This volume explores the dynamic and productive cultural forces engendered by exiles, wanderers, and diasporic communities in Britain and Italy over more than five centuries. It investigates the historic resonance of transnational encounters and movements between two European cultures that look back on a long history of cross-fertilisation. Drawn from a range of academic disciplines including literary studies, history, musicology, art history and bibliography, it presents the ways in which exiles, émigrés, intermediaries and their attendant cultural perspectives interact with the sometimes repressive, sometimes productive religious or political systems and ideologies that they encounter. This volume pays tribute to the stimulating exchange, circulation, and appropriation that has occurred between Britain and Italy, showing that the condition of displacement can lead not only to the articulation of loss and grief, but also to fruitful forms of interaction.
