Courting Celebrity

In 1826 Angela Veronese, a gardeners daughter, wrote and published the first modern autobiography by an Italian woman. Veroneses account focuses on her unique experience as a peasant girl who came of age among the Venetian elite, and details how she attained a certain renown in and out of Italy by improvising, writing, and publishing her own lyrics. Courting Celebrity is a bilingual annotated edition of Veroneses autobiography. To better elucidate Veroneses thinking, the book includes the autobiographical writing of another contemporary Italian poet, Teresa Bandettini, a well-known Tuscan poet-improviser. The book offers a substantial sample of Veroneses poems, translated and in the original. These compositions, together with detailed bibliographical documentation, point to the success of Veroneses autobiographical enterprise and offer an unparalleled view of both high society and popular culture at the time. Courting Celebrity illustrates womens practice in two key literary genres, poetry and autobiography, and illuminates the strategies of womens self-fashioning and pursuit of celebrity.