The Gothic in nineteenth-century Italy

Is there an Italian Gothic of the nineteenth century? At first glance, the question may appear redundant, particularly for Anglophone readers accustomed to associating Italy not just with the Grand Tourists and nostalgic antiquarianism of the eighteenth century, but also with the imaginative geography of the Gothic canon, the cultural and topological setting of masterpieces such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the novels of Ann Radcliffe, from A Sicilian Romance (1790) to The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796–7), to mention just two authors linked by a pervasive interdiscursive and intertextual Italophile network. Given its deeper implications, my opening question should therefore be broadened and qualified: was there an indigenous or autochthonous Gothic in nineteenth-century Italy, a local reworking of English (and perhaps also Continental) forms and models – a Gothic ‘under the sun’, so to speak, capable of exercising its aesthetic and thematic influence at a supranational level?