The ideal of romantic love in post-unification Italy

In nineteenth-century Italy, the diffusion of the ideal of romantic love appears to have been closely intertwined with the rise of the national patriotic movement.⁹ Strongly influenced in their ideals by Romanticism, the Risorgimento elites were committed not only to shaping the political, economic and social contours of the new-born Italian state but also to spreading a new emotional and sexual morality. In the aftermath of unification, the institution of marriage was beset by a series of tensions, such as the debate around the civil rite introduced in 1865 by the first Italian civil code, the so-called ‘Pisanelli code’, the proposed divorce law and the socialist propaganda of free love.¹⁰

Conceiving of the family as the link in a wider chain of parental ties, the post-unification bourgeoisie felt the need to secure the stability of Italian society and reaffirm the centrality of marriage as an institution, rejecting divorce and the search for paternity and extending marital authorization to the entire peninsula.¹¹ Among the motivations behind this stance was adherence to the ideals of romantic love. National patriotic rhetoric had in fact insisted on the idea that at the basis of every good marriage there should be a strong love bond. In contrast to the habits of the aristocracies of the ancien régime whereby marriages tended to be arranged, the Italian bourgeoisie was convinced that only a marriage for love would guarantee a future of happiness for individuals and, consequently, a future of prosperity and peace for the entire nation. Paolo Mantegazza can undoubtedly be counted among the ranks of those who committed themselves, in the aftermath of unification, to drawing the contours of the new society or, in other words, to ‘making Italians’. Elected first as a deputy (1865) and later as a senator of the kingdom (1875), during his career Mantegazza devoted his scientific investigation to improving the living conditions of the citizens of the newly formed Italian state, showing a particular interest in issues related to their sexuality and affectivity. Trained as a physician, he began his career by engaging in the study of hygiene, writing works that variously fell into the genre of so-called guides to ‘matrimonial hygiene’. Together with Igiene dell’amore (Hygiene of Love) (1877), a compendium and deepening of his other earlier works such as Fisiologia del piacere (Physiology of Pleasure) (1854) and Elementi di igiene (Elements of Hygiene) (1865), Mantegazza wrote the famous Fisiologia dell’amore (Physiology of Love) (1873).

In this work, he undertakes a detailed analysis of love as a ‘feeling’ from a philosophical and psychological point of view. Focusing mainly on European civilization, Mantegazza describes a feeling that largely mirrored the characteristics underlying the ideal of romantic love. A deep and all-embracing bond between a man and a woman, the presence of a space in which it was possible to have (within certain limits) a free experience of sexuality and pleasure, and recognition of the need – for both men and women – to choose their partner in complete freedom were the elements that characterized the bond that should underlie matrimonial relationships for him. Moreover, Mantegazza deemed love to be the ‘prince of affections’.¹² In his view, it was a profound feeling that, in its highest form, involved an individual in all aspects. Therefore, in line with the scientific trends of the central decades of the nineteenth century, Mantegazza divided psychic phenomena into the three classes of ‘senses’, ‘feelings’ and ‘thoughts’, considered as the main components of human beings.¹³ Thus, while it was true that there were types of love that intersected, the apex of human affectivity – or what Mantegazza called ‘perfect love’ – could only be achieved through the perfect harmony of all three elements.

In the book, Mantegazza goes on to advocate the adoption of the new emotional paradigm by the couples of the new-born Italian state. In doing so, he addressed himself primarily to the female audience or, as he called them at the opening of the work, ‘the daughters of Eve’.¹⁴ His readers expressed great enthusiasm for the work, addressing letters to Mantegazza through which they described their adherence to the new emotional paradigm in its various aspects, including those more related to the body and eroticism. His targeting of female readers was in line with the conviction of the time that women were naturally closer to the sphere of feelings and affections. Whereas men were generally associated with the public sphere, with matters related to politics, economics and civil society, women were to be seen as the queens of the affections, those who had to take care of the domestic sphere related to the family and raising children.

