| Summary: | This paper investigates two popular historical novels, Marina Fiorato’s The
Glassblower of Murano (2008) and Anne Fortier’s Juliet (2010), in order to shed light on a
discourse of pure origins and unbroken continuity that concerns ‘Italy’ as a cultural
construct. Within both narratives, ‘falling in love in Italy’ occasions the appropriation of a
privileged relation with history and the past, a notion often contrasted with the displacement
and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places, people and lifestyles of
England and North America. This essay proposes an exploration of the notion of romantic
love as one of the forces reconnecting displaced and fragmented Anglo-American souls with
a supposedly timeless and unbroken society. From a point in time when the dialectics of
history have been allegedly transcended, Anglophone popular narratives portray Italy as a
space of timelessness and pre-modernity, where the experience of romantic love carries
within it the promise of a new identity.
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