I can't help but think of Radcliffe's The Italian, and really this entire section of literature in general, as it compares with An Italian Affair and other texts like it. Truthfully, is it not misusing Italy in a similar manner? Granted, the writing itself is significantly better, empty as it is of lines such as "In the middle of the night I was woken up by a mosquito and found myself already crying." However, similar crimes are committed by Radcliffe: that characters act in unnatural ways and, deeper than that, Italy becomes a place where "something" happens. In commercial fiction, that "something" is romance and passion and finding, ultimately, finding oneself. Here, it's a place in which danger can occur--danger brought on by the supernatural and danger brought on by some kind of dark love.
I don't say this to lessen the Gothic or The Italian in any way. However, it's important to recognize the interesting parallel and consider how we've twisted it (and degraded it?) in modern writing. Whereas we once wrote about a man preying upon a younger woman, typically with some kind of barrier (status, religion, relationships, etc.) between them and a heavy sense of danger painted into the "Italian" scenery, we now write about a woman using a man for her own purposes (finding herself, forgetting her ex-husband, the usual), often with an Italian background that is so flat and immobile it is similarly unrecognizable. The question, I think, is whether we can really consider one inherently more Italian/true to Italy than the other, if both emphasize very specific elements of Italian culture rather than Italy as a whole.
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