Women, therefore, were for Mantegazza a kind of specialist in the field of feelings. Unlike men, who were more inclined to stop superficially at the aesthetics of forms, in love relationships women were more often capable of achieving what we have seen described as ‘perfect love’. The woman, in fact,

can hardly ever love without esteem … This difference alone is enough to show that in the psychic evolution of the two sexes woman advances us in the aesthetics of feeling than we advance her in intellectual development. Woman has already reached perfect love, which is the fusion of all human elements, which is the election of elections; we also see in the lover and the bride the concubine … In love we are more often disciples than masters in the field of feelings.¹⁵

Without any doubt, even if women were deemed to be specialists in feelings, it was still Mantegazza – a white bourgeois man – who drew the guidelines of amorous affection. At the same time, however, female readers’ responses show that it was becoming a widely shared emotional ideal – by both men and women – to such an extent that one could suggest the emergence in the nineteenth century of an ‘emotional community’ sharing the same understanding of love.¹⁶

Mantegazza therefore conducted a real campaign in support of romantic love and marriage by free choice. As will be seen later, in the scientific investigations conducted throughout his career, the ideal of romantic love constituted one of the cornerstones of his sexual science, continuing to represent the interpretative framework within which he developed his interests in human sexuality, even when he orientated them towards non-Western populations. Before looking at this, it is perhaps worth considering how, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the ideal of romantic love was adhered to in scientific discourse by a number of scholars, including Mantegazza.

The influence of romantic love at the roots of sexual science

In the nineteenth century, sexual science emerged alongside anthropology. The parallel development of these two disciplines favoured the creation of close interconnections between issues such as race and sexuality, an aspect of both fields of study that has only recently begun to be explored.¹⁷ From this perspective, Mantegazza represents an interesting example of this interconnection. Known as the father of Italian anthropology and a scientist of sexuality, he stands at the crossroads of this process of disciplinary and epistemological development. Mantegazza in fact grounded his sexual science in his anthropological method. Although he intended the anatomical and biological component of humans as the starting point of his investigation, he was convinced that at the same time it was also necessary to investigate its psychological, social and cultural aspects. Therefore, even in his analysis of human sexuality, he adopted an all-encompassing perspective, which included not only the physiological mechanics of reproduction but also the investigation of human sexual behavioural habits set in their social and cultural context.

From this perspective, human psychology, and within it the sphere of feelings, represented one of the most important aspects of the human which needed to be investigated through the analysis of its manifestations. Certainly, Mantegazza did not deny the physiological origin of psychic phenomena, convinced that they were no different from other physical forces ‘except for the forms in which they manifest themselves and the special organs that produce them’.¹⁸ However, he believed that science at the time was not yet sufficiently advanced in the histological analysis of the human brain, so he considered it inevitable that the psyche would be studied through ‘external and apparent acts, actions and works’, pursuing a comparative study of human behaviours.¹⁹

In the psychological study of the emotions, Mantegazza was strongly influenced by the scientific trends of the time, not only by the studies of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who wrote the Principles of Psychology (1855)²⁰ but above all by the research carried out by Charles Darwin who, in 1872, published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one year before Mantegazza’s Fisiologia dell’amore.²¹ Although throughout 1871 Mantegazza repeatedly noted in his diary the need to focus on writing his book, it was not until September 1872 that it took shape. In particular, in December of the same year, Mantegazza noted that he had ‘read Darwin’s last work’ and immediately afterwards that he wrote ‘68 pages of the Physiology of Love’ followed by the note ‘I revise them all and send them to the printer’,²² suggesting that Darwin’s work did indeed have some influence on the drafting of his book. Like the English scientist, Mantegazza was convinced that complex emotions such as love were the result of a long evolutionary process. Thus, not only were elementary expressions of the emotions to be found in animals but European civilization, considered to be the most advanced, carried forward – or rather had to tend towards – its most advanced forms. In essence, both Mantegazza and Darwin regarded romantic love as the apex of the emotionality of living beings, for which the study of the feeling in its earlier stages of evolution would be useful. For this reason, they were convinced that to study the earlier stages of the development of this emotion was necessary in order to fully understand its deeper meanings in contemporary times. The anthropologist wrote in this regard:

if the anatomist and the physiologist, in the study of generation in the various animals, find valuable materials for marking the highest laws of the morphology of living beings, the psychologist finds in the loves of the brutes sketched almost all the elements which man clutches under his robust wings.²³

