Notes on the Shelleys’ North-Western Passage to Italy

This paper deals with the Shelleys’ first physical impact with Italy, focussing on their experience of the borders they crossed when entering the peninsula through Mont Cenis. Their mostly negative reaction to the Kingdom of Sardinia, which in the course of the century would lead the process of Italian unification, invites reflection on how the reality of border controls and territorial fragmentation interacted with Romantic idealized notions of the Italian state, which as yet had no actual political existence.