According to some thinkers, we live in an age of sad passions today, at least in the West. Our attitudes push us into our comfort zones, toward disenchantment, disappointment, if not cynicism. Yet, there have been eras in which our Europe was a ferment of ideas, emotions, and innovation. The first example that comes to mind is 1968, with the euphoric expectations and hopes that accompanied it. Going further back in time, it was the Romantic era, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that set Europe ablaze. But what was Romanticism? From a school textbook, we can answer that it was a cultural movement born in Germany—with movements like Sturm und Drang, an expression that can be translated as "stormy impetus" and therefore "storm of emotions"—and in England at the end of the eighteenth century. Romantic culture manifested itself differently in different countries and through different forms of expression: from literature to philosophy, from the figurative arts to music, including political thought and the sciences. Romanticism celebrated the primacy of the individual and interiority, promoted the recovery of spirituality, feelings and imagination, exalted the free "feeling" of the individual, investigating the darkest and most irrational aspects of the human soul.
It was, in short, a different attitude to life than in the past; indeed, it was a set of new attitudes that somehow shaped the feelings of the young men and women of the time, forever shaping the way they dealt with certain moods and emotions. Even today, our way of looking at nature, love, human suffering, nostalgia, and the past remains romantic.
We realize this from the first pages of Alberto Rollo's new work, not coincidentally entitled Le attitudini (Neri Pozza, 2026, pp. 304, also available as an e-book), a novel that is at once a story of sentimental and human development, a true birth into life, but also the vibrant tale of a cultural era, Romanticism, which is a state of mind, a mind that is in part our own.
In keeping with the tradition of much Romantic literature , the book is centred on an exchange of letters which has fortunately escaped the ravages of time .
A wardrobe in a noble palace in Salento and a metal box in Dresden are, in fact, the caskets that saved a collection of correspondence from the ravages of history, a treasure that, by chance, ended up in the hands of an eighteenth-century scholar. Those papers tell the professor about the orphan Marianna Di Dio, known as Nenna, and Bruno Röder, a student at the University of Jena. Their paths crossed in the unrepeatable moment of revolution, when a wind of freedom swept across Europe's youth with its burden of possibility and idealism. With coal-black hair and Norman eyes, Nenna's small life holds immense sway for an illiterate woman born into misfortune. Her beauty, undisguised by any veil, leads her to Naples, to serve the Marchioness of Scantara, and then to the good graces of the English ambassador's wife, the scandalous Lady Hamilton. Nenna learns, savors the cultural ferment that sets the world ablaze, and experiences love—a love made of timid encounters and passionate readings, and then of distance. Returning from the Grand Tour, Bruno finds Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, Novalis awaiting him, all the sparks of a spiritual revolution ready to explode. But the girl is an obsession that refuses to subside. For years, Bruno and Nenna write obstinate letters; from afar, they build a bond filled with books and landscapes, certainties and bewilderments, through an era and its twilight. They try to prove that one can be young forever... but is it really possible?
Bruno and Nenna's generation pushed themselves to the threshold of the dream of eternal youth, of an eternal, mysterious spring. It's no coincidence, to quote Pietro Toldo, a great critic of the early twentieth century: "Romanticism still seduces with its youthful enthusiasm, its noble impulses, its cult of beauty and life, its aspiration, always inherent in the human heart, in every age, toward the heights, toward the azure and the infinite..."