Darwin, however, was also influential from another important point of view. By electing the sexual instinct as the main human drive, his theories also gave a great boost to scientific research on human sexuality. In fact, unlike in The Origin of Species (1859), in which he assigned only relative importance to it, in The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin gives crucial importance to sexual selection, an aspect also shared by Mantegazza who, after reading the work, coined the motto ‘to live means to generate’.²⁴ One of the fundamental characteristics of sexual selection as applied to the human species is its fundamental reliance on the ability of each individual to choose their partner – the partner they consider the best. It is precisely this element of ‘human agency’, which Mantegazza interestingly translates as ‘sexual choice’, that allows the species to evolve not only in terms of health but also in terms of morality. Supporting Darwin’s theory, Mantegazza defines love as one of the fundamental elements of human progress. On the one hand, it enabled the health of a species to be improved by choosing strong healthy individuals and discarding sick ones, but on the other, it also allowed the moral improvement of an entire society. Indeed, according to Mantegazza, ‘if tomorrow woman would only grant her love to the honest and hard-working man, if it were possible for man to love only the modest woman, we would see the human family regenerated in the course of a generation’.²⁵

Although Mantegazza differed from Darwin on the modalities of sexual selection,²⁶ he agreed with him on the fact that nature advocated the need to put individuals in the foreground, who are invested with the responsibility for the advancement of the species or the improvement of humanity. Following Darwin’s theories, Mantegazza was in fact going to give a scientific explanation to the citizens of post-unification Italy of the key element underlying the spread of romantic love, namely the free choice of a partner. However, the importance that the emotional paradigm of romantic love acquired in nineteenth-century society not only influenced the investigation of the mechanisms underlying human sexuality but also played an important role in directing the interest of anthropological research towards the various declinations assumed by marriage at a global level.

The sexuality of the so-called ‘primitives’

If, at first, Mantegazza’s interest seems to be focused on the way in which the feeling of love was understood within Western society, he soon orientated his interest towards the study of sexuality according to a broader perspective that also involved the so-called ‘savage’ populations, namely non-Western populations. Indeed, when Mantegazza published the Fisiologia dell’amore, he had recently moved to Florence where he obtained what is officially considered the first chair of anthropology in Italy. From that moment on, Mantegazza began to develop his anthropology and sexual science in parallel.

The interest in the sexuality of people deemed ‘primitive’ was not exclusive to the nineteenth century, but was a fundamental part of Europe’s colonial expansion and already established by the eighteenth century. Accounts of Other societies conveyed by white European travellers, missionaries, explorers, merchants and naturalists developed into stereotypical images concerning the sexual habits of non-European peoples which began to be more widely spread in Western culture. There are two main types of images concerning the sexuality of non-European peoples that became widespread.

Some of these representations emphasized the greater freedom and closeness to nature that supposedly characterized the sexual behaviour of so-called ‘primitive peoples’. The progenitor of this discursive strand is in many ways Denis Diderot’s (1713–84) book Addendum to the Journey of Bougainville (1772) in which he describes how the inhabitants of Tahiti – men and women – experienced their sexuality ‘without shame and without fear’,²⁷ thus fuelling the Western erotic imagination of the myth of a new Kythera – as Bougainville himself called it – an earthly Eden where the inhabitants lived ‘innocent and happy’ following ‘the pure instinct of nature’.²⁸

Other representations, on the other hand, showed the imagined ‘savage’ as an individual dominated by an animal sensuality that led them to commit the worst nefarious deeds and engage in the lowest sexual perversions. The discourse was primarily linked to the reflections of naturalists and anthropologists concerning the size of the genitals of non-Western populations, particularly Africans. Still influenced by legacies of ancient medicine, these scientists, largely educated as physicians, believed that if African men had, on average, larger penises than Western men, this must inevitably entail a greater erotic charge that would consequently condition their sexuality.²⁹ Albeit with different declinations, these images both emphasized that ‘primitive peoples’ possessed a greater degree of eroticism than Western populations and as such needed to be colonized and civilized to temper their ‘base’ feelings. During the nineteenth century, indeed, these stereotyped images crystallized within the scientific discourse of the time, contributing to the affirmation of the supposed biological inferiority of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ and thereby justifying colonialism and slavery. Both images occurred at length over the past centuries within Western culture and continue to constitute deeply rooted, and not yet completely eradicated, racist discourses on non-Western populations.³⁰

