Italian Risorgimento and Secret Societies. News on Italian Carbonari in the early 19th-century British press.

From the dissemination of the first corantos to the rise of news in print, Italy has always raised the interest of the international press for a variety of reasons. Being a major destination of the Grand Tour that attracted travellers from across Europe and the United States, Italy’s major cities have hosted communities of expatriates whose interest in the country was nurtured not only by its favourable climate and artistic and cultural heritage, but also by its political events. In particular, the socio-political events, the key figures (Giuseppe Mazzini to name one) and the political movements that led to the independence of Italy from foreign powers and to the proclamation Kingdom of Italy in 1861 first, and to the capture of Rome in 1870, received considerable international press coverage. This because they were seen as events that would promote the social well-being of the population, liberating the Italians from a centuries-long rule that had fragmented their country. In particular, the British press showed a consistent interest in the so-called secret revolutionary societies that laid the foundations of the unification process in the first half of the 19th century, and in the Carbonari in particular. This contribution examines the linguistic representation of the Carbonari in the British press, i.e., in the news and in letters to the editors (LTE), applying to a corpus specifically built for this study a quantitative and qualitative analytical framework that combines corpus linguistics, corpus-assisted discourse analysis and historical pragmatics. Recurrent clusters, collocations and extended co-textual references in news articles and LTE will be examined to identify the ideological connotation of these news from Italy regarding Carbonari.