half of the XIX century, with further reference to Lady Montagu, Lady Morgan, and Frances Trollope.