L’estro erudito. Rileggendo l’Anglomania di Arturo Graf

[Autom. eng. transl.] The essay is an all-round exploration of the latest work by Arturo Graf, Anglomania and the eighteenth-century English influence in Italy (1911), a very eccentric work in the critical and literary path of the great literary historian (and poet, now almost forgotten, but at the time often considered almost at the level of Pascoli and Carducci). In the first part of the work, hypotheses are put forward about the genesis of such an unpredictable work, shrouded in mystery given the author's confidentiality and the fact that almost all his papers (letters, manuscripts, worksheets, etc.) are gone lost. It therefore moves towards appreciating the stylistic and structural qualities of the book, which still make it not only essential for erudition, but also very enjoyable for the liveliness of writing and invention - almost the link between the soul more rigorously criticism and the most outrageously creative of Graf (hence the title of the contribution: "the learned talent"). In the second part of the work, the critical fortune of the book is studied, and its continuous 'presence', often 'underground', in the pages of two of the greatest critics-writers of our twentieth century, Mario Praz and Carlo Dionisotti. This recognition is an opportunity for an overview of twentieth-century Italian Anglomania (and English Italomania) and for a reflection on the usefulness of a reinterpretation of Graf's work today, that is, "in what, since the time of the Glorious Revolution, it is perhaps the only historical conjuncture in which the United Kingdom, in the bewilderments of Brexit, appears less than worthy ”of its (also) European destiny. A dense bio-bibliographic note is attached to the essay.