Gabriele Rossetti Bust

Gabriele Rossetti carried the politics of southern Italy into a London classroom. Born in Vasto in 1783, the poet supported the constitutional movement in Naples in 1820. When that movement failed, he went into exile, first in Malta and then, in 1824, in England. He taught Italian at King’s College London from 1831 to 1847.

His household connected two literary cultures. With Francesca Polidori he had four children, including the poet Christina Rossetti and the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their achievements belong to British cultural history, but the family’s language, books, and political memories were also shaped by Italian exile.

For Gabriele, Dante was a continuing intellectual preoccupation. He argued that medieval love poetry concealed the language of an anti-papal fellowship. This was his interpretation, rather than an established explanation of the Divine Comedy. Reading him today means distinguishing the historical poet from the nineteenth-century political hopes Rossetti brought to that poet’s work. His bust preserves the memory of an exile who made the study of Italian literature part of his life abroad.