Trans-Adriatic Enlightenments: Maria Petrettini’s Italian Translation of the Turkish Embassy Letters

Abstract

In 1838, Maria Petrettini, a Greco-Venetian aristocrat, published a translation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters from English into Italian. In this paper, taking as a focal point Petrettini’s translation of the Letters, I aim to unravel the story of two parallel texts that challenged religious and political presuppositions. In the work of Petrettini and Montagu, the view of the Turk as a savage is deconstructed through a gendered perspective. The writer and the translator propose that a traveller can know a foreign land only if they are able to penetrate all aspects of public and private life; a feat that only a female scholar can accomplish. Apart from the importance of the Letters and their translation, focusing on a scholar like Maria Petrettini allows us to broaden our gaze to the intellectual possibilities available to high class women in the North-Eastern Mediterranean; the multiple strategies for women’s political representation within an era of Revolutions; the mosaic of religious, political and ethnic affiliations and the ways in which Enlightenment and Romantic ideas merged into each other within the framework of the Greco-Italian intellectual milieu providing us with a transcultural, trans-Adriatic Enlightenment.