As is well known, exotic sexuality had a key role in shaping Western culture’s self-image as it was employed as a foil in constructing ideas about European sexual behaviours. During the nineteenth century, ‘primitive’ sexualities were mainly used in a comparative function to show the superiority of Western morality.³¹ Historians, including Doble and Ginsburgh in this volume, have demonstrated how in the colonial context the sexuality of the Other, especially that of Africans, was depicted as a threat to ‘white purity’.³² Africans were imagined as sexually excessive, lustful ‘savages’,³³ with the potential to subvert the colonial order through miscegenation and the blurring of racial boundaries.³⁴

When Mantegazza obtained the first chair in anthropology in Italy, he also ‘expanded’ his studies on human beings by exploring the so-called ‘savage races’. At the time, however, the emerging Italian anthropological discourse was not yet closely linked to colonial ambitions, which developed mainly during the 1880s. In the decades following Italian unification (1860s and 1870s), Mantegazza’s interest in the Other was still largely influenced by a romantic-liberal attitude that, based on a monogenism more dictated by his moral than scientific convictions, led the anthropologist to affirm the existence of a ‘universal human brotherhood’.³⁵ His concern was therefore to study ‘l’uomo e gli uomini’ (‘man and men’): not only the variations in human manifestations but also the features they have in common. Of course, this also concerned the emotional expressions associated with human sexuality and the emotional bonds derived from them. In his anthropology, in fact, Mantegazza also wanted to focus

on the mores, the feelings, the thoughts of all those men, yellow or black, who in regions so far from us and with almost nothing in common with our history, have nevertheless thought and struggled, enjoyed and mourned in the forest or desert, which nature has assigned them.³⁶

Although in the course of his career, Mantegazza undertook a few journeys himself – to South America between 1854 and 1858, to Lapland in 1879 and to India between 1881 and 1882 – his can mainly be described as an ‘armchair anthropology’, or a science that was not based on fieldwork as in the case of twentieth-century anthropology. Like many anthropologists at the time, in fact, to gather evidence of human sexual behaviour he mainly drew on the accounts of other anthropologists and scientists, travellers, explorers, traders and priests and on novels and works by classical authors. With regard to sexuality, the work in which he concentrates his research from an ethnological point of view is Gli amori degli uomini (Loves of Mankind) (1885–6). This work is thus a sort of large catalogue in which, interestingly, the attitudes of peoples considered ‘savage’, as well as those of past civilizations (particularly the classics), are described and compared with Western sexual behaviours.

The publication of the book came at an important moment in the history of Italian colonialism. Indeed, in the same year (1885) the so-called ‘overseas campaign’ received a considerable boost due to occupation of territories in the Horn of Africa that eventually went on to constitute the colony of Eritrea, the Italian colonia primogenita, officially recognized in 1889 with the Treaty of Wuchale. The last among European nations to participate in the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’, the fledgling Italian kingdom was driven primarily by economic purposes and the desire to join the circle of European powers. Nevertheless, the idea of ‘Oltremare’ (‘Overseas’) represented one of the great myths of liberal Italy, not only politically and economically but also culturally.³⁷ In the 1880s, indeed, Italian publications saw a flourishing of articles and accounts by scholars and travellers whose central theme was Africa.

Mantegazza, for his part, also sought to ride the wave of that exotic vogue and to help support the Italian colonization campaign. In fact, from the 1880s onwards, Mantegazza’s attitudes changed, becoming more and more supportive of Italian expansionist aims, as demonstrated by his participation as Italian representative at the Conference of Berlin in 1884, though he nevertheless played a rather marginal role.³⁸ Notwithstanding, the focus on the sexual habits of non-Western populations does not seem to be directed towards a moralizing purpose on the part of the West: unlike much of the impassioned racism of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, Mantegazza’s attitude towards so-called ‘savage peoples’ remained rather ambivalent. On the one hand, in fact, Mantegazza spoke towards ‘primitive peoples’ as populations that generally possessed an overflowing sensuality, as they were less subject to the ‘religious and moral extinguishments’³⁹ that act instead on individuals within ‘civilized’ society. On the other hand, however, Mantegazza very often used examples taken from the sexual habits of ‘primitives’ to question the absolutism of Western customs, showing that sometimes non-Western populations demonstrated similar, if not imitable, behaviours. As will be seen shortly, this was also the case of customs related to emotional relationships and marriage bonds.

