Roman Revolution and Risorgimento (1848-1870)

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Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a US senator and a member of the New England transcendentalists. After working as the editor of the Dial, she became the New York Tribune's first female correspondent. She and her editor, Horace Greeley, traveled to Rome where she married Marquis Giovanni Ossoli and participated in the Roman Revolution (1848-49).  Click on the portrait for her essay: "Woman in the Nineteenth-Century" (1843).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning eloped with Robert Browning to Italy in 1846. She spent the remainder of her life living in Florence at her Casa Guidi opposite of the Grand Ducal Palazzo Pitti. She supported the cause of Italian independence and the expulsion of the Austrian Habsburg rulers of Tuscany. Click on the portrait for her "Casa Guidi Windows" (1851).

Harriet Hosmer traveled to Rome where she studied sculpture under John Gibson. She was among a number of women sculptors in Rome whom Henry James referred to as the "marmorean flock." She created portraits of famous heroines, queen and American politicians. She also created a bronze sculpture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning's Clasped Hands (1853). Click on her portrait for links to collections that include her works.

Hawthorne traveled to Italy where he wrote his French and Italian Notebooks and novel, The Marble Faun, inspired by Praxiteles Satyr in the Capitoline Museum, Rome 

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Story's Cleopatra inspired Hawthorne's novel, The Marble Faun, in which a young sculpture student creates  a statue of Cleopatra.

(Click on the picture above)

Guiseppe Garibaldi was one of the leaders of Italian independence.  He fought with Mazzini during the Roman Revolution of 1848. He became a general in the second war of Italian Independence of 1859.  He was asked by Abraham Lincoln to fight for the Union forces in America.

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning lived here after their elopement to Italy in 1846.

Powers maintained a studio in Florence where he created his most famous work, The Greek Slave. The work is inspired by the Venus de Medici, also located in Florence in the Galleria Uffizi in Florence.

William Wetmore Story occupied an apartment on the piano nobile where he entertained members of the Anglo-Italian circle. His daughter, Edith, married a Medici, Marquis Simone Peruzzi de Medici.

Story carved this monument for his wife's grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. Established by the Stuart Court in exile at the foot of the Pyramid of Cestius, famous Americans and British authors and artists are buried there, including English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.

The Shelley-Keats House is located at the Spanish Steps in Rome, and is open to the public as a historical society.

Hawthorne mentions the sculpture in the novel The Marble Faun, Chapter 13.

 "Ah, this is very beautiful!" exclaimed Miriam, with a genial smile. "It is as good in its way as Loulie's hand with its baby dimples, which Powers showed me at Florence, evidently valuing it as much as if he had wrought it out of a piece of his great heart. As good as Harriet Hosmer's clasped hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives! Nay, I do not question that it is better than either of those, because you must have wrought it passionately, in spite of its maiden palm and dainty fingertips."