Balaguer, the Grand Tour and Models of New Freedoms in Europe: The Italian Myth and its (Un)Viability

Abstract

This paper analyses the paradox which the model of Italian unification exerted on Víctor Balaguer. On one hand, Italy’s Risorgimento, along with everything that it represented culturally and symbolically, was an inescapable part of the cultural Grand Tour for young and cultured individuals of the period. On the other hand, the movement’s centralising and standardising approach ought to have been rejected by the Catalan writer, who was a champion of local freedoms, particularly the freedoms of the old regimes. Nevertheless, Víctor Balaguer repeatedly defended Italian “unitarism” throughout his lifetime.