Questioning the polygamy of non-Western peoples

In contrast to the belief held by much of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology,⁴⁰ Mantegazza’s investigation of non-European and past sexual habits did not have as its primary aim the creation of reductive views that served to secure the supposedly moral superiority of the West. Nevertheless, Mantegazza’s perspectives fit into the colonial and racist visions of the time. Certainly, like most of his contemporaries, Mantegazza was convinced that human ‘races’ were organized along a hierarchical scale, in his case a tree. In the highest branches were the Western peoples, while descending to the bottom were the ‘Semites’, ‘Asians’, ‘Americans’, ‘Finns’, ‘Laplanders’, ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Negroes’, down to the lowest branch occupied by ‘Australians’.⁴¹ At the same time, however, in Mantegazza’s anthropology, this discourse does not apply univocally to the manifestations of the sexuality and emotions of racialized people. Like other scholars at the time, Mantegazza was undoubtedly convinced that romantic love was the highest form of sentimental relationship and that it should serve as the legitimizing basis for the marital relations of the ‘high races’ such as those in Europe. This does not mean that Mantegazza understood marriage as the best form of union between a man and a woman; rather, it was in his opinion ‘the least worst’⁴² of the possible types that could be adopted in the Italian society of the time.

Mantegazza was also aware that it was a human-made contract and that consequently every era and race had different marriage customs. Nevertheless, the love bond remained the element that, in his opinion, had to be the basis of marital unions. Indeed, his anticlericalism led him to advocate the need for a divorce law reform ‘to be made now’ to preserve the institution of marriage as the seal of true love.⁴³ With regard to ‘primitive races’, on the other hand, Mantegazza was undoubtedly convinced that ‘a polygamy limited to a few females is the most common form of human society of the lower races’, but at the same time he believed that amorous sentiment and monogamy were also widespread among them. He wrote in the Fisiologia dell’amore:

even the most libertine and wildest man feels needs other than that to fecundate the female; he feels the need to love a woman. And to love does not mean to bind the limbs of two bodies in a single knot, but to possess and desire and defend and protect each other for a long time … it means taking responsibility … for the future of the one we have created and brought into the world.⁴⁴

More than ten years later, in Gli amori degli uomini, he reiterates: ‘Love by free choice is to be found at the very bottom and at the very top of the human ladder.’⁴⁵ Not only the Celts ‘among whom girls freely choose their husbands’⁴⁶ but also among the ‘Loango negroes’, in the Western part of the present-day Republic of the Congo, if ‘the young couple are in love with each other, they can always manage to get along without either marital consent or a dowry’.⁴⁷ The reason for this belief is explained a few pages later. Expressing his opposition to the ‘strange theory’ held by a number of ethnologists that ‘the most ancient form of love was communal marriage’, Mantegazza states ‘however distant and however low-reaching may be the boughs of that great tree [of humankind] to which we all belong, the sap that runs in it is the same’.⁴⁸ Convinced of the existence of races but also of the common nature of all human beings, Mantegazza had no doubt that the capacity to love, and thus to bond to a single individual, was intrinsic to human nature. These contradictions were partly embedded in nineteenth-century Italian science. As historian Sandra Puccini argues, at the time,

racist prejudice was still intertwined with the consideration of primitives as our ancestors, inferior nowadays but also capable, in a distant future, of ascending to civilisation thanks to the identity of the human mind and the progressive force of evolutionary law.⁴⁹

However, it is also possible to identify some peculiarities of Mantegazza’s scientific perspective. His anthropological methodology – aimed at studying both the variations of human beings and their common features – added to his anticlericalism – which led him to emphasize the negative influence of the Church on sexuality – probably caused him to overlap different and apparently contradictory discourses: the inferiority of non-Western races and the ubiquity of certain human behaviours. However, regarding the claim of the human tendency towards monogamy, adherence to the ideals of romantic love also played an important role.

