The narrative is placed in Naples, in the year 1764, when an English traveller "happened to stop before the portico of the Santa Maria del Pianto, there he sees an "extraordinary figure" and decides to ask a local friar who that singular man was. "An assassin", the friar peacefully replies. The outraged traveller considers it a crime too heinous for the man to be freely circulating. The merciful friar explains he has sought sanctuary in the holy church.
Structurally, this initial chapter serves as a hook to introduce the story, the traveller receives a volume from the friar containing the story of another assassin, an episode which occurred back in 1758. These two characters, having accomplished their preparative role, are vanished from the narrative never to be returned to. It is the readers themselves who will access the report, in other words, they will become the English traveller. By then, we have already been made complicit of an ideological point of view. Outbursts against the inequities of overseas nations were a familiar cliché familiar for the English 18th-century reader.
Had The Italian (1798) been written a few decades before, Ann Radcliffe might have opted for a preface, where she would declare the book was originally an ancient manuscript recently located and her work was merely that of an editor or translator. This manoeuvre was regularly used by gothic fiction writers. Horace Walpole employed this resource in the first edition of The Castle of Otranto(1764) in order to heap veracity for the work, as well as to protect his identity. In face of the good reception the novel obtained, he reconsidered this position in the second publication. At that time, fiction reading was considered a waste of time, many authors would not expose their identities, appealing to pseudonyms or artifices such as the long-lost manuscript. At the same time readers would not admit they were consuming fiction, as they ought to be absorbing knowledge with something more instructional and worthwhile. The novel form was still fresh and not highly regarded at that time. Radcliffe, however, belonged to a succeeding moment when these attitudes were being revised. Furthermore, she was absolutely conscious of her commitment to the imagination as an end, and that her mind-escaping fiction was written mostly for delight, leaving the tutoring aspects for the background.
The Italian emerges as a novel obsessed with the family. The success of this tale lies in an intense desire for bonds, whether this family is biological, sociological or national. Being a novel written by a traditional Englishwoman, there is a dichotomy created between the multitude of English readers and the Continental, Catholic and often Italian characters. The author conveys through the story a notion of ‘otherness’ in contrast with the English beliefs. The gothic obsession with the Catholic clergy as repositories of evil, represents the danger from the outside. From a historicist and political viewpoint, England is this big family threatened by the Revolution going on in the mainland. This connection between politics and literature was formerly pointed out by T.J. Matthias in The Pursuits of Literature (1796), he perceived, at the very moment it was happening, a straight relation between gothic novels and the impending revolution across the channel, disturbing the domestic structure, harmony, and moral property with its passion and violence.
From an immanent perspective, the gothic hero is also an outsider in his own aristocratic family. He is the one who does not fulfill with the established order and seeks, outside his social family, thrills of forbidden love. As for the gothic heroines, they are simultaneously outsiders by virtue of their gender and upholders of the ascending bourgeois values. Though it is placed elsewhere, the gothic novel privileges a certain model of social understanding and class behaviour, which reflects the shifts and anxieties of 18th-century English society.
Vivaldi’s family is a peculiar one. While the hero’s father, the Marchese di Vivaldi, adopts the ordinary paternal intimidation (the family name to zeal for, the honour of the house, disclaim you as my son); his mother, the Marchesa, and her enigmatic confessor, take matters a step further, as far as cold-blooded murder. The casuistry by which the villain brings the Marchesa to this crossing, representing, at the same time, herself as the originator of the scheme is really shrewd and intricate. The scenes between the pair show the extraordinary dialogue skills of Mrs. Radcliffe. This villain is the lurid Schedoni, a character who is capable of great evil and yet maintains certain majesty of demeanour, his indifference to ethics is pleasantly intriguing, as he makes of it a matter of relativity.
‘To what do you allude, righteous father’ enquired the astonished Marquesa; ‘what indignity, what impiety has my son to answer for? I entreat you will speak explicitly, that I may prove I can lose the mother in the strict severity of the judge.’
‘That is spoken with the grandeur of sentiment, which has always distinguished you, my daughter! Strong minds perceive that justice is the highest of the moral attributes, mercy is only the favourite of weak ones’
