Dream Italy: Black Artistic Communities in Nineteenth-Century Rome
Walking is an embodied and profoundly social activity, it is a way of thinking and feeling (to quote Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst), a way of acting and being amidst all the different contexts and layers that make up a place. Walking brings us into a range of encounters with the human and non-human world. It is a mobile, migratory practice. It reflects the practice and experience of the artists who traveled to Rome, and perhaps reflects something about Rome itself. I’ve called this walk, Dream Italy, in honour of Robert S Duncanson who visited the country in 1853. He named one of his larger landscape paintings A Dream of Italy, and described, to his assistant Julius Sloane, the transformative effect of his travels: “My trip to Europe has to some extent enabled me to judge of my own talent. Of all the landscapes I saw in Europe (and I saw thousands) I do not feel discouraged.” Italy offered African American artists opportunities for travel, education, collaboration, friendship and pleasure that they did not find in the United States. Their journeys to Italy, and to Rome more specifically, connected them with international communities, and so their stories and the lives they created around this city must remind us of the histories of encounter and migration that shaped this city, and that continue to shape Italy.
© Anna Arabindan-Kesson
I
Cast of Characters
David Dorr: b 1827/1828, d 1872. An enslaved man from Louisiana who traveled to Europe and North Africa between 1851-1853. Wrote A Colored Man Round the World.
Frederick Douglass: b 1818 d 1895. An African American activist, social reformer, orator, politician, philosopher and writer. Visits Italy in 1887
Robert S Duncanson: b 1821/22 d. 1872. Based in Ohio for much of his life, Duncanson is perhaps one of the most accomplished, and well-known African American artists of the nineteenth century. Visits Italy in 1853.
Michel-Jean Cazabon: b 1813 d. 1888. One of the few known Caribbean nineteenth-century artists of colour. Cazabon was born to free people of colour in Trinidad and educated in London and Paris. He may have visited Rome between 1841-1842.
Edmonia Lewis: b 1844 d 1907. The first sculptor of African American and First Nations heritage to achieve international recognition. Moves to Rome in 1865.
Sallie Mercer: dates unknown. Sallie Mercer was from Philadelphia and worked for the actress Charlotte Cushman, who called Sallie “her right hand.” She also played a prominent role in managing Cushman’s household while she was in Rome.
Eugene Warburg b 1825/26 d. 1859. Warburg was the son of a German Jewish immigrant and a mixed-race, enslaved mother. Manumitted as a child, Warburg trained as a sculptor in marble. He arrived in Europe in 1853, and moved to Italy in 1858 where he died and is buried in Rome at the Verano Monumental Cemetary.
Sarah Parker Remond: An African American abolitionist, journalist, lecturer and physician. Remond moved to Florence where she studied medicine in 1867 and then moved to Rome where she lived until her death in 1894. She was close friends with Edmonia Lewis, and Douglass visited them both when he visited. Remond is buried in the Protestant Cemetary in Rome.
Igiaba Scego: b 1974; Italian writer, journalist and activist whose family moved to Rome from Somalia. her latest book The Colour Line explores the life of a Black woman and artist in Rome, based on Edmonia Lewis and Sarah Parker Remond.
Itinerary:
Passegiata del Pincio
Villa Medici
Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti
Via Gregoriana
Palazzo di Propoganda Fide
Piazza di Spagna
Via Alibert
Via Margutta
Via della Frezze
Links to art works:
Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867
Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876
Dates
Napoleonic Wars: 1803-1815
US Civil War: Apr 12, 1861 – Apr 9, 1865
Unification of Italy - Risorgimento:
First War of Independence 1848
Second War of Independence and the Expedition of the Thousand 1859
Birth of the Kingdom of Italy declared by Vittoria Emmanuele II with Turin as capital 1861
Third War of Independence 1866
Breach of Porta Pia 1870
Rome declared capital of Kingdom of Italy 1871
Franco-Prussian War: 1870-71