In this respect, Mantegazza seems to anticipate the work of another important anthropologist, Edward Westermarck (1862–1939). With his important studies on homosexuality and marriage in Morocco, Westermarck is generally regarded as one of the forerunners of the twentieth-century tendency to question the hegemony of Western sexual mores and the supposed inferiority of the sexual morality of ‘savage’ peoples. In particular, thanks to his work The History of Human Marriage (1893), he is regarded as one of the first anthropologists to begin deconstructing the myth of the original promiscuity of non-European peoples, arguing on the contrary that humans were fundamentally monogamous.⁵⁰ Westermarck, in fact, wrote that:

love has slowly become the refined feeling it is in the mind of cultivated persons in modern times, although conjugal affection is far from being unknown, even among very rude savages.⁵¹

A Darwin supporter as much as Mantegazza, Westermarck also believed in sexual selection and, at the same time, in the ideal of romantic love as the foundation of marriages in the West. There is no explicit evidence to suggest that Westermarck derived his thoughts directly from Mantegazza’s works, which were published several years before his own. Westermarck was undoubtedly familiar with Mantegazza’s intellectual production, quoting him extensively in his book. He also sent the Italian anthropologist a copy of his The History of Human Marriage with a direct dedication.⁵² Mantegazza, for his part, recognized the importance of Westermarck’s work, writing in the review published in his journal Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia, the same year that the work was published:

We are especially pleased to note how the A. strenuously fights the theory of the promiscuity of the sexes in the earliest epoch of human history, an idea that we have long fought in our work on the psychology and ethnography of love.⁵³

While Westermarck is regarded as a transitional figure from evolutionary anthropology to cultural relativism, Mantegazza on the other hand is generally considered a traditional evolutionary anthropologist. However, Mantegazza, as we have seen, already held this belief in the 1870s. Overlaying the ideal of romantic love with their endorsement of Darwinist theories, Mantegazza, before Westermarck, believed that the tendency to create a couple by selecting a partner according to their preferences was innate to human beings. However, at the same time, it seems difficult to deny that the election of the romantic ideal as the emotional paradigm of the time did not contribute to establishing among scientists a propensity to search for the roots of such an emotional paradigm in supposedly ‘primitive’ people – not only Mantegazza and Westermarck but also Darwin himself, who from a young age was a great lover of romantic literature.⁵⁴

Conclusions

The ideal of romantic love was a profound influence upon the evolutionary anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza’s research on human sexuality, helping to cast doubt on the hypothesis of polygamy originating with ‘primitive’ peoples. In fact, Mantegazza, by emphasizing that humans naturally tended towards monogamy, wanted to scientifically legitimize the need to adopt romantic love as the emotional paradigm underpinning the society of the new-born Italian kingdom, the aim of this being the stability of the new society under construction. Mantegazza addresses the Italian bourgeoisie in his works, especially women, who were considered specialists in the field of emotions, portraying romantic love as a guarantee of a happy future not only for the nation but also for individuals.

If, as was often the case in the nineteenth century, the gaze on the ‘primitive Other’ represents a projection of the anxieties and aspirations of Western society,⁵⁵ also in this case the image of the Other disseminated by Mantegazza is conditioned by the perspectives of the post-unification Italian bourgeoisie and the prominent place that romantic love occupied in their psycho-emotional horizons. However, the sexuality of the ‘Other’ was not used here in a negative sense but rather as a virtuous mirror to demonstrate that love and monogamy were intrinsic to humankind. This brings further evidence to overcome an overly simplistic view of the nineteenth-century investigation of human sexuality. Indeed, scholars have stated the existence of an ‘unsolved epistemological tension’ between, on the one hand, an ‘older largely ethnocentric and deductive tradition of cross-cultural evolutionary anthropology’ and, on the other, a ‘new inductive science that recognised sexual and cultural variability as natural’.⁵⁶ The occurrence, not only in Westermarck but also, years before, in Mantegazza’s sexual anthropology, of different and sometimes contradictory elements shows the need to think of a more nuanced view of the development from evolutionism to culturalism in anthropological thought. In fact, placed side by side, Westermarck’s and Mantegazza’s cases show that already within the evolutionary paradigm there were discourses that aimed to describe the complexity and multiplicity of non-European sexualities.

Notes

1. 1.  For an accurate account of historiographical developments related to sexual science, see C. Waters, ‘Sexology’, in M. Houlbrook and H. Cocks (eds.), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 41–63.

