Dante and Italy in British Romanticism

Italy's physical ruins, fragments that are emblematic of its broken national unity, its history of conflict and possibility, provide analogues for revolutionary Europe's conquest by the forces of reaction, and, these same ruins make Italy the pre-eminent site of "beginnings to which one can go back." [...]Hemans's engagement with Dante produces a re-inscription of his verse that questions the nature and aptness of the act of inscription itself"(130). [...]afterwards he makes no response-the canto ends with her words and the next begins with further, different encounters. [...]at the heart of La Pia's speech is her famous, arching, almost palindromic line, "Siena mi disß cemi Maremma, " which sums up her life, from birth to death in five words. In the closing two lines La Pia defends herself against claims that she was no more than the mistress of the man who killed her, as if the loss of worldly reputation still mattered to her. [...]she asks to be remembered ("ricorditi di me"), in a context where prayers for the dead are repeatedly emphasised: the souls Dante meets in Purgatory want the world to know what happened to them, how and where they died, but solely in order that prayers will be said for them (see, for instance, Purgatorio 5, 67-72).