2. 2.  M. Foucault, La volontà di sapere. Storia della sessualità 1 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006), p. 97. (Translation from Italian texts are my own.)

3. 3.  A. Giddens, La Trasformazione dell’intimità. Sessualità, amore ed erotismo nelle società moderne (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), pp. 27–37.

4. 4.  H. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 233–5.

5. 5.  A.P. Lyons and H. Lyons, Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 101. On Foucault’s discourses on sexuality and race, see also A.L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

6. 6.  For an overview on the subject, see C. Schields and D. Herzog (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2021).

7. 7.  On the connections between race and sexuality in the fascist era, see S. Ponzanesi, ‘The Color of Love: Madamismo and Interracial Relationships in the Italian Colonies’, Research in African Literatures, 43 (2012), 155–72; D. Garvin, ‘Imperial Wet-Nursing in Italian East Africa’, in C. Schields and D. Herzog (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2021). For an initial attempt to investigate the connections between Italian colonialism from the perspective of non-conforming sexualities, see N. Camilleri and V. Fusari, ‘Queering Italian Colonialism: Mapping a Blind Spot’, Contemporanea, 25 (2022), pp. 477–87.

8. 8.  H.H. Chiang, ‘Double Alterity and the Global Historiography of Sexuality: China, Europe, and the Emergence of Sexuality as a Global Possibility’, E-Pisteme, 2 (2009); J. Funke, ‘Navigating the Past: Sexuality, Race, and the Uses of the Primitive in Magnus Hirschfeld’s The World Journey of a Sexologist’, in K. Fisher and R. Langlands (eds.), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 111–34; P. Schrader, ‘Fears and Fantasies: German Sexual Science and Its Research on African Sexualities, 1890–1930’, Sexualities, 23 (2020), pp. 127–45.

9. 9.  P.A. Ginsborg and A.M. Banti, ‘Romanticismo e Risorgimento: L’io, l’amore e la nazione’, in Storia d’Italia. Annali 22. Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 2007).

10. 10.  L. Tasca, ‘Il “senatore erotico”. Sesso e matrimonio nell’antropologia di Paolo Mantegazza’, in Bruno P.F. Wanrooij (ed.), La mediazione matrimoniale in Italia e in Europa tra Otto e Novecento. Il terzo (in)comodo (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2004), p. 300.

11. 11.  L. Schettini, Il gioco delle parti: travestimenti e paure sociali tra Otto e Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 2011), p. 152.

12. 12.  P. Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore (Milan: G. Bernardoni, 1873), p. viii.

13. 13.  T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 139.

14. 14.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. v.

15. 15.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. 204.

16. 16.  On this concept, see B.H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

17. 17.  Funke, ‘Navigating the Past’, pp. 111–34.

18. 18.  P. Mantegazza, ‘Saggio sulla trasformazione delle forze psichiche’, Archivio per l’Antropologia e l’Etnologia, 27 (1897), p. 290.

19. 19.  ‘Rendiconto della Società di Antropologia’, Archivio per l’Antropologia e l’Etnologia, 3 (1873), p. 317.

20. 20.  On Spencer and psychology, see J.W. Burrow, La crisi della ragione. Il pensiero europeo 1848–1914 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), pp. 73–6.

21. 21.  On the relationship between Darwin and Mantegazza with regard to expressions of emotion, see, D. Martín Moruno, ‘Pain as Practice in Paolo Mantegazza’s Science of Emotions’, Osiris, 31 (2016), pp. 137–62.

22. 22.  Mantegazza, Giornale della mia vita (Rendiconto, December 1872).

23. 23.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. 24.

24. 24.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. 1.

25. 25.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. 193.

26. 26.  G. Landucci, Darwinismo a Firenze: tra scienza e ideologia: 1860–1900 (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1977), pp. 131–3.

27. 27.  D. Diderot, Supplemento al viaggio di Bougainville e altri scritti sulla morale e sul costume, Renato Pastore (ed.) (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1977), p. 34.

28. 28.  Diderot, Supplemento al Viaggio di Bougainville e altri scritti sulla morale e sul costume, p. 31.

29. 29.  Lyons and Lyons, Irregular Connections, pp. 28–9.

30. 30.  On the racial and gender stereotypes still surviving in Italian society, see S. Ponzanesi, ‘Edges of Empire: Italy’s Postcolonial Entanglements and the Gender Legacy’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16 (2016), pp. 373–86.

31. 31.  K. Fisher and J. Funke, ‘ “Let Us Leave the Hospital; Let Us Go on a Journey around the World”: British and German Sexual Science and the Global Research for Sexual Variation’, in V. Fuechtner, D.E. Haynes and R.M. Jones (eds.), A Global History of Sexual Science (1880–1960) (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), p. 55; Lyons and Lyons, Irregular Connections.

32. 32.  J. McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); D. Anderson, ‘Sexual Threat and Settler Society: “Black Perils” in Kenya, c. 1907–30’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38 (2010), pp. 47–74.

33. 33.  C. Forth, ‘Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination’, History Workshop Journal, 73 (2012), pp. 211–39.

34. 34.  A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

35. 35.  P. Mantegazza, ‘L’uomo e gli Uomini. Lettera Etnologica del Prof. Paolo Mantegazza al Prof. Enrico Giglioli’, in Viaggio Intorno al Globo della R. Pirocorvetta Italiana Magenta (Milan: V. Maisner & Compagnia, 1876), p. xx. On the evolution of Mantegazza’s racism, see N. Labanca, ‘ “Un nero non può esser bianco”. Il Museo Nazionale di Antropologia di Paolo Mantegazza e la Colonia Eritrea’, in L’Africa in Vetrina. Storia di musei e di esposizioni coloniali in Italia (Paese Treviso: Pagus, 1992), pp. 79–83.

36. 36.  P. Mantegazza, ‘Fra i Micmac’, L’Illustrazione Italiana, 21, 31 (1894), p. 91.

37. 37.  N. Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2002), pp. 15–56.

38. 38.  Labanca, ‘ “Un nero non può esser bianco”. Il Museo Nazionale Di Antropologia Di Paolo Mantegazza e La Colonia Eritrea’, pp. 86–94.

39. 39.  P. Mantegazza, Gli amori degli uomini (Rome: l’Osservatore, 1967), p. 51.

40. 40.  Funke, ‘Navigating the Past’, p. 121; E.W. Said, Orientalismo: l’immagine europea dell’Oriente (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015).

41. 41.  Mantegazza, ‘L’uomo e gli uomini. Lettera etnologica del Prof. Paolo Mantegazza al Prof. Enrico Giglioli’ (fig. I).

42. 42.  P. Mantegazza, L’arte di prender moglie, l’arte di prender marito, Lucia Rodler (ed.) (Rome: Carocci, 2008), pp. 49–50.

43. 43.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. 336.

44. 44.  Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, p. 322.

45. 45.  P. Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1935), p. 161.

46. 46.  Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, p. 162.

47. 47.  Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, p. 161.

48. 48.  Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, p. 190.

49. 49.  S. Puccini, ‘I Viaggi di Paolo Mantegazza. Tra divulgazione, letteratura e antropologia’, in C. Chiarelli and W. Pasini (eds.), Paolo Mantegazza e l’evoluzionismo in Italia (Florence: Florence University Press, 2010), p. 61.

50. 50.  Funke, ‘Navigating the Past’; R. Leck, ‘Westermarck’s Morocco: Sexology and the Epistemic Politics of Cultural Anthropology and Sexual Science’, in V. Fuechtner, D.E. Haynes and R.M. Jones (eds.), A Global History of Sexual Science (1880–1960) (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 70–96.

51. 51.  E. Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 546.

52. 52.  M.E. Frati (ed.), Le carte e la biblioteca di Paolo Mantegazza. Inventario e catalogo (Milan: Giunta regionale Toscana & Editrice Bibliografica, 1991), p. 316.

53. 53.  P. Mantegazza, ‘Edward Westermarck “The History of Human Marriage”’, Archivio per l’Antropologia e l’Etnologia, 23 (1893), p. 470.

54. 54.  G. Beer, ‘Darwin and Romanticism’, The Wordsworth Circle, 41 (2010), 3–9.

55. 55.  Lyons and Lyons, Irregular Connections, p. 8.

56. 56.  Leck, ‘Westermarck’s Morocco’, p. 87.

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